In-season NBA news thread
- Thread starter nattysez
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Kerr calls out Draymond, saying the team had a lack of trust after the Green-Poole assault. No shit. Kerr got such a pass after that incident? But then also says that they aren't a championship-caliber team next year without Green. You lost in the 2nd round in 6 games. Your 3 stars will be 1 year older next year. The window has closed. What a glorious window...but come the fuck on. Carrying Green's water as his coach while crying about other team's actions/fans has been nauseating. I like Kerr the person, the NBA persona is disgusting.
https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/37664703/warriors-never-rebuilt-trust-green-poole-incident-steve-kerr-says
https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/37664703/warriors-never-rebuilt-trust-green-poole-incident-steve-kerr-says
I was coming here to comment on that story. He never once takes responsibility for his own poor leadership leading up to the incident and never takes responsibility for not adequately dealing with it afterwards. The key to his enabling of Draymond Green is in the quote "not being a championship-caliber team without Green." If your focus is on "winning is everything" he makes the correct decision to ride Green to the Championships until the team falls apart (and then blame Green) As Red Auerbach showed, you can win at sports and be a good human being at the same time. I don't differentiate between Kerr the person and the NBA persona. One is the product of the other and neither have looked good during this episode.
It’s always a good look when you issue your apology and it’s quickly discovered it was written by ChatGPT.
Discovered? People are purely speculating, right? Or was there some evidence revealed which I missed? It's certainly a very vanilla PR statement.
Sorry, poorly worded sarcasm to distract myself from the fact the Celtics were pissing away the game. It was definitely a paint by numbers statement that makes the ChatGPT meme amusing and when you fuck up a second (or third, or fourth...) time you should probably get your PR team to put in a little more effort.
I like everything about this. Makes the Sixers worse since they can't replace him (unless I'm looking at it wrong, this doesn't open up anywhere near a max salary slot), it makes him look like a dummy for spending the last of his prime years for a lousy team, and it makes Ime's life harder trying to get this goof to play defense. A classic win win win move.
Shouldn’t he be going to Detroit and paired with Cunningham if this was the case?
Truly a fitting ending for everyone involved, including Daryl Morey, who tried to cover his own hit song and didn't sell nearly as well as the first.
I have to think Houston is a shill here, just driving Jame's price up, as a FU to Morey & Philly.
IME/Harden is just an awful combination on so many levels.
But who knows, NBA Free Agent signings can get weird.
This move has been well sourced for awhile; it's not the thing of one writer carrying water for a narrative.
All indicators are that Harden just really, really liked Houston, and the feeling is reciprocated.
To bring in his own guy, Doc was hired before Morey. Also, firing Doc buys you a good year or two before people start wondering about your roster decisions.
Though, also Morey may well still think he can convince Harden to stay. Harden may want to go back to HOU, or he may want to go back to Houston if the money difference is enough, and be willing to return if Morey makes the right offer, and part of that offer is years/money, part of it is coach/role promises.
Philly should let Harden walk, find a decent rotation piece with the taxpayer MLE, try to sign a vetmin ring chaser, hire a nutritionist for Embiid, and try to win with Embiid and Maxey, like Denver does with Jokic and Murray (obviously with less passing from Embiid). If they can get off Harris’s last year for two contributors who fit with Embiid, great.
I don't see it, obviously Embiid is a much much worse passer than Jokic (and he doesn't play on the move) but Murray is also a significantly better passer than Maxey. If they let Harden walk replacing his passing is more important than anything else
A ball dominant Harden has never been successful in the playoffs. If Philly is ever going to go deep in the playoffs, they have to be Embiid-centric. They were on the right track in acquiring rotation guys who can shoot the three ball. Their ball movement can come after teams commit defenders to stop Embiid.
And yes Jokic and Murray are better than Embiid and Maxey. Maxey needs to grow his game, and probably will when Harden is elsewhere
The problem, in the NBA, is that if you take a team that already tops out in the 2nd round, and make it a 90% version of another team, you start talking about 6-8 seeds pretty rapidly.
That extra 10% really, really matters.
I think the Sixers could be a better team without the ball dominant Harden if Maxey continues to improve as their PG, and if they can find a couple of complementary players on the cheap and/or for Harris.
lol, Doc Rivers going from Harden/Embiid to Chris Paul would be hillarious... just collabs with all the guys who can't get over the hump in the playoffs
Maxey is a 6'2" shooting guard. Just because he's small doesn't mean that he can play point. His assist percentage was 80th in the league this year at 16.9%, in the group with Banchero and Wagner (coincidence) above and Jaylen and Kuzma below. Even pre-Harden, his 19ish% would be in the high 60s ranking.
Probably doesn't matter that much if Philly's offense runs basically through Embiid and you have some legit 3&D guys out there, but I have a hard time imagining Maxey as a "make other players better" guy. He's Terry Rozier at distribution, but if Terry was worse at it.
Seriously doubt he has say at this point. He was a shell of himself against Denver, even before getting hurt. Father Time, undefeated, etc.
Can you see Maxey as more of an assist man if he had the ball in his hand next season? He’s a better player with more experience than he was before Harden arrived.
Sure, more. If he focuses on moving the ball more, it would likely improve.
But I think that people are underestimating what guys like Harden and Simmons before him provide for others. Harden has an assist% of over 40% in 6 of the last 7 years. Simmons, for all his flaws, is over 34%.
I still go back to Terry Rozier, not just because they're the same height/build. Terry started out with similarly bad assist% as Maxey and had a bump at Charlotte with focus and more of the ball. He has been 20/20/20/23 there. That's improvement, and I could definitely see Maxey doing that. But if you're relying on Maxey to do that for you now, that's a lot of open looks that those other Sixers aren't getting now because there's no longer a dude who knows how to draw guys away from corner-3 coverage and put one in the pocket for a great look, at least not with anywhere near the regularity that they were used to.
Maxey's current rate would put him behind Smart, Brogdon, Tatum and White on the Celtics and roughly tied with Brown. If Maxey saw a Rozier-like boost, he'd catch Brogdon and Tatum (a shooting guard and a forward) but would still be miles away from Smart, who's no Harden himself as assists go.
Again, it probably doesn't matter much, since teams can win with a Brogdon-like distributor if the roster is built correctly and you have a healthy Joel Embiid as the focal point of the offense anyway. But in my mind, you're playing away from Maxey's strengths if you're asking him to find guys shots. In an ideal scenario, he's one of your spot-up shooters and secondary scorers to Embiid. And as a secondary scorer and 3pt guy, he's phenomenal. He's really turned himself into an efficient guy.
I could be nuts, and this distributor/PG stuff is kinda old-fashioned to begin with (I'm kicking myself for even using the term shooting/scoring guard).
https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/37711722/lakers-lebron-james-says-consider-retirement-offseason
What is this about? Forcing a trade to a better team?
What is this about? Forcing a trade to a better team?
It is about LeBron. He loves the press and will use all points of leverage to get to the team or teammates he wants.
If LeBron does retire, he goes out, yes on the losing end, but with one hell of a stat line:
15-25 (.600) FG, 4-7 (.571) 3FG, 6-7 (.857) FT, 40 points, 10 rebounds, 9 assists, 2 steals, and only 1 turnover
Would have to represent one of the better "last game of his career" stat lines in NBA history.
15-25 (.600) FG, 4-7 (.571) 3FG, 6-7 (.857) FT, 40 points, 10 rebounds, 9 assists, 2 steals, and only 1 turnover
Would have to represent one of the better "last game of his career" stat lines in NBA history.
It's about saying goodbye to the 2026, 2028, and 2030 draft picks and whatever salary filler they can scrounge to get John Collins or something
The second part is true, but the first one is the answer. Lebron loves to be the center of attention, and threatening to retire is a perfect way to be sure he's talked about all offseason. I was shocked that he didn't come to his presser in a walking boot to prove how hard it was for him to tough it out and play so he could get attention for that as well.
Sensing a potential Finals matchup between less-heralded teams, LeBron knows an opportunity to seize the spotlight.
I bet he does a sit-down interview during half-time of one of the Finals games where he says a bunch of vague things about potentially retiring.
I bet he does a sit-down interview during half-time of one of the Finals games where he says a bunch of vague things about potentially retiring.