2022/23 NBA REGULAR SEASON THREAD "TANKING FOR WEMBANYAMA"

suggs good now

Jalen Suggs, sheesh. can we check that x-ray pic.twitter.com/pVCWYyBJ5P

— Steve Jones Jr. (@stevejones20) November 4, 2022

...may have that dog in him. pic.twitter.com/EDhuzfKPAo

— Steve Jones Jr. (@stevejones20) November 4, 2022

and klay misses the buzzer beater down 1

i'm happy that i randomly tuned in to the best game of jalen suggs pro career

warriors are bad

the computer knew but we would not listen

The two timeline thing was never a good idea. You can do a couple youngsters but having your roster half full of unplayable and inconsistent kids isn’t gonna work for winning. They have 6.5 playable guys atm. The core looks good but not having vets like Otto, GP2, iggy, Lee, jta and Belli to throw out there is no good. I think they gotta bench wiseman for a while and prob give all his minutes to Kuminga who has shown last year that he can at least play some defense and catch a lob and get to the line

yeah silly idea, arrogant

what they need to do is trade everything not tied down while steph is still good

a core of wiseman/kuminga/poole has an absolute ceiling as the washington wizards. time to make some moves

i was surprised they stayed pat last trade deadline but it obv worked out fine for them at the time

Maybe they've decided to get in on the Wembanyama sweepstakes.

if they had just drafted different guys they would be looking "light years ahead" but of course drafting the right guys is really hard so u gotta factor that in

taking wiseman over ball is actually inexcusable tho

old school move to go for the raw athletic center

especially perplexing for a team whos star is a not physically dominating guy thats just really good at basketball

i find it hard to say they had the wrong idea when they just won the title. i think you have to say they unambiguously succeeded in their plan regardless of how good these guys turn out.

i think ultimately what happened is that the crown jewel of the whole plan was a top 2 pick in a year where two of the undisputed top 3 guys were guards in what also is looking like a pretty bad draft. you can ding them for taking wiseman over lamelo but it’s a whole alternate timeline of the warriors to start thinking about lamelo’s development playing behind steph in a totally different system & style of basketball than charlotte. patrick williams would be more useful than wiseman at this point but picks 4-10 of that draft leave a lot to be desired, to say the least. there was an argument for them taking halliburton but again you get into the same issues regarding how his career plays out. what happens with jordan poole in that scenario? if instead of picking between lamelo and wiseman the warriors had gotten the opportunity to select between i.e. jabari smith and chet — two much easier system fits — we might be having a different convo. what if it was evan mobley instead of wiseman?

franz over kuminga may end up hurting, but for as good as franz looks he isn’t a franchise altering superstar. he would be a legitimate bridge player between the eras, but they’d still be looking for the top 10 player in the league type guy either way. unless you stumble into a paul george, kawhi, donovan mitchell, bam etc type jackpot you’re only gonna squeeze so much out of picks 7 and 14. unless you think franz is getting to that level they still drafted fairly well with those picks as it stands now

Wiseman over lamelo was basically them flinching at the full commit to the two timelines, like he’d be curry’s successor whereas wiseman was theoretically going to slot into the current group’s lineup. Obviously didn’t work out that way

In other words Jordan otm

i mean they won a chip with the old guys but i dont the plan was called one timeline

and idk i mean you can go into alternate histories as much as you want but i do think drafting the better players would be the way to go, and as long as were doing it if they had drafted lemelo theyd be a lot better than they are now lol

i mean they just won the title idk how a lot better you can get. i mean, does anyone think lamelo would’ve been some huge impact player in the finals last year? cuz i don’t. he prob plays the same exact role as poole.

in any event i personally still think kuminga is a real player & moody clearly has an NBA future. poole could be an all star. they’re gonna be a free agent destination whenever they first have cap space. there may be some middling years whenever steph actually stops being amazing but their future still seems pretty bright to me

lamelo is so much better than poole lol what are you talking about, hes legit star player, they really would be set up to have a next generation

i suspect the two timelines thing was bs from the beginning tho, really what they were doing was hedging against the possibility that their core was cooked, which was a reasonable concern, but you cant say that, from that pov it was a decent approach, tho trading one or two of those picks for vets would have been better kinda split the difference, rather than trying to do it via who you draft which in the end just resulted in an extremely bad miss with the second pick

Wiseman was a bad pick. Bad picks always have reasons behind them but they are bad all the same.

truly some galaxy brain shit from dubs management drunk on everything going their way up til then

the pistons took darko over wade and won the title the same year, but it still was a disaster pick

lamelo is better than poole but we’re talking about a team that just won the title. how much better does he make their title team? lamelo’s playoff career currently consists of two play in games his team lost by 30 points each. i don’t see an argument for him being some major factor vs that boston team… he’s not at that stage in his career. and neither was poole, of course, which is my point. i would really find it hard to lose sleep over the whole thing. franz over kuminga is a diff story bcuz wing players are an easy longterm fit on any team but let’s see how kuminga develops

i personally think he wouldve made the team much better, maybe sweep the celtics better, i mean he made the allstar team last year, hes really good and i dont see why he wouldve had any problem being the 4th best guy on the team, wouldve actually filled a big need for the dubs keeping the offense rolling when steph sits

but regardless if were taking the two timelines hypothesis seriously we have to examine its claims not just the outcome of one season, the young high picks did nothing for the warriors last year and arent looking up to doing the job of keeping the warriors contending

ok we disagree on lamelo’s ability to hold up against the celtics in the NBA finals as a 20 year old. i do not see it

i’m actually far more sympathetic to arguments dinging them for not taking halliburton bcuz there was plenty of discussion at the time over whether they should take someone that ppl thought would be a good NBA player right away vs some notion of long term ceiling w/ the other three guys

but again you get into questions of how a guard of that talent develops next to steph, w/ poole emerging, w/ klay coming back to eat up minutes and touches etc. i just think taking a young guard from another situation and placing him theoretically in golden state of all places and saying he’d be the exact same player we now know is far fetched

idk melo was good from his first summer league game hes a baller

devin vassell would be good on this warriors team. they should’ve just traded down

the most prudent thing if you wanted to strengthen the current team wouldve been to just trade at least some of the picks

i remain puzzled why kerr hates kuminga, is he a knucklehead or something? every time i see him play i come away thinking he is a clear NBA rotation player off the bench

they couldve traded down for haliburton too. but i think the whole thing about their situation (which was also true about the pistons with darko) is that getting a high pick when you're already good in many ways nudges you towards a high risk/high reward swing for the fences type guy because it's not gonna kill you if it busts. and look they just won the title with basically nothing from any of those guys, which sorta proves the point. one x-factor in the long term playout is that it's unclear how playing behind such a vet team is affecting the development of the yung'uns

lamelo is so much better than poole lol what are you talking about, hes legit star player, they really would be set up to have a next generation

― lag∞n, Friday, November 4, 2022 8:45 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

poole just had a seriously great playoff run. hes not better than lamelo but what he just did is way more impressive than anything melo has done yet. maybe lamelo should try playing

the most prudent thing if you wanted to strengthen the current team wouldve been to just trade at least some of the picks

― lag∞n, Friday, November 4, 2022 9:29 AM (twenty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

exactly, they have 7 babies on this roster. way too many.

i remain puzzled why kerr hates kuminga, is he a knucklehead or something? every time i see him play i come away thinking he is a clear NBA rotation player off the bench

― J0rdan S., Friday, November 4, 2022 9:30 AM (twenty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

no one has said anything directly but theres been hints that he needs to grow up. i think they wanted to start the season giving wiseman as much as they could and then do what they're about to do which i would guess to give kuminga all his minutes. kuminga doesnt seem to do very well in spot minutes but does good in extended runs. I think they should try starting him next to dray. kerr last night said theyre gonna reshuffle the deck on rotations, which to me means wiseman is gonna get some DNPs for a bit.

Steph, Klay, Dray and a few others have been around for all four rings. That's just as many as LeBron has and it took them many fewer years. No way am I going to feel sorry for any of the Dubs or their fans if they don't get back to the Finals for a while.

poole just had a seriously great playoff run. hes not better than lamelo but what he just did is way more impressive than anything melo has done yet. maybe lamelo should try playing

― im a beacon of light (Spottie), Friday, November 4, 2022 1:10 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

i will let him know to get on a team with good players

forgot to finish my last sentence there and have no idea what i was going to day lmao

it’s not a question of who is better it’s more that they would be in the same role on the dubs & thus melo’s development and production would look more like poole’s than it does in a place where he’s the focal point of the whole franchise

the point stands that wiseman wasnt a good pick. feel bad for him cos he should be on the rockets or something getting 30mpg working through mistakes and here he has major expectations and a microscope on everything he does and has to produce in limited minutes doing things outside of what he's best at.

i mean maybe who knows, i suspect the dubs wouldnt have any problem accommodating someone as good as melo, its kind of like saying scottie barnes would just be doing kuminga type things if he were on the dubs, teams generally can find uses for good players, poole has actually been quite stretched in his role which is an indication of a need there, if you look at the dubs its just him as steph as far as perimeter creators xp

the warriors should've dealt wiseman while he still had trade value tho maybe his value was already tanked last season

yeah once he got hurt it was lost.

its hard to deal young players who havent shown anything, tho who knows maybe someone out there still loved him

but also... him being hurt mighta helped win them a chip. they simply didnt have to worry about him playing

it is weird that wiseman gets so much rope and kuminga doesnt

Kuminga has 1 possession like this and he’s benched. We have 9 games of this and it’s “development”

Last year no one was given special standards and it worked. https://t.co/p0RXEDsVC4

— sam esfandiari (@samesfandiari) November 4, 2022

its kind of like saying scottie barnes would just be doing kuminga type things if he were on the dubs

i just think a point guard coming up under steph curry in the warriors system which revolves entirely around steph is a very very unique situation, historically speaking really to say nothing of the current NBA. so i have a hard time just saying melo would be the exact same guy. i think a wing player like barnes or wagner has a much easier path to developing in a similar way as they would on other teams, tho kerr prob still would've favored igoudala and otto porter types in the finals

I always got the impression that lacob is high on Wiseman bc light years hubris and has told Steve to make it work.

this play is making the rounds. curry mad at wiseman for not running the play right, wiseman mad at curry for not getting the ball in the post which lol, then james getting inside position for the rebound but gets moved off his spot with ease
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJTmEuy27fc
also this one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNQEQNNGRYY