2018-2019 NBA thread

[PokeKitty]

Nice to see Raps allow Green to take the final shot, Kawhi is clutch but not great at last second shooting to win.

[Benjiex]

Nice to see Raps allow Green to take the final shot, Kawhi is clutch but not great at last second shooting to win.

Danny Green made a great decision to shot at the last minute.

[xskarma]

The Celtics are hard to love at the moment. I turned the game off in disgust after a buzzer beating 3 to end the 3rd to put the Knicks up by 15 again. Celtics did make it closer in the 4th but still lost (I was following on twitter while playing some Tavern Brawls in HS).

If you are going to play like this, at home, against an opponent that you should never lose to, you deserve all the ridicule you get. My confidence that the Celtics will turn this around is waning. Maybe they just believed a little too much in their own hype and lost the necessary fire to compete night in and night out and they never really get it together before it;s too little too late.

[Espo]

Bucks blow a game to the Suns at home. Lead by six with a 1:30 or so and missed every shot.

Stat line of the game. Brooks Lopez 0-12 from 3 pt range. 3-17 overall. Rough game.

For some reason, seeing this last night made me feel better about the Sixers losing to the Cavs. The Cavs aka the Warriors shooting 53% overall and 50% from 3.

Some weird under and overachieving last night.

[xskarma]

Celtics getting killed again by someone catching fire. Berea this time. Can't seem to miss. So frustrating to have this happen, despite decent defense most of the time. It's like every one saves their best night of the season for the Celtics game. >.<

- - - Updated - - -

This Celtics team is also mentally weak or at least they let bad runs get to them. If someone goes on a run or if they get some foul calls go against (or more likely NOT get some foul calls on offense yet again) they seem to let their head's down and start playing bad on offense AND defense, further propelling the problem.

This team needs to keep confidence when they are down. I just don't get how they could be so good at that last year and can't seem to get it this season, with basically the exact same players. Must drive Brad Stevens nuts.

[xskarma]

The Ringer did a parody/tribute to Luke Doncic, and it's just the best: https://twitter.com/jga41agher/statu...26867941060608

[ramayana1423]

This Fultz thing is amazing to me... what a disaster. I can't remember a more impactful whiff at the start of the draft since Darko.

It doesn't seem like it's entirely the Sixers' fault, but to me, an interesting legacy of the process is that the top of the draft seems to be more of a crapshoot than it's been in the past. I sat here for a while trying to come up with reasons why it might be their fault for focusing on a scorer, but some scorers, like Kyrie Irving, work out. A guy like Andrew Wiggins was undisputedly a better prospect than Kawhi coming out of college (Kawhi shot 25% from 3 in college... Wiggins 35%.. then Kawhi promptly shot 37% as a rookie). Now Kawhi is like the 6th best player in the league, and Wiggins is shooting 39% on twos this year and looks like this:



Fultz was a 6'5" point guard who was super athletic and could shoot. He should have worked out.

For every player where you say, "The problem is that he was given control of the team too early" like Wall or Carmelo, there's a Fultz who struggles because he's marginalized on a contender.

The only thing I can think of, and it seems kind of obvious, is that players have to develop when they get to the NBA, they're not born ready. Guys like Kawhi and Curry worked their asses off; Giannis has gained like 30 pounds of muscle this offseason.
Wiggins hasn't. John Wall, despite being possibly the most athletic PG in the league, unbelievably ranks as a minus defender, and his shooting is barely improved from when he was 22 (and Kyrie was saved from becoming John Wall by Lebron, who forced him off the ball - by the way, Wall's career is basically over, he doesn't matter anymore). Fultz either has a weird injury, or is a headcase.

And without Fultz, the returns from the process are somewhat underwhelming. You ended up with Simmons, Embiid, and Butler. That's a nice big three, but it's an incomplete roster, which is surprising given the number of assets they had at one point or another.

I never liked Fultz, but I never thought anything like this would happen.

I have a real problem with top NBA prospects in college whose teams aren't good, or at the very least competitive. I was talking to a friend about this back before that draft, and we looked at every single NBA All-Star from the previous 3 years and how there college teams were. It was something like 40-50 total college seasons, and only two of there teams had less than 20 wins, they were 18 from a Draymond
Michigan St team and 19 from Ben Simmons LSU team. If someone is a #1 pick, they are expecting that player to be an elite NBA player, and an elite NBA player in college should be able to single handledly get his team to be competitive. Fultz Washington team was TERRIBLE, they went 9-22 in a bad Pac-12 conference. I could never get over that and it surprised me that so many NBA teams loved him so much. Obviously a lot goes into evaluating a player, but it seems like a lot of teams were just completely ignoring the fact that he couldn't carry a college team to simply being decent and that is/was a huge red flag in my opinion.

[xskarma]

Sort of. At the same time I don't ever even remember seeing a Fultz highlight in college that made me think he was worthy of a top ten pick, let along the number one pick. Or like compare him to Curry in college. I watched him torch Wisconsin in the NCAA tournament. Fultz did not even have a game like that in the regular season that I remember.

Strange how Drafts work. Part of the reason I love them in pretty much any sport.

Steph Curry went like 8th or 9th in the draft that year, cause people questioned his size and if he could defend at the NBA level, ignoring his truly elite shooting for the most part. And then skip 10 years, and Trae Young gets drafted high, mostly cause Steph Curry is out there and people are now ready to believe that a player in that mold can succeed.

The same is true for Fultz. Front offices around the league that were high on him will dig into his case and find out what signs there were that should have excluded him from being a top pick. They'll find out what it was and try to make sure not to make that mistake again.


I honestly don't think it has to do with playing on an unsuccessful small school team. He's just mentally not okay and that has nothing to do with what school you go to. But I guess you could make the argument that a bigger school with more pressure on him might have drawn those problems out sooner and he would have naturally been de-selected from the top picks because of it.

[ramayana1423]

I honestly don't think it has to do with playing on an unsuccessful small school team. He's just mentally not okay and that has nothing to do with what school you go to. But I guess you could make the argument that a bigger school with more pressure on him might have drawn those problems out sooner and he would have naturally been de-selected from the top picks because of it.

He's for sure a headcase, but I've seen people say he was at a small school before, I don't get it. Washington is not a small school and Isaiah Thomas took the exact same school 7 years earlier to 26, 26 and 24 wins as well as NCAA tournament victorys every year. If Fultz was so elite, so incredible that he is deserving of being the #1 overall pick, should GMs wonder why he couldn't even come close to getting college team to be even decent? I mean you could make that argument for any top 5 pick really, but especially the #1 overall.

[xskarma]

"Utah will send two future second-round picks to the Cavs for Korver, league sources tell ESPN." - Woj

Cavs now completely in tanking mode, Utah trying to upgrade their shooting. I like it. Mostly cause it means that Korver doesn't end up on the Sixers.

[Pendulous]

Korver is...or at least was, a fantastic shooter for Utah a few years ago.

I don't know what the hell is wrong with the Jazz. Same lineup as last year, Golbert is healthy, but getting blown out multiple times and under .500.

[xskarma]

They've also got to move on from Favors, he's not doing anyone any... well nevermind.

lol


I think the Jazz problem is the same one the Celtics are having, they ran back the same line up, but the guys in the line up are not playing as well or as together as they were t the end of last year. I think both teams will see a resurrgence once their respective players start making shots again and get into form.

For the Jazz that's mostly Mitchell. For the C's it's a combination of several players being a little better and a little more consistent, not just game to game, but quarter to quarter.

[Pendulous]

Oh, I forgot turnovers. One of the worst in the league at that too.

This game is sloppy.More misses, more turnovers. Somehow a close game, but low scoring.

[Rennadrel]

Raptors vs GSW is kinda interesting, not as challenging without Curry playing. The real litmus test will be when GSW is healthy and we play them on the road in that barn burner back to back of against OKC and GSW.

[Blueobelisk]

You guys think tonight's HOU @ SAS game will be good? Like super high quality?

[Rennadrel]

KD is crazy.

KD is ridiculous. I'd die to have him playing on the Raptors.

[xskarma]

Celtics were up by 30 against the Cavs and brought the 3rd stringers into the game against the Cavs still playign Sexton and others of their better players and the Celtics ended up extending the lead. Pretty impressive showing by the end of the bench guys, who all played about the last 9 min.

Tomorrow another game, away at Minnesota. Going to be a tough one, but at least the starters got plenty of rest tonight.

[xskarma]

That was probably the most satisfying win of the season, together with the OT win against the Raptors. Hayward with 30 points and a bunch of assists and rebounds too. His best game as a Celtic, easily. He just looked locked in and playing to win.

If this is a preview of things to come, then watch out cause the Celtics made it look easy on the road today, despite being on the second leg of a back-to-back.

[PhaelixWW]

Long article on The Ringer about Joel Embiid and how he compares statistically to Shaq. The article epitomizes what bothers me about The Ringer compared to Grantland... Grantland's articles were almost always very smart and insightful, and The Ringer's arguments tend to be a bit more headline grabbing with less insight:

I usually tend to appreciate the articles on fivethirtyeight too.

[-aiko-]

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