Woo hoo, we will contend for the 8th seed

still holding out hope that once Stern is gone, Silver might actually allow a smaller market team to win it.

 

exactly. "professional" sports -- where players don't get paid millions of dollars to intentionally lose. guess you walked right into that one.

 

Any production is better than last season though. Our bench was atrocious. Even if these rooks only give us a total of 8 points, 5 boards, 3 assists, 1 steal and 1 block; it's much better than Freeland and Price.

 

The Spurs were less than 30 seconds away from winning it this year so I think the small market conspiracy theory has run its course.

 

McCollum should be good and I'm counting on it.

 

I agree. It is obvious that big name markets tend to have a much easier time grabbing star talent, but it doesn't mean the small market team can't win titles.

 

Im not saying it cant happen or that I dont want it to happen Im just saying that Im ok with taking steps to get there and hope that perfect storm I mentioned happens in the meantime. No matter how good your team is there is more luck and timing and match-ups than anything.

 

Fair enough, but he played next to Aldridge a decent amount during that partial season, after we picked him up on waivers. And after all of the arguing, Robinson never established any kind of game or role in his first year and still needs court time to figure out what kind of player he's going to be in the NBA, something that Hickson had already done in Cleveland before going to Sacramento and then bouncing to us.

 

GMs (who run these professional franchises) manipulate their rosters all the time to jockey for better draft position ... tanking in other words. The players don't necessarily get to set the strategic plan.

 

Okay that's fine, I understand your point. But since he won't have the pressure of living up to his pick status for now; he won't have the pressure to produce at the level many want him to be. Sometimes that's enough to help your game along.

 

Okay I do agree with that. Spurs got really lucky when Robinson and Elliot went down.

 

the population of San Antonio within the city, according to the 2010 census, was over 1.3 million people which ranked the city seventh in the U.S. at the time. i wouldn't call them a small market.

 

why would a gm tank to keep their pick in a weak draft rather than strive to lose the pick this year, thus keeping their pick next year in what promised to be one of the best drafts in recent memory? that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

 

It's smaller than Portland's metropolitan area actually. San Antonio is a large, spread out city. Portland's market reaches throughout most the entire state, since they only have 1 team.

 

Portland is #24 at 1,905,700
San Antonio is #30 at 1,496,600

http://www.radio-media.com/markets/main.html

 

My only point was that McCollum or Robinson shouldn't factors in an analysis about this team making the leap from fringe playoff team to top 4 or 5 in the conference. I'm certain that they will play and could even be decent, but their addition to the roster won't significantly propel them beyond that 8th seed.

 

Because Paul Allen is an idiot?

EDIT: It also seems you are talking just about the Blazers particular situation with its owed pick to Charlotte. That situation cannot be extrapolated to every other team in the league (and a helluva lot of teams do "tank" for draft position every year).

 

Nielsen lists San Antonio as the 36th largest market in the country with 881,050 TV homes.

Portland ranks 22nd with 1,182,180 TV homes.

The top 10 markets are:

1 New York 7,384,340
2 Los Angeles 5,613,460
3 Chicago 3,484,800
4 Philadelphia 2,949,310
5 Dallas-Ft. Worth 2,588,020
6 San Francisco-Oak-San Jose 2,502,030
7 Boston (Manchester) 2,366,690
8 Washington, DC (Hagrstwn) 2,359,160
9 Atlanta 2,326,840
10 Houston 2,215,650

You'll probably notice that the majority of NBA titles have been won by teams in one of those top-10 markets.

http://www.tvb.org/media/file/TVB_Market_Profiles_Nielsen_Household_DMA_Ranks2.pdf