The 2022 National Basketball Association (NBA) Playoffs Thread

seems misguided, centers are supposed to keep the ball out of the basket

it kinda depends

i guess the mavs wont be going after gobert then huh

the post-series jazz slander by dallas has been very funny

hey is jason kidd actually a decent coach?

no

He got the team to buy in on defense so he’s got that going for him. I think this series w the suns will teach us a lot more tho.

yeah you gotta give him credit for the defensive improvement at the very least

yeah getting good defensive metrics from this lineup is impressive, I don't think I totally understand how it's happening

mavs do have some really good defensive players. finney smith & bullock are two of the better three and D players in the league, kleiba can guard wings and bigs. powell is another guy who can guard a lot of diff players. even luka isn’t terrible, he’s at least a big dude. they usually have the personnel to cover up for the dinwiddies and brunsons. bertans is the only guy they put out there who is just flat out awful on defense.

kidd has coached them up tho & they do have a “defensive coordinator” guy whose name i’m forgetting but they talked about him on TV during one of the jazz games

my impression of Kidd in Milwaukee is he was coaching the team he wanted and not the team he actually had, so he kept drawing up defensive schemes that his players couldn't really execute which led to them giving up 3s in record numbers. he also worked his guys to the bone and there are a lot of stories of him being a giant asshole so I'm glad he's gone. it is possible that he's learned a thing or two since and may even develop into a decent coach some day. maybe even some day soon. I really have to see how this Suns series plays out.

coaching is so hard to try and quantify. so much of it is just culture stuff.

he was in a good position culturally in dallas since the star on the team respects him & he was coming into a situation where the previous coach was an asshole type who had worn out his welcome. but it also seems like kidd changed his approach after being fired and seeing other coaches when he was an assistant. i think they said on TV that he said he would’ve coached differently if he had been an assistant first instead of just jumping right into a head job.

yeah never understood why why teams hire players with no coaching experience to be their head coaches

i do think it’s easier to quantify coaching when it comes to defense. don’t think there’s too many teams who have good defenses where you’re just like, yeah i’ve got no idea what the coach is bringing to the table here

wasnt van gundy supposed to be a good defensive coach? that pels team was dreadful

yeah never understood why why teams hire players with no coaching experience to be their head coaches

― lag∞n, Monday, May 2, 2022 10:52 AM (forty-eight seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

kerr pulled it off but i guess as a gm you prob learn a ton

yeah i mean you might hit but it just makes no sense imho as an approach

in retrospect nash probably would have been way better off working as an assistant first

he was kinda around the dubs but it was probably way too casual to be able to learn the real ins and outs. he may be a good coach but hes not really the coach of the nets so we may not get to find out.

idk how you'd even evaluate Nash as a coach. obviously he didn't do a great job but I dunno who could've made that situation work

we are about to witness a massacre

Philadelphia's DeAndre Jordan gets the Game 1 start at center in place of the injured Joel Embiid tonight at Miami.

Embiid is the seventh current All-Star to miss at least one games in these playoffs ... three shy of the single-season NBA record: https://t.co/t2E8SwNy5L

— Marc Stein (@TheSteinLine) May 2, 2022

what an absolute bummer that embiid isnt playying. but doc is prob too dumb to go 5 out and let harden/maxy cook

yeah they should just be hoisting and hope for the best

proud of doc. the starting lineup got torched. figured it out with maxey, danny, harden, tobias, niang

[two hours later]

Doc Rivers just now: "We are going to keep starting him [DeAndre Jordan] whether you like it or not because our guys believe in him."

— Barry Jackson (@flasportsbuzz) May 3, 2022

what a freaking sicko

mavs hitting some 3s

can nba players stop kicking nuts for one week

🚨 NUTSHOT ALERT 🚨

Jae Crowder caught Luka Doncic right in the groin 😬pic.twitter.com/OpYzEEZ8Ci

— ClutchPoints (@ClutchPointsApp) May 3, 2022

Mavs putting up a fight but the Suns are shooting 66%

The Suns are relentless.

That javale pick on luka and slam was sick

mavs really have nobody to put on Ayton

mavs will waste luka's career like they mostly wasted dirk's

good :twisted:

TIL that Jordan Poole and JJJ were high school teammates

all these guys went to fake baller feeder schools iirc

The Heat scored 50 points in DeAndre Jordan's 17 minutes and 56 points during the 31 minutes he sat.

His lack of dynamism on both ends considerably hamstrings the Sixers during his stints.

— Jackson Frank (@jackfrank_jjf) May 3, 2022

i feel like, in a sense, losing a center, even one of embiid’s caliber, is the easiest loss to deal with in the modern NBA, because the strategy to deal with that should be so obvious. you just go small, spread the floor, play with pace, and shoot. pepper in some minutes with a real 5 but just turn the game into a shooting contest. doc refuses to see it tho it just runs counter to his understanding of basketball.

the sixers do have a specific problem in that they were a bad rebounding team even with embiid and the heat killed them on the boards last night when they turned the intensity up, but the niang and harris at center rotation with some paul reed every once in a while is just there staring him in the face

harden seems to be cooked as a primary scorer. was third on the team in shots attempted last night and only got to the line 4 times in a game they need to him to score 35+.

DJ -22 in 17 minutes. niang +6 in 22 minutes despite shooting 0/7 fg

we expect elite players to keep producing into their mid 30s these days but harden shows that if youre not psychotic about taking care of your body and evolving your game you can still decline hard when you hit 30 maybe he shd go on the juice idk

i do think part of the issue was that the heat were happy to crowd him and make him pass and the sixers shot 6-34 from three. but he also doesn’t have a varied game, it’s not like he’s gonna be like “ok this team isn’t letting me drive, lemme move off the ball or get into the post or get to my midrange game instead.” compare him to the way that i.e. devin booker plays, or even luka, who gets compared to him a lot but has more angles to his game. harden is kind of like a computer where you can dictate his play based on your defense. he still may beat you but it’s not like he’s going to problem solve beyond what you could predict going into the game

sad thing is he did have a more dynamic game in his early houston years but then at some point he decided he just wanted to dribble between his legs mostly

if his game had expanded instead of contracted and hed bothered to stay in shape hed prob be doing fine rn

perhaps if he didnt play under management that dictated only 3s and layups

yeah he was completely enabled. even down to being able to boot out other superstars at will.

take the team jet on strip club tours and so forth

just gonna look up whos currently running the sixers brb

i still cant believe he walked away from this completely unharmed.

One of the most freak accidents I’ve seen on the court 😨😨 pic.twitter.com/zMrIwEGEYT

— Mark Jackson’s Burner (@casualtakeking) May 3, 2022

yeah he just popped up that was scary