It is the 2018-19 NBA Playoffs discussion thread for hoops friends ONLY

nuggets lacking energy tonight seems like

yeah. i really have liked craig this year. i guess the team is calling it a “nasal contusion”

craig was one of their more reliable shooters

Will Barton sucks and I want him out of my life

this is a weird game in a lot of respects but i'm going to say one of the weirdest is that rodney hood has 3 blocks. i just went through a few years of game logs and i don't think i'm breaking any news when i say that i don't think that has happened before.

did jamal just leave the bench

uh shoutout to neil olshey on the rodney hood pick up

malone should have gotten a technical for grabbing blazers players

kanter and hood have been huge and were massively under the radar moves

ya

it's inexcusable that the nuggets haven't played kanter off the floor. it's not that hard to do.

kanter has been essential post nurkic injury

Home court seeding is now past tense. Let the trumpets sound. The series has officially begun.

i'm still watching the fourth and my dudes will barton and evan turner need to have some kind of bad decision making competition

barkley trying to say "nurkic"

it's inexcusable that the nuggets haven't played kanter off the floor. it's not that hard to do.

― call all destroyer, Wednesday, May 1, 2019 11:38 PM (seventeen minutes ago) Bookmark

in denver's defense it's prob a little harder to play him off the floor when his back ups are zach collins and meyers leonard

really tho... kanter's problem is PNR defense when he has to move his feet. jokic handling the ball so much doesn't really put kanter on the move often. he can kinda just bang w jokic all game.

his rebounding is so valuable with this squad he'd have to really fuck up to lose his minutes

When Collins was in there he got roasted one on one vs plumlee so

Denver just missed a million wide open three pointers, sometimes the game is no more complicated than that

they shot really well in game one, bound to come down to earth

xp you can run 1-5 pick and roll whenever kanter is on the floor.

i guess this was just a missed 3s game. it feels like denver should never be scoring in the 90s against a v flawed portland defense.

There’s a lot of variance in basketball, this is a thing I’ve learned.

The nuggets are defending the blazers really well, but they just have to hit open 3s when teams are doubling Jokic as hard as the blazers were. They also missed a ton of free throws. It was a very frustrating experience to be at the Pepsi center last night. There were fights in the stands, people threw stuff on the court.

the massive increase in 3pt shot attempts is also an increase in variance

3s and increased pace* have made variance wild 15 point leads disappear in 2min i wonder if well see a clearly not that good team just get hot from deep and win the chip sometime soon

*i know more possessions is supposed to = less variance but it seems like theres something operating here that makes that not really so, might just be a level of chaos that happens when u play so fast, or maybe its just not enough possessions to really flatten out the variance idk

lol xp

think also w the game changing its harder to figure out who the good teams/players are based on past criteria, like lou williams was a fringe rotation guy for most of his career now hes lighting up the league well past his athletic prime

There were fights in the stands, people threw stuff on the court.

― Matt Armstrong, Thursday, May 2, 2019 10:37 AM (eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol seriously?

wow colorado didnt know u had it in u

i figured the crowd would be baked but it takes all kinds i guess

denver is becoming a real city

more half court possessions = less variance. fast breaks muddle things

more 3pta also generates more fast breaks i assume because of longer rebounds

yeah good call

One crazy thing about seeing games live is sometimes you have the perfect angle to realize a call is awful

more half court possessions = less variance. fast breaks muddle things

― ciderpress, Thursday, May 2, 2019 10:55 AM (forty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there are a lot of players who are good on the break but not in the halfcourt, the game becomes a lot about limiting fastbreaks and quasi transition 3pt looks

can u accomplish that then u r a good team, also do u have good halfcourt players then u r good too

for instance if the celtics can limit the bucks break and quasi break looks then they will win the series because they have good halfcourt players

*unless the refs just call a foul everytime giannis drives

even just like 3 seasons ago if the warriors got a 15 point lead at any point in a game they were like 114-0 or something but now pretty much any team can come back on them and even bigger leads arent safe

yeah its nuts

its interesting, from a spectator standpoint i think it's probably gone a bit past ideal at this point but it feels like teams could still figure out other stuff that works whereas baseball, which has a similar thing going on, is just fucked without rules changes

see a clearly not that good team just get hot from deep and win the chip sometime soon

I'm not worried about that happening at all, let alone soon. The playoffs have four rounds of seven game series. For a "clearly not that good" team to win out though all four series, including the Finals, they would have to be pretty good in reality, not just randomly 'hot'. The team might be a fairly low seed because of a poor regular season, whether it was due to injuries or just a failure to coalesce early, but you don't collect 16 wins in the playoffs against the best teams in the league without coming together as a good team, playing good hoops.

are there any examples of a "clearly not that good" team winning a championship? the 2011 Mavs sorta come to mind but they were legitimately great during the playoffs and Dirk was arguably the best player in every series.

I mean it happens all the time in football and baseball but I can't really think of a team winning a title in the NBA that wasn't one of say, the best 4-5 teams in the league

i think its more feasible than before for a Hot team to knock out a 1 seed and/or get to the conference finals which would be interesting enough

The dubs lost the finals in the same year they won 72 games. That was interesting. They were pretty clearly the best team, if you just look at everything leading up to the finals, but you don't win a chip if you don't win the finals. That's the rule and it's a good one.

kind of an interesting parallel between that Cavs team and the 2010-2011 Mavs, where LeBron/Dirk just stepped up their game to an all-time peak to impose their will on a superteam that by all accounts should've won without much of a sweat. But, the Cavs were one of the best 4 teams in the league that year, along with the Warriors, Spurs, and Raptors. I'm talking about stuff like, say, the rather mediocre Kansas City Royals making 2 consecutive WS appearances (winning 1), or the New York Giants getting in as a 6 seed and knocking off the 18-0 Pats

year they won 72 73 games

I knew I should look it up, but was too lazy.

3-point shooting for an entire team still seems to stabilize pretty quickly. going back through the 5 years of team playoff data on nba.com the best performance i can find is the 2016 spurs who sot 43.9% and got bounced in the second round by okc. when a team plays the 18-20 games needed to get through the finals they're probably not even going to shoot that. the 2017 cavs shot 42.4% over 18 games but that was an outstanding shooting team in general. so i don't know that an otherwise flawed team could go on a 3-point tear impactful enough to actually win 4 rounds.

my favorite baseball example is the 85 twins who won the world series with a negative run differential

well a team cld be good enough to win a couple rounds then only need to get hot for 8 games total or whatever seems doable for like the 4th or 5th best team to make it happen