You know, you put up with this kind of shit when you trust Draymond to make a clutch defensive play to seal a win, which I’ve seen him do more times than I can count over his Warrior tenure.

But I haven’t seen him do this year.

Draymond also projected to be a player who would age poorly. That being said, I didn’t expect his decline to look like he was losing his mind.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Warriors are a play-in team, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they end up in a tough WCF series.

Their starting five is, I believe, negative on the year - but was the best unit in the league last year. So clearly if they get it together, the team could be really, really good, and much better than they’ve been so far.

But I also wouldn’t be surprised if Klay struggled to get over the mental hump of not being the same dude he was five years ago, and the last thing I want to do is bet on Wiggins being consistent. Meanwhile, while Kerr’s faith in his players is a strength, I wonder if he has a blind spot towards his guys’ struggles and is going to give them too much rope.

Maybe last year, but man, Jokic has spent the last three years making an argument that he’s the best offensive player in league history.

And, I mean, you want to talk about how insane KD’s efficiency was last year? It was INSANE. .677, are you kidding me?*

But Jokic’s was .701.

(*when a player has their most half-a-season by far, one has to consider the possibility that it’s just a fluke and he wouldn’t have kept it up if he had played the whole year. Of course, the first place I would have expected regression was in his 3pt%, which is almost as insane this year … so maybe he could have kept it going!)

So while it’s certain that KD would have been in the discussion last year, I don’t think it’s at all clear he would have won it. And the prior two season are a bit more of a stretch, although, again, I would have expected top-five finishes if he kept that up, and, honestly, at that point, who can really say? He’s certainly in the discussion.

Not only that, but if something this obvious is allowed to persist, what kind of smaller, subtler biases are going on that the league is just completely ignoring?

It’s hard for them to argue that this sort of thing doesn’t happen in subtler ways when this is so freakin’ obvious and ignored.

Did you, uh, watch the play in the clip you shared?

What part of that looks replicable?

Wade and Curry.

LeBron also won a title for the Cavs to a title, but only after leaving and returning.

Then you have Jokic and Giannis and maybe Kawhi who have done it after being drafted outside the top ten.

Point being: people’s expectations for high draft picks are way too high.

This is such a weird take.

Fans like watching basketball games where the players care.

Zion: “I just imagine that the ball is a sandwich.”

Antwan Jamison has a legacy?

Jamison wasn’t that good. He was the epitome of the guy who scored a lot of points because he was on bad teams who needed someone to take those shots. He didn’t do enough else well to turn him into a winning player while being an often-below-average efficiency high-volume scorer.

He lost his hops pretty quickly and it was impressive the way he found a way to still be a reasonably effective scorer around the basket, and he probably would have been a lot better in today’s NBA. But he was a largely frustrating player to watch because the scoring wasn’t that good and there wasn’t a lot else there.

Damn. I was watching this and stepped away sometime in the late third because it felt like the Knicks had no chance.

What do you mean “lived up to their draft position?”

I think people tend to have unreasonable expectations of high draft picks. As I’ve mentioned before, only two players acquired via a top 10 draft pick in the 21st century have led their team to a title as the best player on that team.

I tend to think Iverson is broadly over-rated, but if you don’t think he lived up to first-pick status, your expectations of the top pick are unreasonable.

You don’t think Steph is still impactful?

I love the idea that he would be up for the financial sacrifice this would involve because he was motivated by other things. These guys are all so rich, and it always kind of bums me out to see someone who already has more money than his children will ever be able to spend focus on squeezing out every available dollar.

I don’t love the idea that we’d miss some seasons of potentially MVP-candidate-level play to see him play football, which is so much more destructive on your body than basketball. It’s not likely to be like Jordan playing baseball, when he could get back into basketball shape afterwards. The NFL is brutal.

I felt like Lamelo was a little over-rated given how entertaining he is and how much Charlotte needed a feel good story. Not in a terrible way, just, you know, he had real flaws (which you’d expect in a guy that young) which people were brushing off. People seemed a little hasty to anoint him.

But it does seem like he’s elevating his game in all areas.

I really do feel like the future of the league is in good hands even though it’s going to make me sad as the current crop ride off into the sunset.

Shout out Christian Wood literally making sure nobody else can possibly go contest the shot.

And you bums here said he was washed.

Nobody was saying he washed.

People use the word bust way too liberally. I’m not a big fan but this is absurd.

Ayton is somewhere close to average for the #1 pick in the 21st century. Maybe a little bit below it, but not a lot.

The most important position is “guy who can create elite offense for himself and others.”

It doesn’t matter what position they play. They can be a center (Jokic), a PG (Steph), a wing (KD, LeBron).

Most title teams have a good center because it’s hard to win a title with a major weakness. Sooner or later, that weakness gets exposed.

You could do what you did above with almost any position. Warriors aren’t winning the '22 title without Wiggins elevating his game. Bucks don’t win the title without Jrue. etc etc etc. The issue isn’t positions, it’s weaknesses. In most years, in today’s fantastically deep league, it’s simply really hard to win a title if you have a major weakness.

Trae is by far the best on offense (even with his shooting woes this season) but by far the worst on defense. He’s bad enough on defense to make the top spot a discussion, because if you’re not factoring that in he’s running away with things.

I feel like Darius give you the best combination of quality on both sides of the ball - he’s the guy who takes nothing off the table. So the question is, how much do you value that vs putting up massive counting stats? I value that a lot, so he grabs the top spot.

Trae comes in second because of his defensive liabilities counterbalance his incredible offense. I maintain a deep skepticism that someone with Trae’s playstyle can win a title, as well.

Jalen third. LaMelo last, because, like Trae, what he does well he does fantastically but he also has a lot of holes in his game. However, he’s just not in the same class offensively: he’s never had a season above league average in efficiency, and, if you want to blame his teammates for that, well, it’s not like all these other guys have consistently had great teammates, either.

Worth pointing out that LaMelo is by far the youngest of these guys so you’d pretty much expect him to be last. There’s plenty of reason to think he’ll rank higher among these four if you re-do this evaluation in three years.

Right now? Nobody.

He wants a green light to do whatever, to not play defense, to not play within himself or a system. There were signs of this before the Draymond punch, but he was scoring so well it didn’t matter.

If playing with Steph Curry wasn’t enough to get the guy to want to play with a modicum of discipline, nobody else is going to, either.

But if he gets an attitude transplant he could be a successful part of a good team again.