The Basketball Thread
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@ganymede said in The Basketball Thread:
@warma-sheen said in The Basketball Thread:
Yeah, them stars have trouble being consistent in the top game. But they can win their conferences consistently with just about anyone on their team. I don't like it, but they've earned the respect. From me anyway.
I don't want this to become the Football Thread, but I team of deaf chimps could win the AFC East in the absence of the Patriots.
Sure, but that's just their division. But they manage to get through the rest of the AFC on the regular too, to get to the Super Bowl. Just like the Cavaliers. Did the Cavs do it against a Boston team without 2 of its best players? Sure. But at the end of the day this is practically an entirely new roster that they swapped out midseason and no one gave them great odds to get very deep at all and now they are in the championship. LeBron is coming up on his 8th consecutive finals appearance and that's nothing to sneeze at.
What I respect about LeBron is that he had a very similar situation in Cleveland his first time around the Cavalier block and did not handle it well at all. He crumbled under the pressure and complained about needing more help at the start of his career. Now at the end of his career, he's showing up past LeBron by doing what his younger, more athletic self could not.
Maturity is a real thing.
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@bobgoblin said in The Basketball Thread:
Also, can the statements of the Cav's being 'trash' stop? If they are trash, then why do their players combined have the highest salary in the league? If those players are really that bad, then the GM needs to be fired immediately and sent to a Gulag in Serbia.
The Cavs' lineup beyond LeBron isn't bad, but it's not great. And, yes, their GM blows hard, actually, and should be sent to a gulag.
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Right, the new Lebron is super mature. Great guy. Totally got to the playoffs without help...
except for all the guys who took paycuts for the title run to play on the Cavs, just like they did with the Heat. Every ring on Lebron's fingers came from superstars taking paycuts to stack teams.
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@admiral said in The Basketball Thread:
except for all the guys who took paycuts for the title run to play on the Cavs, just like they did with the Heat. Every ring on Lebron's fingers came from superstars taking paycuts to stack teams.
And who were they, aside from Wade on the Heat?
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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If it wasn't 1 am or so I would go do proper research.
Instead I'll just leave my unqualified statement as is and curse the house of James.
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@bobgoblin said in The Basketball Thread:
If those players are really that bad, then the GM needs to be fired immediately and sent to a Gulag in Serbia.
The Cavs' roster isn't bad - that's not their problem. It is overpaid, that's their actual problem.
In today's NBA it's all about the salary cap and how it's utilized. In this case LeBron was the actual cause of his own team's greatest issue, since after they won in 2016 he got J.R. Smith and Tristan Thomson paid. Neither of them is producing reliably, and certainly not at the levels their contracts would demand, and they can't get rid of them because other teams are aware of their actual value.
So the Cavs are stuck with what they have. I'd be shocked either if they do better in the Finals than a gentleman's sweep (5-1) or if LeBron sticks around next year. He's 33 years old, he can't be carrying people playing 48 minutes a game forever.
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Chris Bosh was a 9.6 Win Share with Toronto (which went up to a 10 win Share in Miami) and was good enough for 13th in the League (Wade was 6th) and James was first (with only a 15.6) Bosh took a massive salary decrease below what Toronto was offering to go play with James in Miami and bring an additional 10 wins to that team.
Then when things got rough in Miami (losing to Dallas) they went and brought in Ray Allen and his 7.2 WS to get them over that hump. The average salary for a 7.2 WS player in 2012 was around $6 mil more than Allen got paid (Which was just above league minimum).
I don't fault players for chasing championships since that is a metric of 'greatness', but the reality is players took pay cuts to stack teams to play with LeBron. (An important note here, has anyone ever heard a former teammate of LeBron ever praise him for being an excellent teammate?)
Also, the most recent Cavs brought in 12 WS Kevin Love from Minnesota in exchange for 0 WS Andrew Wiggins (Rookie) and a ham sandwich.
Yeah. The clear thing there is LeBron wanted HIS people to get paid (both JR and Tristan were, at the time, with LeBron's Agent who is also part of his circle). So the Cavs paid out to keep LeBron happy. Then they traded their best future asset (Kyrie) for a bag of potato chips. Kyrie I give credit to, he actually was vocal about what a lot of people who have played with LBJ have said privately. He may 'distribute' the ball but he's a selfish player.
Golden State in 5.
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I would argue that Bosh's WS was substantially inflated due to the fact that the Raptors, at the time, weren't a very good time without him. Ray Allen has always been a clutch player, but at 37 he wasn't getting a lot of bites in free agency for his WS.
I ain't got no response to the Love trade, but it's possible that Minnesota really wanted a ham sandwich (Anthony Bennett). Or a salary dump ($6.5M, if I recall). Wiggins was rookie of the year for 2014-2015, and has scored 15+ PPG in his career.
I concur with Arkandel: the Cavs roster is overpaid. Very overpaid. Neither Smith nor Thompson deserve the coin they got, period.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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But Bosh's ws went up when he went to the heat. That's the issue that I make with the assumption be was only good on the raptors
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@bobgoblin said in The Basketball Thread:
But Bosh's ws went up when he went to the heat. That's the issue that I make with the assumption be was only good on the raptors
WS is, honestly, a silly statistic. In this case, it is explainable: Bosh was able to perform better when he wasn't the centerpiece on a team with Wade and James, because defenses were focused on the other two. Had Bosh been on the Spurs, I don't think his WS would have gone up..
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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He wouldn't have been a centerpiece on the spurs either.
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“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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That gif was me watching the game last night
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@bobgoblin said in The Basketball Thread:
the 3rd consecutive year
Fourth consecutive year, I don't mind either team but I am so tired of the match up I doubt I will watch much of the finals.
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@thatguythere I don't think anyone will. Not only are people tired of the matchup, it isn't even expected to be a good one with the Cavs limping into the finals. I'll be shocked if the ratings aren't abysmal, especially after the first game.
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@warma-sheen
Yeah the first two times around i watched every minute of the games, last year I dropped to about a third of the total time played that I watched, this year my plan is to check the score with about 5 minutes left and decide if the end of the game is worth watching. -
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@thatguythere I watched the Rockets and Cavs as though I would have been watching the Finals. I think it was the two best teams in the league and so I enjoyed the series as such. It was the only basketball I watched a full game of all year. I doubt it is a unique perspective, but that is the state of the league, sadly.
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I cite J.R. Smith's costly blunder in last night's game as further evidence that he is one of the top three reasons why the Cavs will not win the Championship.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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@ganymede said in The Basketball Thread:
I cite J.R. Smith's costly blunder in last night's game as further evidence that he is one of the top three reasons why the Cavs will not win the Championship.
I don't think I've seen a mistake this bad in the last decade of watching basketball. Oh. My. God. I was screaming at my phone.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
