“AD can’t self create” idiots absolutely seething

Yes. He’s still plenty impactful. Top-10 player for sure, but PTS-REB-AST-TS% would make you think he’s in the conversation for the best player in the world but I think he’s quite clearly not at that level.

Damn. That’s a nice moral victory bro.

Massively improved their odds. One less bucket and they’d be below NOLA in the wildcard hunt.

This should be a travel. I know that it isn’t, NBA rulebook wise, but it should be. It just looks wrong.

The 15 teams in each conference get split into 3 groups, more or less balanced based on the previous year’s conference standings.

Every team plays every other team in their group during the group stage. These count as normal regular season games too.

At the end of the group stage, the winner of each group qualifies for the knock out round, and one more team from each conference too (a wildcard). All based on results in the group stage games only.

From there, the knock out QFs are played on the homecourt of the higher seeds. Single elimination, winners move onto to the SFs and eventually final, all held in Vegas.

The quarter finals and semi finals games count as regular season games too. Only the final doesn’t count as a regular season game.

Before the season every team only has 80 games scheduled. The 22 teams that don’t qualify for the knockouts have 2 games added to their schedule. The 4 teams that reach the quarter finals and lose have 1 game added.

Kinda disagree with this idea. The real problem is that coaching is hard to evaluate from people who don’t have a coaching background themselves (and even then takes an absurd amount of time). Which makes it hard for GMs to really know how good a coach is, leading to coaching ability often being conflated with just results, or at least results relative to expectations of the roster. It also makes it easier to pin the failings of the team on the coach since the fanbase doesn’t know wtf they’re talking about and usually gravitate towards blaming the coaches for all their issues.

Yes, as he mentions, 3/4 coaches to win a title between 2019 and 2022 were fired by the end of the 2023 season, but he doesn’t address the fact that the fanbases and media were super critical of those coaches before their firing. He even implies that them winning a title somehow proves that they are/were top tier coaches, but that’s judging based on results too.

I don’t think there’s an issue of coaches not being allowed to coach and that’s why there’s less ball movement heavy offenses in the NBA. I think coaches are given all the leeway they need to implement the system of their choosing, and there’s less ball movement simply because there’s a bigger difference between the skill level of the guys at the top of the NBA and the average NBA player than there is in Europe. The stars in the NBA are just more efficient at isolating, posting up or spamming PnR than the top European guys, in part due to better spacing with the longer 3pt line, more favorable rules etc…

Should there be better ways to evaluate coaching? Yes.

Would a trend of longer commitment to an head coach lead to better systems and more efficient offenses ? Don’t think so.

I do not trust the average fan of any team to know even close to enough about Xs and Os to be able to judge their own coach. I sure as shit don’t trust any other team’s fans.

That’s mostly down to him gritting through this hip injury. Before that he was averaging 26.3 ppg which was his highest since NOLA.

They had the best 3p% in the league over the previous 5 games. They’re regressing to the mean slowly.

Reddish averages 1 “steal in the backcourt off an inbound that the broadcast doesn’t even catch cos it was zooming in on the scorer getting back on defense” per game

Bad shots but that’s some hilariously bad transitiok defense too

I’ve heard people bring up Jokic as having an all-time playoff run but I haven’t heard anyone talk about the Nuggets as a team having an all-time run or being an all-time team.

As always, I expect there’ll be a lot of hindsight bias to this. People will pick and choose what to care about based on what happens next.

I’m sure IF the Lakers had stayed healthy and IF they’d repeated or come close in 2021, and hadn’t done the Russ trade and gone through the debacle of the 2022 season, people would see the 2020 title as less flukey.

Same will happen with Denver. If they win another title in the 2-3 years with this core, or at least consistently make deep runs and reach the Finals again, nobody will bring up the seeds of their opponents in 2023.

If for whatever reason, they kinda fall apart and never make reach the Finals again, people will see it as a flukey title and bring up their opponent’s seeding more. It is what it is.

Correct. All 3 teams would be at 3-1, and 1-1 against eachother. So it would be point differential, and LA has a big lead there so they’d have to lose to Utah by a lot or Phoenix would have to run up the score against Portland and Memphis.

Competitive balance. Imagine how insane the Pacific division group would have been last year.

The hope is for the 4 best teams in the conference to qualify for the KOs. If three of those are in the same division, it becomes impossible for all 3 to qualify and some mid team from a weak division gets in.

Kinda depends on the team tbh. Nuggets wouldn’t get better with a Gordon-Lavine swap. Teams like the Clips or Mavs would be better off with Gordon too.

Huh? 2021 Sixers with Butler could very well have beaten the Bucks.

Kobe was MVP level from 2000-01 to 2012-13. That’s 13 years …

Career wise it’s Kobe. Kobe maintained an MVP level prime for about as long as Bird was in the league period.

Zu was fouling the McShit out of AD to prevent an offensive rebound lol but it didn’t end up mattering