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

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

nets and spurs were so desperate for any shred of sustained short term relevancy that they just handed the keys to guys (players) who are by definition not qualified to run basketball organizations, even on paper it's a bad plan

they were firing coaches making trades, just awful

both the nets and suns had good things going before the kd trades too they were on the right track

i think the one thing you could say about the suns is that they had reason to suspect they had seen the best of ayton and cp3 in the finals they lost and that there was a reason to shake up the team, but booker/bridges would still have been a great foundation and a more creative front office could have focused on building around them in a more sustainable way.

yeah try to roll ayton and cp3 over find some diamonds in the rough, the pacers signed ayton as a rfa and one would assume wouldve been open to a a sign and trade for myles turner, so youre rolling out booker bridges turner cam johnson etc

crazy Lebron James was so good he tricked the entire league into thinking the big 3 + aging role players thing was a recipe for success. all the smart basketball people who said "this isn't really a smart plan" after The Decision were right after all

its is pretty funny, wade was great too, and none of them were old

suns are victims of new owner syndrome

they also had Bosh successfully reinvent his game which you don't see often in all-star starters

yeah bosh having an agreeable disposition was key

suns are victims of new owner syndrome

― infinite wiggles (Spottie), Monday, March 18, 2024 1:23 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

if these guys were thinking clearly theyd take it slow get the lay of the land but instead they come in hot making fantasy trades, god bless

ishbia is not just a guy w/ new owner syndrome he's also a guy who walked on at mich st and thus thinks he's a ball knower too. worst of both worlds

sometimes ball players are the worst ball knowers, theyre in too deep

lmao this guy

Deandre Ayton says that sleeping on an air mattress earlier in the season could have contributed to his early season struggles

“My body wasn’t just my body. People forget the humane difference of me adjusting to everything. That included something as routine as getting proper… pic.twitter.com/qkEglqQ14c

— NBACentral (@TheDunkCentral) March 18, 2024

https://www.oregonlive.com/blazers/2024/03/trail-blazers-deandre-ayton-opens-up-about-overcoming-personal-struggles-that-led-to-recent-success.html

maybe he could've gotten to that one game earlier this season had he slid down his frozen driveway on his air mattress

beginning to think he doesnt value sleep enough

If Ayton ever gets better focused on hooping he's got all the physical attributes to be a very valuable player. It's just never happened, yet. If it ever does happen, the trade will look like an upgrade. Otherwise...

everyone saying the suns should have just built pretty good teams around booker and their previous assets otm, it would have been a fun team.

i think one of the issues with the suns' teambuilding is that people kind of overrate how good booker is, especially after the finals run. he's an incredible scorer obviously (which, yes, is the most important skill) but he's not great at much else, and i have questions about him as a leader. cp3 was providing the actual leadership on the 20-21 team, whose success in the playoffs was kind of fluky anyway.

might just be because i live in phoenix and people talk about book with awe, like he's a top-5 guy in the league when he's not and probably never will be.

i think booker is really good maybe not top five but top five is hard theres only five or at most seven of those guys, but i also dont think leadership is a real thing tho so take it with a grain of salt

also dont think the suns were stuck building only a pretty good team, take the celtics for instance they dont have joel embiid but theyre better than pretty good, im sure they couldve gotten in the mix with various supersars if they were willing to move jaylen, heat have made two finals without anyone getting mvp votes

Yeah, Booker is really good, not denying that at all! I probably sound like a dipshit talking about "leadership" or whatever but ultimately Booker doesn't really have that thing where his team is truly elevated by his presence.

Like people love to talk about players who do things that "don't show up in the box score" but with Book it's kind of like, yeah, what you see in the box score is exactly what you get, no more, no less! And his box score stats are, it must be said, really good! An efficient 27 points per game with decent assist numbers. He's just not someone I watch and think "his destiny is to win a title" like with other guys, even guys like Tatum.

If you trade Tatum for Booker I don't think the Suns are suddenly title contenders. Their current roster construction is just not good enough.

i think book has the juice the intangibles i believe in him hes got that dog etc, look at what he did vs the nugs last year, hes not the prototypical best player on on champ team def not a top level nba athlete, but i think hes close enough to being a top guy that if you had the right team at the right time some magic could happen

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

― slob wizard (J0rdan S.), Monday, March 18, 2024 11:18 AM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

dunksandthrees projection has them at 19.5% to avoid the play-in

gives the lakers a 14.5% chance to miss the play-in entirely too

lakers staying home would be pretty good

we deserve it

losing a do or die game 82 might be nice

there was just a huge opportunity cost to the durant trade. wanting to move on from cp3 and ayton was not the wrong instinct but it’s a leap from that to trading literally all of your best player and draft pick capital for one guy

what if they had kept bridges and just gotten someone like OG. maybe you get in on dejounte murray too. or maybe you still do the beal trade etc. just feel like if they wanted to make trades there were so many paths to getting to where they are this year (the play in muck) without also potentially sacrificing like a decade of your franchise

obv they thought they were getting immense upside, some ppl still believe this exists, others believe it never existed in the first place

once again the haters doubters and cranks have been proven right

If you trade Tatum for Booker I don't think the Suns are suddenly title contenders. Their current roster construction is just not good enough.

― reggae mike love (polyphonic), Monday, March 18, 2024 3:07 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

i definitely agree with this; thankfully for boston fans, the celtics ownership didn't overrate tatum to the extent that they thought they "Tatum + KD + a bunch of random guys" is a team that could compete for a title.

phoenix's bad roster construction is predicated, at least in part, on ishiba overrating booker, on the idea that KD and Booker together be so good that it would almost automatically make the Suns contenders.

Anyway Jordan S. very otm here, more than anything with Booker, the enormous opportunity cost of the KD trade is the bigger problem.

The Durant trade was bad but not even a fraction as bad as the Beal trade.