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

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the jazz being a top 6 team and getting the number 1 pick would be chefs kiss

luka is putting up insane #s but after watching harden and russ do this type of thing for years i just cant get excited about it?

The fact that a player has so much talent that they consistently put up big numbers against other NBA teams makes them pretty damn amazing to watch. But teams that are built around having one superstar put up mind-boggling numbers every night are built more around a weakness than a strength.

bones posting his own highlights to sexual healing is lol

When I get that feeling..😮‍💨 pic.twitter.com/K32EwcIadi

— Bones Hyland (@BizzyBones11) November 6, 2022

Watching Luka isn't as much fun as the Dirk-Nash era or elder Dirk putting the team on his back but he makes some incredibly fun passes. (He seems less pouty this season, too.)

if you can't enjoy watching luka i feel bad for you son

what i like about luka is that he loves to put on a show and seems to love what he's doing out there. the feeling that he's just toying with the other team.

i love luka highlights but dont care to watch a whole game of him is i guess what im saying idk

i like watching luka but the mavs theory is flawed they need another guy

i really dont get cuban/mavs FO decisions between the dirk/luka eras, just looking back at broad strokes never really seemed to have a clear plan of how to put together a contender

they stumbled into luka and I think stumbling into a great was the only plan

i know mavs player haters ball is one of our favorite pastimes around here but it’s not really all that crazy that after a 15 year stretch of success with the best player in franchise history they had a three year dip after the guy retired. it doesn’t strike me as exceptional in any way honestly

also they didn’t stumble into luka they went and got him by trading a single first round pick aka making one of the best trades in NBA history that any other team could have topped by throwing in a grand total of two first round picks. given what stars are going for now it was just a massive coup and again literally any team could’ve put their chips in the middle for luka and nobody did. it wasn’t a giannis situation

tbh i forgot the mavs traded up for luka rather than a bunch of dumb teams passing on him (though a couple dumb teams did pass on him)

i don't think it's fair to prior mavs management, who ran out of steam but did some really good things in their time, to lump them in with current mavs management who might well be incompetent

idk the mavs are a good team, but they need another guy

“We just play soft, man,”

- Anthony Edwards on the Minnesota Timberwolves pic.twitter.com/7IDd6RAXG9

— NBACentral (@TheNBACentral) November 8, 2022

fact check: true

Cuban's decisions have been baffling for 20 years - he inherited Dirk, their most successful draft pick between Dirk and Luka was Devin Harris IIRC (or Josh Howard, maybe - one of them was the only drafted player to last more than like five seasons with the team). Chase a huge free agent, get spurned, set money on fire for Erick Dampier or Raef Lafrentz. The Porzingis sign and trade was another in that long line, even though they clawed a little advantage back pawning him off on the Wizards.

there was the part where they won the nba finals

i know this is prob the 4th time weve had this discussion but the major datapoint that uh points to the conclusion that they lucked into that champ team is they immediately dismantled it ie did not run it back truly one of the most insane decisions in the history of the league, underrated

they really had to hit the sweet spot of being dumb while thinking theyre geniuses, the mark cuban effect, because a normal dumb org wouldve just run it back, as would a smart one

also worth considering, letting nash walk exactly before he went supernova

it’s not that they’re beyond criticism because they’re certainly not. but if you were gonna rank every NBA franchise by titles, finals appearances, playoff appearances, playoff wins, regular season wins etc over the last 20 years the mavs would shake out as one of the 6-8 most successful orgs in the NBA. but the conversation we always seem to have about them is always about whether they’re incompetent, which doesn’t make sense to me

theyve done a lot of weird shit theyre a bit of a mystery idk

theres also the scandalous disfunction of the org thats been in the news the last x number of years, kinda feel like they might be experiencing lakers syndrome in that theyve fallen behind the league as far their level of management professionalism, same could be said for the suns who are also a good team, but they are i suspect prob making their job more difficult than it need be from that perspective

there was def circus vibes to them that one offseason… they also got trashed everywhere including here for pushing out carlisle in favor of jason kidd and it looks like everyone was wrong about that move. hiring a GM from nike seemed kinda crazy but he’s made some moves that were clearly good. they also didn’t handle the brunson thing the way they should have… the javale signing already seems as dumb as it did when they signed unit. they also were just in the west finals. they’re currently no 5 in net rating but we’ll see how it plays out. again it’s not like you can’t point out the flaws but they’ve done just as much good stuff over the years that nobody ever brings up when we have this discussion

do they get credit for unlocking tyson chandler as a legit player w/ that title team? go look up the trade they made to get jason terry. they developed barea out of nowhere. they just made the west finals where the entire team aside from luka was second round picks, UDFAs, or other team’s cast offs that they developed into good players.

idk theyve always looked like a middle of the pack org to me. dont think theyre amazing or incompetent

dysfunctional though, yes, probably

thing is as far as judging them on their outcomes is theres a lot of stuff that looks suspiciously like getting lucky, maybe theyre just lucky, maybe its cuban the guy who sold a non working video platform to yahoo for billions of dollars

do they get credit for unlocking tyson chandler as a legit player w/ that title team? go look up the trade they made to get jason terry. they developed barea out of nowhere. they just made the west finals where the entire team aside from luka was second round picks, UDFAs, or other team’s cast offs that they developed into good players.

― J0rdan S., Wednesday, November 9, 2022 11:01 AM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

they did have one of the best coaches and they hired him and kept him on for a long time when he had previously washed out of a couple orgs despite a lot of on court success, imo you can def put that one in the pro column

while I think I fall closer to jordan’s side in this debate, I do think that having a transcendent player, who as been pointed out preceded cuban’s tenure, did like 75% of the heavy lifting for their single NBA title in 20 years and they’ve done questionable things mixed in with good things since then

and they prob let carlisle go at the right time too, the kidd thing is just lucky tho im sorry... probably, and even that he could be just hitting a sweet spot where hes benefiting from carlises offensive/development work while being able to use his strong suit of getting the guys to play hard, will be interesting to see if the mavs continue to find diamonds in the rough

tehyre one of those teams that instead of rebuilding wants to just always be pretty good and hope to spike a finals run now and then, which, they have done. but teams like that tend to make weirder moves to try to sustain their thing

even the mavs getting to the western finals: lucky

conclusion: theyre just lucky, but its real, they actually have luck on their side

i will say they are smarter than the three teams that didnt take luka

I do think that having a transcendent player, who as been pointed out preceded cuban’s tenure, did like 75% of the heavy lifting for their single NBA title in 20 year

i mean...isn't a transcendent player largely responsible for 90% of championship teams?

crazy thing about that mavs team was the lack of a second star, hadnt happen like that since the rockets first title with hakeem

may be a challops but i think the hawks move was fine at the time, it didnt pan out but they did get the 2nd best player in the draft and another lottery pick its easy to imagine a world in which luka is a bit worse and they won

the other 2 teams though, yeah

03-04 Pistons are probably the biggest outlier

i mean if we're talking about acquiring a top 25 player of all time yeah you probably need some luck. the cavs and spurs won lotteries to get lebron and tim duncan. the warriors needed one of the worst GMs of all time to take two different PGs over steph curry. idk that's kinda how this sport works a lot of the time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

hawks is more forgivable but on some level there was a systemic failure where the nba as a whole didnt recognize luka as the consensus #1 pick, which he absolutely should have been based on the available evidence, but the mavs zigged and traded up, and for that they deserve credit

yeah i remember asking why he wasnt the consensus in here at the time and no one really had an answer

he was the mvp of the second best league in the world at 18, meanwhile the suns are drafting ayton at 1 to fill a positional need, total madness

i give sacto a partial pass just because i respect balkan blood fueds

wld be cool if another insane team defense team came along like that pistons team so we could check and see if it still works. probably not because of hoisting

luka is more valuable than the entire hawks roster i know they're a decent to good team and all but he's gonna be one of the very best players in the history of the sport and he was just sitting right there for them

also they just dont let you play physical anymore, lock down d not really possible xp