2023/24 NBA REGULAR SEASON THREAD "THANKING FOR WEMBANYAMA"

Dunno if I’ve ever seen a shot like that I mean it was like a 15 foot layup

lefty too

Yeah give me a hundred tries I’d never make that even without Joker in my face

lmao sick finish

nugs up by 3 with 27 secs left

He calculated for the curvature of the earth, obviously.

GAME WINNER FROM KYRIE

MAVVVS WIN pic.twitter.com/eGqvIDkPnM

— Dallas Texas TV (@DallasTexasTV) March 17, 2024

This Angle of Kyrie’s Winner WTF pic.twitter.com/GoZPPKXR87

— Nick (@NickRTFM) March 17, 2024

Kyrie 🤯 pic.twitter.com/r2rCCObQFZ

— Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz (@LeBatardShow) March 17, 2024

officiating on jokic was atrocious much of he game, nothing new there, but nuggs lost the game on the glass. they’re a below average defensive rebounding team this year, which (like most of their weaknesses) is mostly a bench thing I think

their starting backcourt isnt good at rebounding but their frontcourt is

luka openly laughing and kleiber throwing his hands up in disbelief were appropriate on court reactions to that shot

clippers with their big 3 helping getting run out of their own building by the hawks

healthy***

We live for the failing clippers. Would go against everything we hold to be true if they were to make a deep playoff run

kinda lookin like they did when they lost 9 straight after Harden joined

Wemby put together a HISTORIC performance in the Spurs overtime win against the Nets! 👽

33 PTS | 15 REB | 7 AST | 7 BLK | 14-26 FG

Victor Wembanyama is the first player in NBA history with 30+ points, 15+ rebounds, 5+ assists, and 5+ blocks while shooting 50% FG in a game 📈 pic.twitter.com/W5rtw2RvDT

— NBA (@NBA) March 18, 2024

he’s already so impossibly good

Every game a new things we’ve never seen

pic.twitter.com/fIBlaWvCWV

— Rob Perez (@WorldWideWob) March 17, 2024

I mean its just a reverse layup but it’s a new way we’ve never witnessed

he's kinda like the Coronavirus, some people were sounding the alarm early about how he could take over the whole league, I'd say now we're at the "European countries start to shut down" phase

kyrie wasn’t the only buzzer beater today. bam hit a walk off 3 to beat the pistons

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyYbct8I1Hc

lol Fournier

What if we built a team of great role players on good contracts and just ran out the clock until those deals expired https://t.co/17Q8oTAMRh

— Subscribe to the You Know Ball Patreon (@TrillBroDude) March 17, 2024

what do they even think theyre doing

that they didn’t trade finney smith at the deadline this year at bare minimum is so nuts

Notable Clipper losses since the All-Star break:

- Blowing 21 pt 4th quarter lead to Lakers.
- Blowing 13 pt 4th quarter lead to Bucks w/o Giannis
- Blowing 22 pt lead to Timberwolves
- Scoring 4 pts in final 4 min to Pelicans
- Down 29 pts at home to Hawks without Trae

— Farbod Esnaashari (@Farbod_E) March 18, 2024

classic clippers move getting nba media on board then immediately disappointing them

they were all like IF the clippers stay healthy they are a problem, counterpoint what if they stay healthy and arent a problem

Unless teams are sitting guys late, the Suns are likely to be a Play In team. pic.twitter.com/htlSy3Orgw

— Nate Jones (@JonesOnTheNBA) March 17, 2024

one thing about these aging superteams is youd really like to fill out the roster with young active players but they inevitably have traded all their young active players for the aging stars so their roster is filled out with your normal powells and daniel theises guys who are in the same age range as the stars and you end up with a skilled but not that athletic or active team which is to say a team that cant play high energy playoff ball that ends up getting overrun by teams that can

Normal Powell.

lol

he is a pretty normal guy as far as NBA players go

clippers top 10 guys by mpg 7 are 30 or older two are 27 and one amir coffey is 24

they definitely went to the extreme end of it

i agree w/ you tho that anecdotally it feels like the league is more so at a nexus point where there are some really good teams w/ a lot of players square in their primes. denver and boston obviously would be the two main examples

like if you think back to the original superteam blueprint, the heatles were old as hell from a role player perspective... haslem, battier, ray allen, mike miller etc all basically ended their careers there. but miami's main foils in that era were the spurs, who were even older; the bulls, who were younger but thibs played them into the ground; indiana, who had a young PG but otherwise was pretty old (grainger, hibbert). the only young team they ran into was OKC and they were probably too young

and of course bron was at the absolute peak of his athletic powers, maybe the stretch where he was one of the top athletes in the history of the league. and bosh was still young and spry. so that helped a lot. but i think that model is getting exposed now & probably will continue to be in the playoffs

celtics 2 guys 30 or over
nuggets 3
okc 0

lebron leaves miami under the guise of returning home but in reality he dumps the heat for a 26 year old kevin love and a 22 year old kyrie. the clippers are not working off that blueprint

the superstar player movement market shifting from free agency to trades also essentially bakes this math into the equation now

yup

suns 4 and the rest arent exactly dazzling athletes

wolves 3

yeah this also fits with the other dynamic where guys who are a liability on other end of the floor rapidly become unplayable at the highest levels. on defense in particular a lot of these older role players can’t hack it.

suns owner gutting his team for kevin durant minutes after buying only to land in the play in is a nice deep nba plot

nets somehow salvaging their own kd trade in the process then sitting there and doing nothing, lol

top three contenders celtics nuggets thunder all drafted their top guys and made a bunch of good moves to fill out their teams, none of them just bought stars

KD to suns feels like the death knell of ppl (zach lowe) analyzing trades by saying stuff like "well, you just can't say no to KD!" or "every team in the league would make this trade 100 times out of 100 even though it's scary" bcuz actually every team in the league did say no to the "KD for all your assets" trade including the suns themselves until a new owner stepped in and did something insane

lol yeah

yeah this also fits with the other dynamic where guys who are a liability on other end of the floor rapidly become unplayable at the highest levels. on defense in particular a lot of these older role players can’t hack it.

― call all destroyer, Monday, March 18, 2024 11:53 AM (eleven minutes ago)

i think this is the key. if you go back to those heat-spurs series, the analysis at the time was that the spurs cracked the heat thru distinctly spurs-ian ball movement that was still miles ahead of most of the NBA. but at this point the league has gotten to a place where pretty much every good to great team is playing with space, using shooters to bend the defense, moving the ball around to find open shooters etc. the idea of having battier and ray allen type guys out there in the finals now just seems a lot less tenable

thinking back to that last warriors title, their role guys who stepped up to push them over the hump were andrew wiggins (25), gary payton II (29), otto porter jr (28)

the nuggets had bruce brown (26), christian bruan (21). jeff green would be the only outlier but that was the last spot in the rotation basically

another layer of superteam dysfunction is teams get these guys then let them gm, the nets had a really good young athletic player after the kd and kyrie acquisitions in jared allen who was then moved in the harden trade for no real reason except that the nets stars preferred their friend deandre jordan

definitely. i think that's ultimately the entire crux of it because in the end acquiring these players is usually the easy part even tho it's positioned as the hard part -- the heat, cavs, lakers got lebron just by existing basically; anthony davis forced his way to LA; KD and kyrie just wanted a big market and the knicks were dysfunctional etc. actually standing up to those guys and not letting them run your entire organization is the hard part and that is where you see, like, the difference between a GM GOAT like riley and someone like sean marks. riley pointedly defying lebron in multiple instances in miami prob contributed to bron leaving but you'd have to look at the heat's organizational track record and say that that attitude is beneficial in the long run