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I laughed:
A lot of fans have given up on the idea of Brandon Knight as a 1. Not sure what the team feels.
I think this is a fair point. With Rudy being the third option on the Grizzlies, it felt like a lot of his touches wound up being of the "here's the ball, Rudy, do something" variety instead of running something that plays to his strengths. He was really good though in 2010 before he got hurt, and I always thought that the small lineups they ran last year while Z-Bo was out where Rudy played 4 worked fairly well.
Anyway, even though I spent a lot of time yesterday talking about why they would trade Rudy and am mostly optimistic that this trade is an improvement, I am actually sort of bummed about this. I always liked Rudy. He seems like a good kid. He can occasionally be a space cadet on defense but otherwise he works hard and is a pretty entertaining player.
The first really big win that the Grizzlies got with this version of the team was early in 2010 against the new Super-Heat in Memphis. They were like 4-9 at the time. It might have even been in the immediate aftermath of that stupid Iverson debacle, I can't remember what year that was. Anyway, Rudy Gay won that game, hit a baseline jumper off the dribble at the buzzer, right over Lebron. I'll always remember that. He had several moments like that and I've always thought if he'd been healthy in the '10 playoffs they would have beat the Thunder in that second round series. I'll miss him and I hope he does well in Toronto.
Neither Arthur nor Randolph are exactly the most durable of people, so having a 4th big who is better than Hamed Haddadi is not really a bad idea. Plus he's young, so even if he doesn't add much to this specific team, doesn't mean he won't down the line.
I don't like the trade for Toronto. Jalen Rose's point seems like a good one, but I'm still not sure Gay helps a team win, and boy is that a lot of money.
The Lakers?
My friend and I watching Celtics-Kings tonight decided he was a cross between Antoine Walker and DC.
As @pflanns pointed out on twitter tonight, he got Courtney Lee switched onto him early in a possession. He proceeded to spend the remainder of said possession outside the three point line.
For a moment, I thought "OMG YOU CAN TRADE COACHES IN THE NBA??"
I have no clue what was going on in that column.
My first take was Detroit wins, Toronto loses, and this move is justified for Memphis in terms of basketball reasons - though it's interesting to see the Grizz move away from some of what I consider their strengths (continuity, pressure/athleticism on the wing).
Dude works for Yahoo! and he's putting down ESPN? Woj is well connected, but he frequently comes off like a jerk.
Yeah, what does Toronto get out of this really? They give up Ed Davis, who seems like he'll be a nice rotation guy at least, plus Calderon, for Rudy Gay? That's the plan having Lowry, DeRozan, and Gay? I guess that's a lot of athleticism, and they can probably push the tempo with those guys, but they aren't stopping anyone at the other end.
Mildly concerned who picks up the scoring slack for Memphis, but given they were intent to dump Gay's contract, it seems they did well enough.
I wonder if there's a story here?
You left out Fields.
Dude works for Yahoo! and he's putting down ESPN?
I honestly had no idea this is what that dig meant until reading this comment. I thought Hollinger used to work for some sports-focused division of Cablevision/Comcast prior to his career at ESPN and this was what Woj was referencing. Makes it even more bizarre/childish to me now, why not just say ESPN?
There's probably some unspoken (or perhaps spoken?) rule not to call out another media company in print?
Me too. Gay is an overrated player, but a solid fit for his old team.
Colangelo has definitely overstayed his welcome, right?
I think he's just trying to make Hollinger sound like an egghead with no real-world experience. The line doesn't work if you say "a statistician who worked for ESPN," because that makes him sound to the average sports fan like a guy with real qualifications.
That's why they got Ed Davis, right? But yes, I wonder this too. If the Gay trade happened first, would they have still done the other one?
Did Reggie Evans get someone to put money on the Heat tonight?
If so, great job of deflecting beforehand.
This made me do a double take. I missed "will" the first time through. I like Bynum a lot, and I would figure his minutes would disappear now.
As soon as I posted that comment, I thought "Well, they *did* get Davis, you doofus."
*Bulls blew a 27 and 15 point lead in their 2 previous losses to the Bucks.
**Him and NateRob have developed a bit of a rivalry this year, with most of the jawing coming from NateRob. Robinson "drew" an offensive foul call, Jennings threw the ball at the ref and pointed in his face yelling. Probably not going to get a suspension though. And speaking of Robinson:
Very pretty play got him open for the dunk. It was in a half court set and not a fastbreak. Nate both annoying and incredibly fun to root for.
Lastly, the Jimmy Butler update: 27min, 18pts (8 of 12), 6reb, 2stl, 0 TO. And unfortunately, he's got Stacey King being all Stacey Kingish again - every time Butler scores, King's catchphrase is "the G stands for gets buckets."
Oh, boy. This is like the kind of stuff people would say about Bill James in 1985. I guess that's about where we're at now...
It sounds a little sillier to claim that someone is unqualified to handle basketball statistics because he was an ESPN basketball statistical maven.
Haberstroh trade grades: TOR C-, MEM B, DET A-
I meant more in the sense that Rondo has elite player moments/games but in the aggregate the evidence is lacking.
UGGGGGGHHHH
Jimmy gets buckets!
When the Bulls played the Warriors I had to listen to King say "OOOOHHHHH the Butler did it!!" multiple times. In a blowout. I listened to them a lot when I lived in Chicago but King seems to get worse every year.
I don't have any links handy, but I'm pretty sure this has been studied and verified in terms of results, at least within small sample sizes.
I looked for some as well, but there really does seem to be an effect at least in terms of the numbers (I can't say anything about his effort or whatever). Something like 3/4 of his career triple doubles have come on national TV, not including games like last years 44/8/10 in Game 2 against Miami. He also averaged 21/7/11 in last years conference finals, a series in which every game was shown nationally.
This guy points out that in 15 regular season national TV games last year, Rondo averaged 17/6.5/12 - which means he averaged something like 10/4/11 when not on national TV.
Perhaps Rondo has a higher standard deviation per game than a typical "four-star" player, such that he "looks like" a "five-star" player more often than you'd normally expect of a guy of his talent level. That'd be interesting to know (and seemingly not tough to figure out). But even if it were the case, I'm reluctant to conclude that the reason is that he tries in some games and doesn't in others.
The funny thing is that Simmons did say that Magic told Simmons that Rondo would have to "step it up" this year, and that Simmons' response was "this is who he is." But then the entire rest of the podcast was about how this doesn't necessarily have to be who he is.
Feel like this is getting needlessly pedantic at this point, but...what I took from the podcast (IIRC) was that there are certain games/things/biases at play that make Rondo seem better than he is. You seem to have taken their point as Rondo tries hard when he's on national TV but not as hard in his other games. I interpreted as Rondo has had several really awesome high profile games but most of the time he's not nearly that good. So, I was not as much concerned with the reasoning behind why Rondo may or may not play as well in national TV games as I was with the question of how good is Rondo really wrt the Celtics' season following his season-ending injury.
I think (based on zero hard evidence) that this is the case. I have also seen theories that it has to do with the pounding Rondo takes when he is consistently driving to the rim, and his unwillingness/inability to withstand that over the course of a full season.
Might this be a good thing? Obviously it would be better to have him be Playoff Rondo night in and night out, but if that's not the case, is it necessarily bad that he has nights when he gets 30/15/15, and other nights when he just seems to float, instead of a consistent 15/5/10? Especially given that he seems to consistently turn up his game for the playoffs, I'm not sure that this variance is a bad thing, however infuriating it may be to watch him and want him to harness it every night. (I vaguely remember studies showing that variance in pitching performance was potentially valuable for an average starter, rather than consistently average production. [I believe those studies were used to advocate for Oliver Perez, so some grains of salt are certainly warranted.])
I was initially worried about this, but man the more I look at it, I can't help but think that Rudy Gay was hurting the Grizzlies on offense more than helping them. Might just be fanboy wishcasting, but Rudy was taking 16.4 shots a game on 40.8% shooting, scoring 17 a game. That shooting percentage is 123rd out of 136 for qualified players. True shooting, he's 274 out of 333. Both of those are from ESPN's stats thing. I'm not going to say that it will be a piece of cake to replace that, but at the same time, how likely is it that they really do much worse? Tayshaun Prince is taking 11 shots a game and shooting .444/.500 TS, scoring 12 a game. Maybe I'm crazy, but if he just does something like that, it looks like it would improve the Grizz offense not make it worse. Then you just need to replace something like 5 pts on 5.5 shots a game from somebody.
I realize that offense doesn't work exactly like that and it's an oversimplified version of what replacing Rudy this year actually means. My main point is that we aren't talking about some excessively high bar to clear here. His PER is below average, his ORrating sucks, WS says he's contributed 0.2 WS on offense this year.
The further point is that there seem to be a lot of articles and fans who hate this deal because they think MEM has thrown some sort of playoff run away this year. That seems to be the main point of contention since the massive money/cap/flexibility gain they made makes it pretty hard to argue that they're not in better shape for the future. I don't know what their odds of making of deep run in the playoffs were before this trade, probably not very great. They have been something like the 5th or 6th best team in the league with a great defense and an offense that frankly sucks. Maybe the hypothetical '13 Grizz with the best shot at a ring is the one where Rudy is playing good and has a more balanced role in the offense. That looked increasingly like make believe this season, so I think there is at least as strong an argument that they've taken a gamble that might improve their offense and therefore their odds of some sort of playoff run as one that has destroyed their chances. They are 23rd in Off. Eff. so far this year and they have to replace a bunch of shots at 41% shooting. How much damn worse could they possibly do?
Not wholly unlike the Celtics/Rondo "they are 27th in offense without him; how much worse can it get?" wishcast - though I think there is more substance to it in Memphis' case.
Not sure this works for DEN from a talent-fit perspective.
I think it's possible that it's fairly representative of his talent on this team. The offense just seems to have calcified with Rudy in this role where he takes a lot of iso possesions and winds up shooting a lot of long 2s. I'm not really sure that it was all his fault. The post is awfully crowded and without much perimeter shooting, I guess Rudy taking jumpers is the way they decided to space the floor or something. I think it probably could be handled better, but maybe this was the best thing they could come up with to keep Rudy, Zach, and Marc all happy and spread the shots around. Rudy probably would have shot some better over the course of the season, but I think taking Rudy out of the equation might force the Grizzlies into finding some better uses for those possessions. Prince and the other new guys aren't going to demand the same number of shots and probably will be more willing to move the ball than Rudy was.
I don't know. I always liked him and Rudy and the Grizzlies worked well at times, but even when he was playing his best there was certainly an argument that he wasn't helping much. I had always thought that they would figure out how to use him like they did in the month or two preceding his shoulder injury, when the Big three were all playing really well, but then last year Randolph went out for a while and they were in a different configuration. This year they've all been healthy and Rudy's role just settled into to something fairly useless. As much as I like Lionel, sometimes I wonder whether he couldn't have done more to make Rudy fit in.
lou williams is out for the year, so that makes the projected records kind of meaningless, but the the hawks get a jump on this summer by acquiring dwight howard (and also they clear cap space by shedding years 2 and 3 of lou williams contract), and the lakers get a jump on this summer by getting rid of dwight howard (they also get to move pau gasol back to center, and they add athleticism and defense in the form of josh smith, plus whatever it is that jason richardson is). and the sixers get rid of jason richardson while bringing back a player they shouldn't have let leave anyway and adding mike smith who is just a little favorite of mine going back to this past draft.
Hearing wilbon on espn 1000 today he had a lot of good things to say, and that butler has made a great impression across the league amongst the players and coaches
On huffpo, there's a thinkpiece on Girls by KAJ...so that exists.
Since this question has been asked, I think now is as good of a time as any to point out earlier in the year several people said the only teams with a legit (5% or greater) in the west were OKC and the Lakers. I thought that was ######## then and I think that's especially clear now.
Somehow, I was sent this link thrice today. I disagree with him and think the show is more self-aware than he gives credit. Still, how did that happen?
37-11 vs. 35-11 isn't a significant difference in record, their SRS is practically the same, and the Thunder actually have a better point differential. Then there's the fact that the Thunder have the two best players from among those teams, including the second best player in the world. They beat the Spurs The Spurs' three best players are 30, 35, and 36; The Thunder's are 23, 24, and 24. I think they have more going for them. I know who I'd rather face, if the Bulls, Pacers, and Heat are evaporated and the Celtics sneak into the Finals.
That's not meant as an insult to the Spurs, or to say they couldn't beat the Thunder head to head. They're obviously right in the mix and I agree that anyone who gave them a >5% chance to make the Finals at the start of the year probably undersold them. I just think Oklahoma City looks like the best bet through 40 some odd games.
?
OKC and SAS have even split their two games so far, with the home team winning each time. Thunder feel like the favorites since they beat SAS in the playoffs last year and seem to be building toward a title. But they haven't proven clearly superior (or perhaps superior at all) to the Spurs so far.
Fatalism, my friend. It is certainly not impossible, but with Howard having re-injured the shoulder, and with their having just blown the first game of the Grammy Trip to the worst team in the West, there is no particular reason to think that they will catch Utah or Houston. My predictions are usually wrong, but I did predict that Howard would re-aggravate the shoulder and get shut down, and I think that is what will happen.
FWIW, Hollinger had them #1 in the West with 60 wins; SCHOENE had them 3rd with 53.
Good point, I should have worded what that differently. I didn't mean to imply I think they're an overwhelming favorite or anything.
It wasn't the same starters last year. Randolph blew his knee in like game 3 and missed half the season. When he came back he came off the bench for a long time. He only started 8 games. Rudy was playing with Speights and Gasol and that is a different sort of alignment. He also spent a fair amount of time as the nominal 4, where I always thought he was pretty good. As I recall they were closing a lot of games with Conley/Mayo/Allen/Gay/Gasol.
As to recovery, I assume that you are right and he would have bounced back some. As to how much, I don't know. If you look at his shot locations on the stats cube, the decline in his FG% is almost entirely because he is shooting both less and worse in the restricted area. I don't know whether that's just a shooting slump or if it is representative of him playing differently. At least observationally, he seemed to be attacking the basket a lot less, but that could be off. That's what I was talking about with his role calcifying.
To the basketball gods, for underestimating Popovich.
Robin, who do you have in the big Min-LA game tomorrow?
Howard is "day-to-day"--how many of your guys are out (not a wiseass question; I am actually asking)?
Also, the real RR (Ricky Rubio) spoke up in the media for Pau, who has been in a pissing contest with D'Antoni about being used as 6th man/PT.
What made last night really special for me was that UCLA lost in Pauley in OT to a sub.500 USC squad while the Lakers were getting outscored 29-13 in the 4th by Phoenix. Spring training really needs to get here.
They're missing Love, Budinger, Lee, and Roy, so probably the healthiest they've been all year.
I saw Rubio's comment and it made me wish they could play together. Even with Pau's contract, I'd love to root for him.
I heard Walton going nuts about UCLA losing at home to USC on Reggie Miller night (he did the UW game tonight). As usual, he cracked me up.
As to the game, if Howard plays and is this year's version of himself, I think the Lakers will win a close one. If he doesn't, Minnesota takes it.
jealous of hollinger much?
If a cursory glance at 82games is to be believed, he was more effective at the three last season than at the four + he wasn't playing that that much as a stretch four (a sixth of his minutes).
You've seen him play infinitely more often than I this season, so it's hard for me to respond to this. Without a doubt, Memphis' lack of perimeter shooters (and attendant nudging Gay away from the basket) was a problem. I'm not rejecting your thesis that his role calcified (for whatever reason) - nor that trading him was wise - but I do think it's easy to overrate how not great he was.
I still suspect this might happen too. I'm more concerned about the Jazz losing their playoff spot to the Lakers than I am to the Rockets or Blazers, cuz the Lakers are definitely capable of playing much better than they have so far. I don't know if that's true of Houston or Portland. Despite the epic beatdown they put on us earlier in the week, I think the Rockets are only a .500 team or a few games over, and I think the Blazers have been playing over their heads a little. I don't suspect they'll finish the season with a winning record.
I saw a little of the LAL/OKC game, and Jalen Rose said at halftime that you'd need about 48 wins to get the 8th seed in the West (that's been the average over the last 5 years, pro-rating for last seasons strike). Wilbon pointed out that the Lakers would have to go 30-8 to do that, which ain't gonna happen. He's right about that, but Rose was wrong about needing 48 wins, at least this season.
My prediction is that the Jazz hold on to the 7th seed with around 45 wins and the 8th seed Lakers/Rockets get 42 or 43.
I disagree with Booey, though, on the Rockets. I think they're better than the Jazz - or, at the very least, I think they clearly have been so far, records aside. Houston has a more efficient offense, better D, and I think they'll end up making it. Not to say the Jazz couldn't finish ahead of them, but I don't see why you'd predict that based on their performances thus far, and it's not like we all expected the Jazz to be way better than the Rockets entering the season. Is there any reason (beyond rooting for your team) that you have for seeing the Jazz as looking better than the Rockets heading to the second half?
If I had to make the call now, I'd go Rockets 7, Lakers 8, Jazz 9, and the Blazers fade. Lakers had better get it going soon, though.
This. I was starting to lay out my WC standings and I realized that with CP3's injury, MEM's recent moves, the return of Bogut and the evening out of DEN's schedule, there could be a lot of second half intrigue in the 3-4-5-6 slots.
I really doubt the Clippers will slip below 3rd, Paul shouldn't be out much longer and even without him they are 5-3 with Bledsoe starting.
Mainly cuz - like the Nuggets - the Jazz's early season record was misleading due to an incredibly road heavy schedule. After beating Detroit on January 12th, Utah was only 20-19, but they'd played 24 road games and only 15 homies. They're now in the midst of a 15/5 home/road split where if they don't crap the bed at home again like they did last Monday, they should be able to put some distance between themselves and their competition before the schedule starts balancing out again in March. 7 games into this favorable 20 game stretch the Jazz are 5-2 and still have 9 of their next 13 at home (and two of the roadies are very winnable games against Sacto and the shorthanded Wolves).
So we'll see. I could definitely be wrong about the Rockets, but from the few games I've seen, they seem like an all offense/no defense run-and-gun type team that could beat anyone when they're on but lose to anyone when they're not. Sort of like the 2007 Warriors, who went 42-40. But yes, like the 2007 Warriors, they'd be a much bigger threat to whoever they played in the first round than the current Jazz would, even if Utah had the slightly better record.
It all comes down to February for the Jazz. This is their chance to build a cushion, and if they don't have a great record this month, then I withdraw my prediction and agree that Houston has the inside track at the 7th seed. In that case I'll just keep rooting for Portland to fade and the Lakers to continue to struggle so my boys can at least hang on to the 8th spot. There's an odd sense of pride in making the playoffs, even if it just means we'll get pummelled in the first round again by the Spurs or Thunder.
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