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too soon

Every team's performance in the halfcourt since the All-Star break

Best Net Ratings:
1. Celtics – 13.2
2. Nuggets – 10.9
3. Magic – 9.2
4. Thunder – 8.7
5. Mavericks – 8.4 pic.twitter.com/v60tAlTV8a

— Shane Young (@YoungNBA) April 3, 2024

whats the magic doing in there

red flags for the knicks, cavs and clippers there esp bcuz the first two are attributable to injuries that don’t seem to be getting fixed

brunson has maybe the biggest scoring burden in the league right now among good teams. he’s the only person in their current line up who can generate a shot. ant is prob up there now too

I think they said during the game last night that the Sixers were top 5 in offense and defense when Embiid got hurt, and since then they were 29th in offense and somewhere near that on defense.

It's not just Embiid, because Maxey and Harris have been in and out (though with the latter it's hard to tell sometimes).

embiid obvs extremely good and is responsible for a big chunk of that on ability alone but also him and maxey are their only real creators so when you remove one its bad

Yeah, there has been some grim Sixers offense the last two months.

I have no idea what they will look like heading into the playoffs because Embiid was already out when they made their trades at the deadline. He hadn't played with any of them!

They needed shooting, so I get the Hield trade, but he doesn't seem like a winning player to me.

is this good

https://i.imgur.com/sdupfwh.png

no

lots of teams really trying to win still so these bottom feeders dont stand a chance

hollinger points out in the article that graph is from that on any given night those eight teams are stinking up half the games, which isnt great, then goes for a true big think with this proposal for banishing them to their own kiddie league for the last 3rd of the season

Remember when the league invited only 22 teams to the NBA bubble in Orlando and effectively told the league’s worst eight teams that they didn’t need to be around to sully the product? It was beautiful; we had nothing but matchups between postseason-caliber teams.

I’m wondering if something like that could work even in a non-bubble. The league could tell teams like the Jazz, “Look, since you’re only interested in playing the first 50 games of the season each year anyway, have we got a deal for you.”

I’m not suggesting these eight teams be shut down, but I do wonder if there’s a way to relegate them to their own little playpen where they only face each other the final month of the season and don’t have to infect the nightly schedule with their awfulness. We don’t need these hopelessly non-competitive games when the bottom-eight clubs have no chance of winning unless they’re playing Milwaukee. (Sorry).

https://theathletic.com/5393160/2024/04/05/nba-standings-spurs-grizzlies-hornets-pistons/

the logistics of that seem somewhat impossible but i do agree that 1/4 of the league morphing into the g league for the final few months is bad

the combo of injuries + teams giving some guys rest before the playoffs + 1/4 of the teams not even having real NBA rotations out there is making for bizarre basketball atm

yeah its an obvious not gonna happen but its a good and funny idea, oh youre a raptors fan enjoying playing the grizzlies five times in a row

another thing adding to it is seems like teams dont care about home court in the playoffs as much as they used to, because it doesnt matter as much as it used to, okc is sitting their two best players with minor injuries for multiple games in the middle of a "battle" for first place in the west

Add more teams to the play-in imo

denver the only team that should really care about home court in the west cos its an actual tangible advantage

Add more teams to the play-in imo

― reggae mike love (polyphonic), Friday, April 5, 2024 3:15 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

its an interesting idea just add one more team in each conf and you could have another round

how about an in season tournament for seeds 8-15 at the end of the season for the 8th seed.

at that point youre basically half way to my idea of having the regular season champ being the nba champ and then having a separate "playoffs cup" with all the teams invited so you should just do that

im in as long as the celtics arent in first place

maybe under the new 58 game conferenceless system they wouldnt be plus the incentives for winning games would be more so idk (they would be still because they are the best)

Here's what I'll put in my email to Adam Silver: Teams 9-12 in the conference standings play a one-game wildcard round, and two of them advance to the current play-in setup. Also, they can't be in last place in their division to qualify, just for fun. Also, maybe cut the season's length by a game or two to make the schedule work.

Also, the winner of the midseason tournament is prequalified for the play-in tourney!!

this is lifted from some half-remembered proposal I saw the last time tanking was in the news, but I really don’t see any possible downside to this:
- only the teams with the 14 worst records are lottery-eligible, as it is now
- a team gets one “point” for each loss before the all star break (or the trade deadline, or game 50, etc), and then one “point” for each win after that. you add up total points and the team with the most gets the best lottery odds etc

would end tanking overnight, and incentivize winning every game for all 30 teams. would also remove the incentive to buy players out, which I agree w/hollinger is a stupid quirk

it would flatten out the lottery standings a lil bit but prob not the end of the world

that’s fine, you could also just get rid of the lottery altogether at that point since there’s no perverse incentives any more

The Gold Plan was an idea a hockey fan made up to eliminate tanking but I always thought it would work great for the NBA:

The premise is straightforward: rather than the league's worst teams entering a lottery each spring to determine the order of the upcoming draft, picks are doled out based on point accumulation starting when a team is mathematically eliminated from postseason contention. At the end of the regular season, the team with the most post-elimination points is awarded the first overall selection, followed by the team with the second-most, and so on.

https://www.thescore.com/nhl/news/2059085

That seems like it could promote tanking at the very beginning of the season? You might want to get eliminated asap to accumulate the maximum in post-elimination points.

sure, I’d love to see a team actually try that

some teams already start the season tanking i.e. Sam Hinkie Sixers. This would at least provide the incentive to field a team capable of winning games

one problem with all these schemes is theres no reward for the players, you gotta give the players a taste to keep them engaged

tanking has no reward for players either

another problem is that bad teams just lose a lot in basketball - I don't know if the Pistons or Wiz are actively trying to tank this year, they're just bad

tanking has the reward of not having to try your hardest

the issue isn’t tanking in general as that has largely been rectified. the issue is that sports, in general, have been overtaken by the “asset” worldview. thus in the NBA there are going to be 5 or 6 teams every season — including unexpected ones like those final blazers dame years — who get to a point where they realize they can’t make the playoffs and then enter asset protection + cultivation mode, regardless of what the expense may be in terms of competitiveness, winning etc. teams didn’t think like this until the last decade or so — previous to that you put your guys out there and tried to win and then the season ended.

in a larger sense it’s an issue of the self vs the group. by which i mean that the ppl who run the wizards, jazz, blazers, thunder etc would almost certainly agree that the kind of noncompetitive basketball we’re seeing now is bad for the league overall. but they’d also argue that it’s not bad for the teams individually, bcuz it is allowing them to do xyz things that they think are going benefit their franchise in the long term

the crux of the problem ultimately is that both sides of the argument have merit, but we are way too far down the rabbit hole to expect owners/GMs to prioritize their own teams less in favor of the greater good. so i think the league could enact measures like the one k3v mentioned that completely reorient the season around the idea of not tanking, but it feels like a hacker kinda thing where teams will always be two steps ahead in figuring out loopholes and circumnavigation. the issue is the mentality derived from hedge funds, moneyball that is pervasive across all leagues (and corporations and industries and…)

i also think there is another pervasive issue that either stems from the NBA or is especially endemic to the NBA, and that’s the idea that any season that doesn’t end in a title is a failure, teams only exist to win rings, all legacies are defined by rings etc. and of course we want that & believe that to be true to a certain extent bcuz it’s fun and makes for operatic drama on the court but there is a balance between the pursuit of championships and existing for the sake of entertainment that i think the league is having a particularly hard time figuring out, but which is more of like a larger sociocultural issue regarding fans thinking like they’re GMs and not fans

tanking has existed for a long time, the celtics tanked to get tim duncan and kevin durant (greg oden), the spurs to their credit tanked harder to get tim duncan, but its def more perfected these days, i think theres also a perception element where fans know whats up due to the massive amount of info available, where in years past youd crack open your local paper and its prob not telling you that tonights opponent has their starters out with fake injuries in order to get a slightly better slot in the draft

a larger sociocultural issue regarding fans thinking like they’re GMs and not fans

― slob wizard (J0rdan S.), Saturday, April 6, 2024 1:19 PM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

the prosumer era gotta love it lol, i think its kinda fine for basketball but where seams start showing is anything artistic like these youtube videos that explain why movies are good due to following the rules of structure, you see the effects with people demanding that a tv show have "stakes", this is not actually how to enjoy watching things its just pretending youre an insider who knows whats up, its funny too cause amongst informed fans formula used to be considered a bad thing but todays experts get mad if you dont give it to them they say youre doing it wrong

there is a basic structural aspect of how we talk about sports now where the needs/desires of the franchise are at odds w/ the needs/desires of the fans and commentators are not able to relieve this tension i.e. how all discussion about the t wolves this year is a tug of war between the worldview of the fan (we haven’t been good in 20 years and now we’re awesome!) and the worldview of the front office (when do we need to start dumping salary?). to the point where prominent NBA podcasters have basically been issuing apologies to wolves fans at the outset of discussions about the wolves, essentially bcuz of how much the professional commentator worldview aligns w/ the world view of the professional front office person (who are spending all day texting with each other thus reinforcing said worldview)

the prosumer era gotta love it lol, i think its kinda fine for basketball but where seams start showing is anything artistic like these youtube videos that explain why movies are good due to following the rules of structure, you see the effects with people demanding that a tv show have "stakes", this is not actually how to enjoy watching things its just pretending youre an insider who knows whats up, its funny too cause amongst informed fans formula used to be considered a bad thing but todays experts get mad if you dont give it to them they say youre doing it wrong

― lag∞n, Saturday, April 6, 2024 1:36 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

beyonce releasing a white paper before her album comes out lol

yeah some very otm posts it’s a strange world we live in these days

i think some kind of marriage between america-style collective corporate interest (lux tax, salary caps, access to incoming players via draft with weight given towards shittiness) and euro soccer practices (promotion/relegation, multiple tournaments in and between countries, developmental academies and player contract sales as revenue generator) could address a lot of these issues.

promotion/relegation is amazing but the free market stuff that comes with it is the worst you soccer has like 15 competitive teams across the top five leagues

idk how europeans put up with that shit f1 is the same way

i think theres some prob irreconcilable differences between the systems like once you have promotion/relegation how do you do a draft, if only the top league has access to it its a rich get richer scenario, you put the second league in then what about the third league, maybe theres only two leagues idk now your best young players are in the second league when youd really prefer to have them in primetime, then you have to pay your second league star but cant afford it so you sell him up to the first league that just pretty much sucks its not good, maybe you do some revenue sharing/salary cap thing where all teams in both leagues have the same money to spend now a bunch of the best guys are in the second league, i think a promotion/relegation system only really works if players are purely just moved for money like in soccer, i know theyve tried to put some abstract salary cap stuff in there but the same teams are just good every year

in european soccer so much of the fan behavior, the expectations of the fans, what makes them happy etc and how that effects team behavior is rooted in how small those countries are. and bcuz of that there is so much about those leagues that we can’t replicate in america bcuz we are 50x the size or whatever. like, ppl in luton and burnley england are overjoyed when their teams are able to just maintain premier league status bcuz they are like… a farm town in rural england. the teams aren’t (or weren’t until recently in some cases) owned by billionaires. we have no equivalent… like charlotte or salt lake or indianapolis are considered NBA backwaters but would be the second biggest cities in england. regardless of what salary caps do at the high end, there’s still a lot more money being poured into the worst NBA (or NFL or MLB) teams than the worst premier league teams, and a lot that just derives back to like the average GDP of the american sports city vs that of england, italy spain etc. but obv salary caps create artificial competition to a large extent, the pacers would have a hard time competing with the lakers celtics etc if spending was unfettered. but we have more billionaires in america to buy up these teams and start spending if they want to (i.e. ishbia). the soccer teams have to turn to foreign money if they want any hope

there also teams in england like west ham, crystal palace etc that are just in london but don’t have the financial ability to compete with the better teams in london or manchester and there is nothing really diff about those fans vs that of chelsea except choosing a team that prob can’t ever win & still being cool with it. that dynamic is a bit harder to explain

ultimately i don’t think the idea of parity — that every team *can* win a title — as derived from salary caps & luxury taxes is ever being stripped out of american sports or american sports fandom

its better, if you gave those euros a lil taste of it they wouldnt be going back, burnley fc dynasty is on the table baby

they should just have a eurowide super premiere league thats fed by all the top leagues tho, having the best players spread across multiple leagues is lame, those guys should be facing off every week in a battle of wills