OFFICIAL AROUND THE NBA THREAD - June 2021

good!

 

How about you go back and read what i said and the comment that i was responding to. Then get back to me. This forum works on written word. It helps to read those words completely and then respond accordingly?
Not trying to be snide or disrespectful in any way but your comments are completely out of context. The original comment was about the Suns leapfrogging the Blazers in one year. That absolutely is not the case in any way.
Now on your response???? How about we take Booker (Roy) and Ayton (Oden) off the Suns team about now and see how they perform? Yes injuries are a crap shoot no question but of course none of that was ever in the original idea or conversation.

 

you enumerated the draft picks Phoenix had in a 6 year period, and essentially implied it was the volume of high picks that pushed them to their record. My response, using Portland as one example, was showing that just having a volume of high picks is no guarantee of success. Still have to make good choices. And pay attention to your medical staff

another example, Sacramento:

2012:

5 SAC Thomas Robinson
6 POR Damian Lillard
36 SAC Orlando Johnson
39 DET Khris Middleton

2013:

7 SAC Ben McLemore
10 POR CJ McCollum
12 OKC Steven Adams
15 MIL Giannis Antetokounmpo

2014:

8 SAC Nik Stauskas
13 MIN Zach LaVine
14 PHO T.J. Warren
16 CHI Jusuf Nurkić
19 CHI Gary Harris
25 HOU Clint Capela

2015:

6 SAC Willie Cauley-Stein
10 MIA Justise Winslow
11 IND Myles Turner
13 PHO Devin Booker
15 ATL Kelly Oubre Jr.

2016:

8 SAC Marquese Chriss
11 ORL Domantas Sabonis
20 IND Caris LeVert
27 TOR Pascal Siakam

2018:

2 SAC Marvin Bagley III
3 ATL Luka Dončić
4 MEM Jaren Jackson Jr.
5 DAL Trae Young
7 CHI Wendell Carter Jr.
8 CLE Collin Sexton
10 PHI Mikal Bridges
11 CHO Shai Gilgeous-Alexander
14 DEN Michael Porter Jr.

7 straight drafts and the Kings only got it right one time. Again, multiple high lottery picks don't guarantee anything other than having several expensive rookie scale contracts

Portland hasn't been that bad, but they haven't been good either, and have missed several golden opportunities to build a contender in the Olshey era

Phoenix has whiffed on some too. For instance two consecutive #4 picks in 2016 & 2017 when they picked Dragan Bender and Josh Jackson. But they've hit some home runs too

 

Pro tip…….NEVER argue with the “experts”………

 

I can't really believe you have gone to this conversation beings you pretty much said the exact same thing i did to the exact same comment three pages ago. I even "Liked" your comment.

Now you are talking about Sacramento and draft picks from Detroit and Milwaukee among other teams?

All I ever implied was the Suns did not pass the Blazers in "One Year". Matter of fact lets see them pass the Blazers at all? If they win the Conference Championship then they have essentially had more success than the Blazers in the last three years. Remember they are one Chris Paul pulled hammy from being beat. Also remember the Blazers were there with Kanter as their starting Center and Lillard nursing a pulled groin among other issues.

Like i said. This forum is on written word. Pretty easy to follow. The Suns have been a work in progress for years now. Sometimes it takes a little luck. Happy for them and their fans.

 

I see what you mean here.

 

Are super-nerds really ruining US sports?

Interesting article......

Jayson Werth is the latest athlete to complain that data and analytics are taking the joy out of sports. Can numbers live alongside individual brilliance.

Are nerds ruining American sport?

Recently retired baseball player Jayson Werth certainly think so. “They’ve got all these super nerds, as I call them, in the front office that know nothing about baseball but they like to project numbers and project players,” Werth, a decent player who earned more than $136m over a 15-year career with the Nationals and the Phillies, told a Philadelphia sports podcast last week. “I think it’s killing the game. It’s to the point where [we could] just put computers out there. Just put laptops and what have you, just put them out there and let them play. We don’t even need to go out there anymore. It’s a joke.”

This is by now a familiar rite of passage for a certain category of “old school” baseball player: spend years playing the sport, make millions, retire, then, happily ensconced in wealthy middle age, dump on the “nerds” and “propeller heads” who are ruining baseball. Until Werth’s tirade, probably the best example of the genre came from former Yankees relief pitcher Richard “Goose” Gossage, who said in 2016: “The game is becoming a freaking joke because of the nerds who are running it. I’ll tell you what has happened, these guys played rotisserie baseball at Harvard or wherever the fuck they went, and they thought they figured the fucking game out. They don’t know shit.”

These tirades almost always tip over into caricature: if only baseball could be freed from the tyrannical bonds of data, the jocks say, players would suddenly re-emerge in all their antenumerical glory, rippling and Byronic and pure. A few predictable themes recur: nerds haven’t played the game to any respectable level; they therefore don’t “understand” baseball at an elemental, emotional level; nerds rely on data; there’s too much data in the game, too much fussing over sabermetrics and analytics and Bayesian inferences and other dweeby irrelevances; as a result, baseball is being stripped of its spontaneity and fun, players are losing their freedom of self-expression, and the sport is dying; ergo, the nerds must be stopped.

This issue is not confined solely to baseball, of course – with the use of analytics in coaching and player recruitment growing, other major sports are experiencing their own backlash against the statisticians. It’s now at the point where we can speak of an authentic cultural battle to decide the future of professional sports: a battle between art and science, gesture and data, virtuosity and system, between the extravagance and unpredictability of individual talent and the icy certainties of mathematics.

Or so the nerd haters would have us believe. The most overlooked dimension of the war in professional sports between the meatheads and the nerds is that it’s only the former who appear to believe the war exists; you can read plenty of exuberant tirades against analytics or nostalgic paeans to the grandeur of sport before science, but never do you come across windy, overegged tributes to walks and hits per inning pitched or the groundout-to-flyout ratio. The nerds rarely have much to say in public in defense of their place within the sport, most probably because they realize the contest was already settled in their favor years ago. With a string of nerd-supported teams in place across all the major leagues (the Houston Rockets, the Boston Red Sox), nerds can legitimately say they hold the strongest currency of all in professional sports: the currency of success. Whether the meatheads like it or not (we know they don’t), the nerds are here to stay.

But does this accelerating nerdificiation mean American sport is no longer any fun to watch? It’s here, on the vital if subjective question of aesthetics, that opinions differ most violently. Run your eye over the news headlines of the past few days in MLB and what’s most striking is the prominence given to individual feats of virtuosity and athleticism: Ramon Laureado’s “throw of the century”, Adam Engel’s acrobatic robbery of a three-run homer against the Indians (in a losing cause, no less), David Bote’s potentially career-defining grand slam against the Nationals on Sunday night. Search for clicky headlines or wannabe-viral posts about the Nationals’ stolen base percentage rate and you’ll come up disappointed. This holds true in all the other sports subject to a creeping anxiety about the march of data: hence all the excitement on social media about Wayne Rooney’s masterly last minute intervention for DC United over the weekend (a triumph of skill over data if ever there was one), or the enduring highlights-reel appeal of that LeBron James block against the Warriors in 2016.

Fun, spontaneity, individuality, personality: professional sport in the US still has them all, and it’s ridiculous to pretend otherwise. Plainly, the country’s professional athletes have not all devolved into mindless automatons. Far from ruining sport and killing creativity, data – by giving coaches the means to better understand where and how to allocate their resources – may instead offer a superior platform for players’ creativity to flower. All the while it is still, very obviously, these individual sparks of genius that draw fans to the game. Teams can use all the data in the world but sport still comes down to the quality of individual decision-making on the field of play. Data can help train brains but it can’t replace them – or the arms, legs and heads to which they’re attached. Data, ultimately, is just one set of inputs among many in the coaching process. And though the factors that go into coaching may now be more diverse, our appreciation of the sport’s outputs – our love of improbable fastballs, and back-breaking catches, and game-ending grand slams – is hardly any different today to what it was 30 years ago.

Indeed if the experience of VAR at the recent World Cup is any guide, data and technology may actually enhance the viewing experience for consumers of sport. Data unearths new ways of understanding the sport, which in turn offers new controversies, new things to argue about – and what, really, is the point of watching sport if not to hold aggressive opinions on issues we can’t control?

For players, data unlocks new ways of being on the field of play, new ways of behaving. Decades ago Charles Reep used data to discover the benefits of the short passing game in soccer and the value of the high defensive press – discoveries at the core of the two leading managerial schools of thought today (the quick pass possession game of Pep Guardiola and the frenetic press of Jurgen Klopp). The Golden State Warriors are famously run more like a tech company than a conventional basketball franchise, such is their commitment to technology; without data it’s unlikely they would have seen the efficiencies of a three-point heavy game and ushered in the tactical revolution that defines modern basketball. Whether Golden State are pleasing to watch is a matter of taste. Perhaps you have a problem with Steph Curry and Kevin Durant landing so many three pointers; perhaps you find the Warriors’ ceaseless quest for long-range scoring opportunities monotonous, or their abrasive defense and constant ball circulation tiring on the eyes. I for one welcome them, and our new nerd overlords as well.

And what, really, has been lost in the process? The Warriors’ data-driven model has upended old coaching shibboleths in basketball and put a whole style of play out of business: gone now are the cult of the layup and the idea that the ball should be recycled through two or three players only. Instead basketball has been remade as a sport of relentless passing, careful substitutions in defense, and spectacular looping bombs from mid-court. This is no bad thing.

Of course, much of the data the sports nerds hawk is often a distraction, or nonsense, or both. The two most irritating words in soccer today are “expected goals”. A good portion of sporting data – not to mention the methodologies underpinning its collection – remains experimental and contested. There’s still more scientism in sport than science. But the experiment is worth the risk – especially if you accept that all physical processes, even highly unpredictable ones on a sporting field subject to the whims of human agency, have a structure that can be modeled.

Even Johan Cruyff, the golden god of football romanticism (“Footballers from the street are more important than trained coaches”), understood the power of simple numerical accretion on the football pitch: coincidence, he famously said, is logical. But data in sport is not the whole solution. It exists to serve the team; the team does not serve the data. Sport will remain this way for years to come, even as the use of analytics mushrooms. Fun things will happen on the field of play. Individual brilliance will shine undimmed. Patterns will emerge then fall away. Coaching fashions will come and go. The fans will keep arguing. The nerds will keep nerding. The meatheads will pass into history.

 

The excitement in sports, music, etc for me has always been the intangibles, random events and unpredictable will that can take a less talented or beat up squad and allow them to win a game they shouldn't on paper.....or perform beyond their wheelhouse on stage ...stats to me are for gamblers to calculate the spread ....I don't care about someone's shooting avg when they hit a game winner ...I enjoy the game winner...if Dame makes a half court shot it's thrilling even though it's not considered a high percentage shot. If a guy leads the league in rebounds and doesn't rebound in the playoffs as well....the stats have failed to predict his production. thanks for posting the article

 

Probably some people would call management of Cleveland Indians "super nerds". They operate every year on one of the lowest budgets, they trade their stars when they are almost beyond team control. But somehow they stay in contention every year. Right now they have the lowest payroll in baseball and also the youngest team but are somehow still in second place in their division. (Although I'm not sure how long they can keep it up as 3 of their 5 starting pitchers average about 2 innings per start!)

 

Notice how little of this conveys to football? I have an opinion on this. It's because in Football it's considered a complete team game. Everyone knows a QB is very limited without a line or a running game as well as quality receivers. Defense needs Line, Linebackers and Backs. Without all three the defense sucks.
Yes Nerds have taken a bunch of joy out of sports IF YOU LET THEM.

 

Well said!

 

first thing, my initial response was that Phoenix didn't pass the Blazers in one season, it was 3. That was "written word" too

the season Portland won 53 games & went to the WCF, Phoenix had a 19-63 record, tied for 2nd worst. Pretty wide gulf. But they already had Booker, Ayton, and Bridges. The next year, Portland won 1 more game than Phoenix. So, the gap went from -34 to -1

this season, the equivalent of a 58-24 record, which is 5 games better that the best Blazer team in the Dame/CJ era. So, -34 --> -1 --> +9. That's passing

and right now, they are up 3-0 on the team that beat the Blazers 4-2. That's passing too

and yes, The Suns foundation looks tenuous because of Chris Paul. His age and history make that true. But Portland's trip to the WCF was tenuous as well. In fact, that team doesn't exist any more. It was dismantled. Holding a team that doesn't exist as a gauge for the Suns team that does exist really doesn't seem to be what the other poster was talking about. I'm watching this Suns team play, and it's a better team than any the Blazers have had in the Stolshey era. It's certainly a better team right now than Portland and two years ago, they only won 19 games. Again, that's passing

as far as the debate, if the way I discussed irritated you, I apologize. That wasn't my intention. My intention was credit the Suns for a series of good decisions

 

Great article that generally gives credit to both sides of the argument. The SF Giants are a prime example. While I have no doubt analytics helped them win 3 World Series in 5 years, they had an old school manager who, more often than not went with his personal experiences and knowledge of the game, his gut, and the occasional gamble when he was making a move. You can’t argue with the results. Those teams had very good players, but arguably only one is probably a HOFer. It was how the manager used them. The current administration has one of the most analytics driven GMs (and Coach) in MLB. The current team is mostly a bunch of no name, low average hitters. The bullpen is a hot mess. But the team currently has the best (or one of the best) records in MLB, because they are meeting or exceeding the reasons they were signed for (based on analytics). So yeah, analytics has it’s place in sports. But so do all the little intangibles that don’t show up in a box score. Why they apparently have to be mutually exclusive is beyond me……

 

YES........ NERDS ARE RUINING SPORTS!!!!

 

It's amazing how many scrub guards are putting up much better playoff numbers than CJ did.

 

"Suns in 4"