OFFICIAL AROUND THE NBA THREAD - June 2021

I was unaware of his age? I apologize for the misunderstanding. It does make sense.

 

Actually, I’m not 100% sure of his age. I was just spit balling based on his postings. I probably should have used green font just to be safe……

 

IIRC, in the other thread he said he's 34

I'm not sure it was Aldo though because he didn't say it 34 times

 

that's probably true...I saw his 3pt%

I just happen to think TS% is a comprehensive gauge of shooting and scoring efficiency, and it struck me as interesting that people were saying he was a playoff disaster. He has a TS% of .560; Dame's is .561. Of course, we know what Dame has faced in the playoffs. Irony is that PG's career playoff TS% is better than CJ's regular season TS%. And CJ's TS drops in the playoffs, yet around here CJ had a positive playoff rep ("Playoff CJ!") while PG13 had a negative rep

Dame-Powell-PG13-RoCo-Nurk would still be playing right now. Now that, would actually be a contender

 

Answer: they wouldn't. All our CJ-to-Philly trade ideas predate the arrival of Morey, when they had Josh Richardson.

 

data suggests this was a really bad season for injuries, especially soft tissue injuries:

https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/31592404/data-shows-nba-injuries-condensed-season

 

Yup 34 years old.. All I meant was Mitchell is already surrounded by a win now squad and probably headed to the finals already in his young career.

All while playing in freaking Utah in even worse Market than Portland to lure free agents

 

Not to be persnickety, but I have seen some very recently.

 

Pacers fired their coach after 1 season. The anti-Blazers. Bad hire.

 

and they had reportedly interviewed 20 people (including Billups) last year before hiring their guy,.

 

I think that's the gist of it. The narrative that PG disappears in the playoffs is false. He's actually just super inconsistent, with a historic number of bad shooting nights that magically balance out to average by just as many really good games.

 

look at the playoff box scores though https://www.basketball-reference.com/players/g/georgpa01/gamelog-playoffs/

he has INSANELY good shooting nights that really bolster his stats then comes crashing back to earth.
for instance, half of the playoff games he has shot 40% or worse this year. And half of them he is under 30% from 3. (Played 8 games so far.)

last season 7 out of 13 games 40% or below. And 6/13
Below 30% from 3. Also turns the ball over more frequently.

and 10/21 of those games he was below his abg TS%

Seems like the definition of inconsistency. Which is not what you want from a “second” star. Paul george would be nice to pair with dame & CJ as CJ and Pg could work out who had it going that game and who didn’t.
Paring him with dame is a waste of time in my estimation as previously noted

 

Interested to see how Denver adjusts after game one.

Monty / CP3 did some not so nice things to MPJ by either making him the lead communicator on the action, or the low man tagger with long recoveries. Forced Mike Malone to leave him on the bench for most if not all of the 4th.

Monty is going to continue to spam spain pick and roll so he's simply going to have to communicate on the switch better here (and he did the more he saw it in game 1), but look for Denver to try and ice side ball screens and to switch or top lock the Chicago action out of the corner they like to run for Book to try and keep him out of help and recovery situations as much as possible.

Malone also messed around with bringing the tagger from the strong side, but we saw some blown rotations out of that (rivers was often the culprit here). Just another way to make that recovery from MPJ shorter, allowing him to simply stunt at the roller and stay more attached with his matchup that's typically shaking up to the wing / top of the key.

I expect Jokic to defend the pick and roll less aggressively overall. Book and CP tore the trap up in game one and are great proactive passers. Got to mix it up more and game 2.

Suns did a good job against Jokic. A lot of it had to do with losing his touch late in the game, but I liked late switching on ball screens when they chose to go over. Also think Ayton's length makes it a bit more difficult for Jokic to get clean looks in the post compared to Nurkic.

Suns have better defensive personnel, for sure. Especially when it comes to the combination of strength and lateral quickness on the perimeter. CP3 at point guard is obviously huge advantage as well defensively.

But overall their game plan discipline is just at another level compared to what we saw from Portland.

 

Huh?

 

What might have been.

 

...hope the Blazers aren't using the same metrics and head-hunting firm!

 

How did we lose against Denver when they’re not healthy? Look at how Phoenix play on both ends

 

It’s like the Suns know Nuggets don’t play defense and are like hey let’s take advantage of that