The Basketball Thread

Arkandel · Jan 17, 2018, 10:06 PM

@ganymede said in The Basketball Thread:

@buttercup

I lean towards LeBron.

I concur. Even though MJ overcame incredible odds playing against players like Magic + KAJ +James Worthy, Drexler, Barkley, Ewing and of course John Stockton and Karl Malone, the times were different and so most of them weren't playing for the same team.

LeBron beat the San Antonio Spurs which is a team packed with Hall of Famers, and what he did against the Warriors was just incredible - MJ never faced anything like them.

Having said all that, if you asked me who the GOAT is, I want to strongly consider Kareem as well.

Ganymede · Jan 17, 2018, 10:17 PM

@arkandel said in The Basketball Thread:

Having said all that, if you asked me who the GOAT is, I want to strongly consider Kareem as well.

I hate that question. Who's the greatest of all time? As if the game doesn't change over time.

Basketball has evolved. You can't compare Russell to Bird, or Bird to Ginobili. Russell would straight-up fuck Bird's shit up, and Bird would ass-kick Ginobili. But tone down the physicality, or heavily-penalize it, and Shaq rocks Chamberlain and Bryant dances around Thomas.

But if I had to pick, Kareem's a top contender. When you have a sport change their rules to make sure others have a sporting chance against you, chances are you're pretty damned good. If you do it the other way around, you're a puffball (I'm looking at you Brady-baby; you still lost twice against little Manning when it mattered the most).

And then there's someone like Wayne Gretzky who is just indescribably better than everyone around him, and anyone who tells you any differently is just dead wrong, sorry Penguins fans.

ThatGuyThere · Jan 27, 2018, 9:23 PM

@arkandel said in The Basketball Thread:

Having said all that, if you asked me who the GOAT is, I want to strongly consider Kareem as well.

I am not sure who I would put as my #1 but Kareem is in my top five. Along with Magic, Jordan, James and the great but mostly forgotten, Oscar Robinson. I can see an argument for putting any one of those five on top, I just lump them together as the top 5.

Arkandel · Jan 27, 2018, 9:23 PM

Boogie

buttercup · Jan 28, 2018, 1:38 AM

Sucks.

How no team has never gone far with that guy baffles me. By the numbers he is fantastic. It doesn't matter the era. While he shouldn't be paired up with someone like AD and should have a good backcourt -- like Portland -- I think he would make a team championship capable. (After GS dies or breaks up)

Arkandel · Jan 28, 2018, 2:42 AM

@buttercup Achilles injuries destroyed careers before. His might be over, at least the way we knew it.

We'll see.

Ganymede · Jan 28, 2018, 3:01 AM

@buttercup said in The Basketball Thread:

How no team has never gone far with that guy baffles me. By the numbers he is fantastic.

Because he used to play on Sacramento and now he's on New Orleans.

Because he couldn't shoot a three worth a damn for his first five seasons. (In one year, his 3P% was an impressive .000.)

Because he was a ball-hog who only now is on a reasonably-talented team.

buttercup · Feb 3, 2018, 2:34 AM

I have planned for a couple of years to take my eldest son on an NBA road trip that he will remember for the rest of his life and I plan to do it this year. I have saved ten dollars a check for two years and I think I have enough to do it on the cheap.

I am not poor but part of this trip is not to spend a lot. It's about quality time and I set this goal for myself worse comes to worse I could always put a few thousand dollars more on credit cards and do it more expensively but I just worked hard to get out of debt finally in December (40k in two years). When my father was alive we were poor as dirt and my best memories are when we penny pitched and got nosebleed tickets. My sons don't care how we do it. I think living out of a cooler mostly, road tripping, cheap hotels and fellowship is the way to go.

My son is an amazing child. He is on the high functioning side of the autism spectrum (Asperger Syndrome) and struggles socially while excelling intellectually.

I was much the same as a child. One of the outlets I had available was basketball. My father and I were rabid Phoenix Suns fans and as child we bonded over the team. When I was eleven he had his first heart attack which led to a quadruple bypass. We were watching a game one night and he started sweating and throwing up in a small trashcan. The game went into overtime and I could tell something was wrong. We used to listen to the radio broadcast with a delay and watch the games through the small television in the living room. After the game (we won) he looked to me and told me he had a heart attack and that I needed to drive him to the hospital.

The doctor told him that he could not watch basketball anymore and he coded while on the stress test the next morning. He wash rushed through to get a bypass. My father told the doctor to go to hell with his basketball request. I spent the next number of games smuggling in a black and white little rabbit ears television unit and we watched the games at his bedside. He lived twenty-five more years and our love of the Suns are my fondest memories of my father and I. It was everything to us.

From an early age despite living in Texas my eldest son and I watched basketball. We are die-hard Suns fans but we love the NBA in general. One of my sons aspirations was to get good enough in basketball to play for his high school team. We played daily and despite making progress that likely is not going to happen. He helps the 8th grade team as an assistant coach now and while he is okay for a kid his age some of his challenges and awkwardness won't allow him the chance in high school. I would be understating it to say that for my son, basketball, is important and one of his only successful social outlets. He is a brilliant child -- straight A's his whole life and his academic future is amazing. I am so proud of his manners and he is the most amazing son a father could wish for.

I will be picking him up for Spring Break in Louisville on the 3/31 and bringing his little brother (6) and I will pretend like we are making the drive back to Texas. We won't be, I am packing a cooler, and we're going to start our NBA road trip together. Each stop I will tell him I love him and it is time to go home but then it will be on to the next city until it is actually time for Spring Break to be over and I will put him on a plane in Dallas to fly back.

My Request:

I do not know these cities. And while we follow the teams I would like to do something iconic and affordable with the little time I have in each.

If there is something unique about the team to do or a particular food or iconic place I should see that is affordable please let me know. I will be buying the tickets over the next couple weeks (nose bleeds) and budgeting out the trip as hotels, gas, and food will add up. Most of the trip will be packed lunches and I could probably afford one meal in each stop for my sons if I stick to the budget.

Here is our tentative schedule:
*3/31 Pick up in Louisville, drive to Chicago
*4/1 Spend day in Chicago, Chicago v. Wizards
*4/2 Travel to Cleveland (Spend Day there)
*4/3 Cleveland v. Toronto (In Cleveland)
*4/4 Travel to Detroit, Detroit v. 76ers
*4/5 Travel to Indianapolis (Indy v.Warriors)
*4/6 Travel to Memphis (Memphis v. Kings)
*4/7 Travel to Dallas (Eldest son flies home, my youngest and I travel two hours home)

Our time is limited so really looking for must do things. Tips to get affordable tickets as for some of these games I'm going to struggle to afford (like v. Golden State, etc).

Ganymede · Feb 2, 2018, 9:05 PM

@buttercup

Fuck, dude. Can I presume that your budget's around $1,000 for the entire trip, given your plan of saving $10 per weekly paycheck?

buttercup · Feb 3, 2018, 2:33 AM

@Ganymede

$1,100 from checks (set aside weekly through my salary). That is for gas and spending money.

The tickets I will just buy outright ahead of time. Same with the hotels.

I'll have another $2k cash on me for reserves. And $20k in credit cards in case I need it but I better be like really in some sort of bind for that.

Mostly I'm looking for stuff I can do that isn't about spending a ton of money in these cities. Or thoughts on what to do.

For example I think ahead of the trip I'm going to get hats shipped from China for each home team for all three of us. Then when we arrive in each city I'll bust them out to wear until the next city.

For example:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Mitchell-Ness-Hardwood-Classics-NBA-Chicago-Bulls-Snapback-Basketball-Cap-Hat/162863963868?hash=item25eb72dedc:g:PKoAAOSwblZZFBFT

When in Chicago I will figure out the best place to take my sons to get Chicago style pizza. Never been there before so will need to see what is suitable for my sons and I to try.

No idea what to do in Cleveland for a day.

Ganymede · Feb 3, 2018, 3:06 AM

@buttercup said in The Basketball Thread:

No idea what to do in Cleveland for a day.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Canton's not too far away, so you could try the Football Hall of Fame.

buttercup · Feb 3, 2018, 3:03 PM

@ganymede

Completely forgot about the Football Hall of Fame in Canton. I'm absolutely doing that. Were it just for me the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame would be on the agenda. For my sons though I'll give it a pass this round.

Anyone know a can't miss thing to do in Chicago for a morning? I think maybe a tour of Wrigley Field. I think I found my Deep Dish pizza place to try -- The Art of Pizza? Any other suggestions?

Arkandel · Feb 20, 2018, 2:28 PM

I was listening to a pretty interesting podcast where Daryl Morey, the Houston Rockets GM, was sharing his insights on how the NBA teams get saddled with some really bad contracts, the kind that lock them into mediocracy for years.

So let's say you're a General Manager and you suspect you might get fired if your team doesn't do well this year - there's a lot of insecurity in the field, alone with coaches they can be gotten rid of very easily. So your job's on the line, right? You gotta produce some results now and sometimes there's slim pickings in the free agent market.

At this point you have no incentive to not take risks because... you'll be fired anyway otherwise! So you go and sign someone unlikely (hello, Deng) hoping that they end performing. If they do great you're a genius hero, if they don't... well, they can't fire you MORE now, can they?

So you get a guy paid $20m a year to not play. I wish someone would take that chance with me, dammit.

Ganymede · Feb 20, 2018, 2:55 PM

@arkandel

I think that's a pretty silly way of looking at things.

Basketball, like all sports, is a business. Teams are in the business of winning, but that doesn't explain why the Toronto Maple Leafs are still one of the most valuable hockey franchises, or why the Dayton Dragons are one of the most profitable baseball minor league teams. The recipe for success requires some winning, but there simply must be more to it than that.

Job insecurity might be why GMs take a lot of risks to win, but that does not explain why there is job insecurity in the first place.

Arkandel · Feb 20, 2018, 3:05 PM

@ganymede The answer is almost always the same - culture.

To keep things in an NBA scope, there's a reason why the San Antonio Spurs have been so successful for so long, and it's because top to bottom, from the owner to the GM and then down to the coaching staff and the players, even the trainers and physical therapists everyone is hand-picked for their chemistry and attention to detail.

Conversely that's also why half the league has hand-picked former members of the Spurs family for their own staff now.

In a culture like that no meteorites are allowed; the franchise has specifically and intentionally not gone after big names in free agency for instance if they were divas, no matter how good. They just don't even try - and the reason that happens is the GM knows he's not going to get canned if he fails to grab a Dwight Howard or a Carmelo Anthony when they become available in the off season. That's not a luxury every front office enjoys. The Pelicans and the Nuggets of the league, ran by owners or boards of managers, don't have the same understanding.

And so they wallow in that bittersweet spot between doing well and doing horribly - the one that means they don't go anywhere in the playoffs, or have first round exits at best, but they aren't low enough to actually grab and develop some good draft picks either.

To get back to your comment though, banks and investment firms had the same problem as the NBA does decades ago. How did they deal with employees who'd try to get some quick profits right now, since that's what their bonuses and job security were depended on, even if that meant they bet on portfolios that failed to return on the investment ten or fifteen years down the line? They gave them more stability, and tied their bonuses on their longer term performance.

Ganymede · Feb 20, 2018, 3:33 PM

@arkandel said in The Basketball Thread:

To get back to your comment though, banks and investment firms had the same problem as the NBA does decades ago. How did they deal with employees who'd try to get some quick profits right now, since that's what their bonuses and job security were depended on, even if that meant they bet on portfolios that failed to return on the investment ten or fifteen years down the line? They gave them more stability, and tied their bonuses on their longer term performance.

Had? Brother, they still have it, they will always have it, and that's why our economy collapsed hard ten years ago. They found a way to fix the problem, and then they gutted it over time until, boom, we get fucked hard again.

For me, this is why I am not a fan of MBAs running things.

Arkandel · Feb 20, 2018, 3:36 PM

@ganymede said in The Basketball Thread:

For me, this is why I am not a fan of MBAs running things.

I hate you.

Ganymede · Feb 20, 2018, 3:38 PM

@arkandel

I love you, man, but we both know how MBA programs often teach their students to prize short-term profits over long-term gains. Hell, that's one of the fundaments of classical economics.

I mean, it is empirically incorrect, but it's still embedded in some of the older texts.

Arkandel · Feb 20, 2018, 4:18 PM

@ganymede said in The Basketball Thread:

I mean, it is empirically incorrect, but it's still embedded in some of the older texts.

It's a classic well documented issue that over-management stifles efficiency 'when the accountants take over'. And it's true. It happened to almost every tech firm we've seen from Microsoft to Apple eventually.

But for the NBA specifically the effects of these strategies are there for everyone to see. It's very easy to screw your team over by committing too much of your salary cap to bad contracts; look at OKC now, a promising good team with a mediocre immediate future, since they have to keep Melo (who has a player option for another year) and that means they'll either pay a massive $190m in luxury tax next year to keep everyone or they'll have to let half their bench go. They're screwed either wya.

And that's a best case scenario; the Lakers had to give away a #2 draft pick just to dump a bad contract (Mozgov) away. They'll have Deng in the books until 2019. Bad choices stick with their teams for years.

In the mean time well managed teams prosper; Boston is flirting with another Eastern Conference Finals appearance this year despite the fact they lost one of their top two players in the first five minutes into the season to an injury... and they stand to get at least one if not two first round picks next year. It's obscene. The Spurs haven't signed almost anyone in free agency in years (LMA is it) and Kawhi is out for more than half the season so far, but they have one of the league's best records.

For the league there's no denying how important culture is. It's huge. The effect is very clear.

Arkandel · Mar 13, 2018, 2:50 PM

Could this be the year the San Antonio Spurs finally miss the playoffs?