Event Around the 2025 NBA Playoff Madness!

I don’t “like” anyone’s comments. I don’t pick and choose. That would be rude

 

You earned a like.

 

I watched the game this evening and the other day @AldoTrapani you were talking like Dame was worse in his prime than Hali is right now and although defense is half of the game and Hali definitely is the better defender and he does get more assists and does so with a better assist to turnover ratio; if you had trouble with Dame's scoring being "feast or famine" like you used to love to go on about, you better buckle up if you're going to start rooting for Hali because tonight was a lot more like his usual performances than what we've been seeing. His numbers tonight were also salvaged by some garbage time baskets.

I honestly think if you put prime Dame on that team with Siakam, that they have the right defenders who can make open threes and they have both Turner and Siakam who are both worlds better than anybody we put with Dame after LaMarcus... I just think Dame would win multiple championships with this Pacers roster around him in his prime. He'd also probably have multiple MVPs and have both Siakam and Turner in all star games. People forget just how good Dame was and just how shitty the teams were that he had to try and win with... I guess by people I just mean you Aldo. It's just always a famine with your takes never anything close to a feast.

 

Indiana would be better with prime Dame. Absolutely.

 

Dame was great for us, but I don’t believe this Pacers team would be better with prime Dame.

Defense matters
Assists matter

Dame is a volume shooter. Clamp him down and because of his volume shooting, the rest of the team is sunk. Also, saying prime Dame would be better is silly since Haliburton isn’t in his prime yet.

Portland struggled when Dame struggled because he didn’t share the ball enough on offense. (Assists don’t always mean share the ball)

 

Who exactly was he going to "Share the ball" with? Aminu? CJ? Harkless? Crabbe? Nurk? Maybe Evan Turner? Gary Trent jr.? Jake layman?

At what point do we give the guy credit for carrying the team?

 

In my first five words of the post you just quoted.

 

So he was going to share the ball with “US”?

 

I think Dame's assist numbers would have been much better if he had better teammates.

I think the team struggled when Dame struggled because the rest of the team usually kind of sucked...

I also think Dame was capable of being a better defender. If he didn't have to carry so much of the load on offense.

There is a reason Dame played a ton of minutes. We sucked when he wasn't on the floor.

 

malarkey....Portland struggled when Dame struggled because they didn't have any other talented player who could fill the gaps on offense, both in scoring and facilitating. Nobody

* by far Dame's highest usage rate was in 2022-23 when he was 5th in usage. That was the team that ended up with the 2nd best player being Grant, unless you liked Hart better. That team wouldn't have been one iota better if Dame had "shared the ball more".

* Dame's 2nd highest usage rate was in 2020-21 when he had the 10th highest usage rate in the league. Some of the players who had higher rates that season were Trae Young, Bradley Beal, Devin Booker

* Dame's 3rd highest usage rate was the year before when he had the 14th highest in the league. Some of the guys with higher rates were Westbrook, Beal, Kawhi, Zach LaVine, Derreck Rose, D'Angelo Russell, and Donovan Mitchell

* and the year before that, 2018-19, the year Portland made it to the WC Finals, Dame had the 19th highest usage rate. You remember that season, right?....when Dame shot down OKC by scoring 50 points and the walk off series winner in game 6. Yeah, Dame struggled in the WCF because the Warriors, as usual, completely sold out there defense to stop Dame and the rest of Olshey's idiot roster couldn't even help enough to win a single game....because the roster completely lacked any impact talent after Dame

I guess we can say that CJ was the 2nd best player on Dame's Blazer squads. Nurk Fever didn't last long enough. Is CJ better than Jalen Williams? is he better than Siakam? Easy no to both questions and the answer with still be the same if the comparison is Chet Holmgren, and Myles Turner. Hell, was CJ even better than Alex Caruso? or Dort? For damn sure the Blazers never had the depth of talent either of those teams had. Not even close

the failures of the Dame era wasn't because Dame was not Lebron or Jokic. It wasn't because Dame was not 6'8. The failure was one of management. Gutless ego-driven blind-ass stupid fucking management. But sure, let's blame Dame because CJ was not Devin Booker, RoCo was not Jayson Tatum, Nurkic was not Embiid, and Stotts was not Carlisle.

 

enough with these dipshit drive-by tweets

LeBron James $52,627,153
Luka Dončić $45,999,660
Rui Hachimura $18,259,259
Dorian Finney-Smith $15,378,480
Austin Reaves $13,937,574
Gabe Vincent $11,500,000
Maxi Kleber $11,000,000
Jarred Vanderbilt $11,571,429
Dalton Knecht $4,010,160
Shake Milton $3,000,000
Bronny James $1,955,377

$191,588,670

(none of those salaries are team options)

the cap is 154M. A 3-year/140M deal would require about 35M in cap space. All the Lakers would have to do is shed 75M in salary...easy peasy...right?

by the way... just checked: parody account. Might want to filter before polluting the forum

 

Yeah the real account is Hoops Legion not Legen.

 

It's a fake parody account.


It would be nice if posters would vet the sources a bit before spreading the info... but unfortunately that is the world we live in now.

 

They're dragging this finals out like crazy....

 

Your first mistake was reading something BGD posted.

 

The extra day between games one and two was weird but they always give an extra day during the finals when changing venues, supposedly for travel. Game 4 is scheduled the normal two days after Game 3 (Game 3 6/11 and Game 4 6/13). Then another two day break when they head back to OKC... and that's how it will be for any games after that since the league switched to the 2-2-1-1-1 format after years of the 2-3-2.

 

This has always been the way i viewed it. Especially the defense part. I watched him play decent defense with the Bucks for long stretches because he had another player that was carrying the load.