Secretly Space Jesus

Pretty sure Deng is just a contract at this point.

Note: they didn't show the total vote counts because no one has any idea what they were. Those decimal numbers are estimates from a Microsoft app. Basically, the Iowa Caucus is dumb as hell, and it's amazing that we still allow it to exist.

Hezonja is finally starting to look like an NBA player.

In that vein, maybe the title of this thread should have the whole "Political Foolishness" part removed?

Yeah, I think you either do the Scola idea or you have it be the first game of the season, where the teams are only burned on the back half by the travel, rather than on both ends.

The London games thing continues to baffle me.

Right. In the offseason, Jae Crowder signed a contract for 5yrs, 35m based almost entirely on his looking pretty good coming off the bench in one 4 game playoff series last year. NBA salaries are about to very rapidly not make any sense.

Fun fact: we're currently on pace to win more games(49) than we won the previous two seasons combined.

Yeah, that's a weird argument to me; switch their team situations, and Garnett would be argued as the GOAT while Kobe would be seen as a version of Wade that held up better. Hell, I'm thinking about it now and thinking about Kobe's long running tendency to be lazy as hell on defense(sidenote: that he has multiple 1st team all-defense awards is infuriating to me), I'm not sure I'd consider Kobe a top 4 player in any year of his career. Even the MVP he won was pretty clearly a lifetime achievement award, and that was 8 years ago. Looking at his seasons by win shares, and he gets beaten badly by the likes of John Stockton, who no one would argue deserved to be making all-star games in his 19th season, even though unlike Kobe, Stockton was still at least a positive influence on his team in his 19th season(9 win shares!).

Again: just because something IS like this doesn't mean it should be. If All-star game appearances are a metric by which players are judged historically, and they are, then putting in arguably the worst starting shooting guard in the NBA this season(and arguably, worst ever) just because he was a great player 5 or 6 years ago is ridiculous, particularly when that player already has a minimum of 4 All-star appearances that he had no business getting. And you never answered my question: Why not vote in Kevin Garnett? Or Jerry West? Both guys are popular and both are legends. Why not them? Also, I don't know why you'd argue that no one watches the NFL Pro-bowl, given that it typically gets better ratings than almost any game the NBA, MLB or NHL puts on.

So your argument is that because baseball fans once did something hugely stupid, it's totally cool if basketball fans also do something stupid? Why not vote in Kevin Garnett? Or hell, why not vote in Jerry West for that matter? He's a legend, right?

PER of only 25. I don't know why the Pelicans keep him around.

Hedo Turkoglu night sounds like a terrible joke.

That's hardly unique to sports media. The least useful thing, in any medium of reporting, is a long memory. I mean hell: in the lead-up to the 2012 Presidential Election, Mitt Romney made getting unemployment below 6% before the end of his first term a key part of his campaign, and argued that he could do it and Obama couldn't, and the press, especially the conservative press, treated him like he was making an incredibly bold prediction of a vastly improved, Romney-led economy. Unemployment is currently at 5%.

I think I wrote almost this exact post a few weeks ago, and based on the reaction, you'd have thought I had said I wanted to sign Dwight to a max deal. It's nice to see everyone has cooled back to appropriate levels on Fournier.

Noah is barely a rotation player at this point. He'll likely be out of the league in 2-3 years.

Right. I can at least see the logic of the argument in the first two questions, and while I disagree completely that Fournier has been better than Oladipo so far this season in any way that wasn't "shooting", I can at least sort of see how someone could arrive at that argument. But the the last one seems to come from the same place that convinced people that Hedo was a good defender.

Yeah, I like Lowe a lot, but the idea that Fournier is a better defender OR better overall than Oladipo is pretty out there.

That's true, but it's hard to not notice that he put up a career high in win shares with 2.1 last year in 58 games, and he was at around 1.7 through 16 games or so this year. He was due for some serious regression, which is mostly what we're seeing now. Thankfully, so was Oladipo, and Oladipo's regression to the mean was ultimately more good for the team than Fournier's was bad.

I don't know if you're not aware of this, but there's a pretty large gap between "gave him too much space" and "gave him at least 10 feet". Hell, someone else posted a picture of the shot literally between when I posted and when you responded.

And BJ Armstrong. And Mario Chalmers. And Kenny Smith. Not to mention the fact that Ron Harper has 5 rings.

Your memory of this is comically absurd. Jameer was, at most, a half-step off Fisher when he took that shot. If Jameer was 2 inches taller, he probably blocks the shot.

I've said this before, but the issue with Fournier, and the reason we should almost certainly let him walk after the season is over, is that he's really only a + level NBA player in one area: shooting. So if his shot isn't falling or teams are preventing him from getting shots off, he's just not a particularly useful player. He's a so-so man defender but a mediocre at best defender off the ball, he doesn't pass particularly well or rebound well. So in any game where his shot isn't falling, you're almost playing 4 on 5. And the reality is that, with him being an FA in a year where everyone will have huge CAP space, it's not going to be worth paying him the 10m+ someone will offer him when there are solid 3-and-D guys who could be had for half that.

I think he needs to start using the stop-and-go move he used early in the game more often. It typically freezes the help defender when he uses it, which would help at the basket.

Yeah, I think this is pretty accurate; Lebron's biggest advantage has always been that he moves around like no one bothered to explain physics and inertia to him, so they inexplicably don't apply.