waiting for the other shoelace to drop: 2013-2014 NBA regular season thread (part 2)

#wheresalfred

Hibbert's conditioning isn't the best, and the more energy he expends on the offensive end, the shakier he'll be on defense / more fouls he'd pick up. His number only gets called if A) he has an obvious mismatch, B) if the rest of the offense is stalled in the 2nd half. At the beginning of each game he's really involved and most of the first 10-15 offensive sets will run though him; after that, they just want to stand in the middle on D. Plus everyone on that 1st unit is a capable scorer.

It'll be cool if Oden can play 25 quality minutes by playoff time and actually be a factor in the eventual IND/MIA series, which will probably be the only time Hibbert is a 1st/2nd option. Hibbert isn't a quick big, which means Oden's lack of lateral movement won't be as big as an exploit. Just hope Oden can make it that long.

Still waiting on Bynum to play, another fun wrinkle :0

hibbert is so slow, very susceptible to swarming double teams, never been an offensive force really unless hes playing the heat lol

understanding the human body, exploring the human body, no one understands us but us http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/66277/thinking-outside-the-box-score

i'm highly skeptical that oden is gonna do anything significant to stop hibbert but we shall see

i feel like maybe he could help in rebounding just in terms of getting a body on hibbert but i don't think oden is there yet on defense to make a real impact

hibbert does dominate but he does it mostly defensively

fwiw i agree 100% with lagoon (and matt) in last night's debate, although i am probably a bit higher on PG than he is. it's not love's fault the rest of his team is chronically injured/is a joke (and that his coach has on the low been really really bad, and probably is going to be out of a job by the end of the season). i think PG is a an excellent player, probably right on the cusp of being elite; he wins games because yes he is very good but also because he plays in probably the best-designed and -executed system in the league.

wow can't believe i just ended a post with a period smh at me

i think i would take PG over any of the group of elite 4s, be it love, blake, aldridge or bosh

i just think in 2014 NBA it really helps to have an elite wing player, especially one as good on defense as PG. it allows you so much flexibility. in the right situation i might take melo over a few of them too (like, if melo could be coached by a smart coach backed by a strong front office)

basically all of those 4s (with the exception of bosh in practice but the heat are an anomaly) have to be paired with another big or else their teams just become a sieve on defense over time.

of that arbitrary group if i was starting a team for one season ignoring current contracts i would go

george
love
griffin
melo
bosh
aldridge

PG has been pretty bad on offense lately though, it'd be a different story i agree if he were producing like he did the first couple of months

melo deserves a high place. he's doing great and his team is sooooooo shitty

Yet somehow he ALWAYS lands in that situation, hero of an otherwise mediocre to bad team. I'm skeptical -- I almost feel like that's the scenario he thrives in.

well the thing with melo is that he unwittingly crippled the knicks from the jump by forcing a trade there before the lockout instead of just signing as FA and the franchise has never been able to recover (also because of general rank incompetence)

that said dude is straight killing it this season, has actually developed as a passer (but doesn't have guys who can hit open jumpers) and is a force on the boards. i think he can be an above average individual defender when he turns up the intensity and could be a good team defender under a real coaching staff.

i'm sort of bending back towards being #TeamMelo but if he takes the godfather offer from the knicks this offseason and completely destroys their cap i'm jumping off forver

yeah agreed completely

not that many other places for melo to go. nyk or lal, i imagine (despite the lol "melo-to-heat" storyline)

basically i think he's more or less turned into the player everyone wants him to be but happens to be on a team with only one other good player

well he could re-sign with the knicks but not take the $120 million max or whatever it is

i guess. i bet he'll wind up a laker (given their roster and management, not sure why, but just a hunch). we'll see.

i think the lakers would take him if he really wanted to go there but i doubt they'll put on a full court press with guys like love, russy, durant, etc on the horizon

lakers can't possibly have cap room for a couple years?

the lakers have like $34 million in salary on the books for next season (kobe, nash, sacre) assuming nick young declines his player option

if the cap rises to about $60 million they have plenty of room for a max signing

Heh have to recuse myself on PG, but I basically agree w/:

1 Lebron
2 durant
(Huge gap)
3 Paul George
4 love
5 aldridge
6 griffin
7 dirk
8 the brow (not sure how much time he plays 4 vs 5 now)
9 Carmelo??
10 millsap? Z-Bo? Ibaka?

except I'd leapfrog Davis and Melo to #5 & #6. 11-20 would still look really strong. Guess can't feel too bad for Melo's guilded shitcage but, as he's playing now, dude could still totally be the best player on a championship team / looks like he's playing the best two-way ball of his career.

but i dunno, a team of nash, post-two leg surgeries kobe, melo and sacre that's only 6 million under the cap would be a disaster so i doubt that's happening

I forget, are the Lakers in that scary, actually-really-prohibitive cap year next year, where they have to pay like ten billion dollars for going over the cap?

hmm yeah they're probably a repeater team next season http://www.sbnation.com/nba/2014/1/12/5300932/mitch-kupchak-los-angeles-lakers-repeater-tax

As far as I can figure Lakers + Nets + Knicks will be paying each non-taxed team something like $7m each if they still redistribute the money same as before, not bad reward for kickin back and not signing Amar'e, Kobe, and the whole Nets team minus AK47.

The Clippers are already deep and added Baby and Granger, crazy. There's no reason for Willie Green to step on the court again this season.

http://sinbapointforward.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/lebron-james-black-mask-2.jpg?w=600&h=400

J.R. Smith wasn't exactly in the mood to compare mask designs after the struggling Knicks lost for the 10th time in 12 games.

"What did I think of it?" Smith said. "It's a mask.

true

j.r. has mask-envy lol

here are the best forwards

1 bron
2 durant
3 love
4 george
5 bosh
6 griffin
7 dirk
8 brow
9 melo
10 aldridge
11 healthy ryan anderson
12 ibaka
13 lee

batum/parsons/nu-rudy/kawhi/deng

le goon (J0rdan S.)
Posted: February 28, 2014 at 4:08:09 PM
i think i would take PG over any of the group of elite 4s, be it love, blake, aldridge or bosh

im m/l ready to assassinate u over this, watch yr back homes

imo shot creation has become away undervalued in the efficiency era, such backlash against iversonian chuckers that people forget how valuable guys who can get their own shot are ESPECIALLY guys like love who can create shots and do so efficiently like kevin love

like if you want to see what happens when you have a bunch of efficient low usage just look at indy, theyre 20th in offensive efficiency, georges idea of creating shots is to pull up from 20 feet drawing zero double teams, something that was working at an unsustainable rate earlier this year

also georges versatility while valuable can be overrated, like you couldnt play him at the 4 vs the wolves or the griz or basically any team that has a pf who can put a body on him, basically at that spot youre hiding him on D like youd have to love, he can guard bosh and anderson and slighter guys like that who are more jump shooters

pg is a v good player tho imo fwiw tbc

btw i do believe the nba is in the midst of a pg hysteria just like tulip fever or when people thought turkglolu

was good

11 healthy ryan anderson

this is fantastically nuts

I remember when people thought Turkoglu was good. It was a strange time. Bush was president.

ryan anderson is an elite shooter especially for his position and he does a lot for an offense just by existing buuuuuuuuuut to think he's a better overall player than nic batum and chandler parsons (who command defenses to guard them at the arc but can also do a bunch of other stuff + are decent two way players) or serge ibaka is to take a very narrow view of how basketball is played

feel like all those dudes are in the same range and batum is the worst of the three

the guy takes 8 3s per 36 minutes and makes 40% of them, what more can u want from a basketball player

I feel like just a few years ago people were saying "the PG is dead" am I making that up?

shooting is just the best basketball skill except maybe rim protecting interior D its magical

ibaka > parsons > batum imo

parsons is good tho i strongly disagree with the conclusion of the article that moullet so graciously posted yesterday he's not that good

imo shot creation has become away undervalued in the efficiency era, such backlash against iversonian chuckers that people forget how valuable guys who can get their own shot are ESPECIALLY guys like love who can create shots and do so efficiently like kevin love

like if you want to see what happens when you have a bunch of efficient low usage just look at indy, theyre 20th in offensive efficiency, georges idea of creating shots is to pull up from 20 feet drawing zero double teams, something that was working at an unsustainable rate earlier this year

― lag∞n, Friday, February 28, 2014 3:05 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark

i feel this. PG does take too many pull ups but also the pacers' offense is weirdly built (no real point guard, not a lot of perimeter shooting that scares people) that i think sometimes possessions fall on his shoulders when they shouldn't.

like if you flipped PG with chandler parsons or something i think his game would just flow a lot more naturally than what happens a lot of the time in indy's offense.

ya hes more of a 18ppg guy than a 23ppg

one of the downsides of the stat revolution is that lotsa people are just not that good at the interpreting numbers stuff, you have all this sportVU/synergy data like ok parsons drives a lot or such-and-such is 5th in the league in points per possession on the right block and it's like ok man but what does that mean, how does that correlate to winning?