hello friends it's the 2018 NBA Playoffs, a place where dreams GO 2 DIE

that team was pure and lovable then dray had to freak out and call kd from the losing locker room cause he cldnt help but kick guys in the nuts smh

anyway i still think the warriors almost secured their own demise by allocating their meager leftover resources towards bigs instead of wings. the rockets having gerald green almost singlehandedly swung the series

i'm glad to be no longer watching harrison barnes honestly

i think more accurate would be to say you can set up a super team and then you *have* to keep it

― J0rdan S., Tuesday, May 29, 2018 1:16 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you can get a super team and then you have to keep it except its not as super anymore (unless lebron just leaves)

warriors have no resources to patch up leaks in the ship which is how it should be when you have that roster imo

harrison barnes played his role admirably, he was a troop

i have decided that the only team level stats i respect are pace, defensive rating, and 3PT attempt rate

Kevin Durant - 死神 "God of Death"

From a famous pic of Durant as the Grim Reaper

Now refers to his killer instinct late in games, especially since he joined the Warriors

Like in English, the Chinese call game-winning shots "daggers" and refer to this as "killing" the game pic.twitter.com/5r46XRSvfE

— Nick Kapur (@nick_kapur) May 29, 2018

anyway i still think the warriors almost secured their own demise by allocating their meager leftover resources towards bigs instead of wings. the rockets having gerald green almost singlehandedly swung the series

― J0rdan S., Tuesday, May 29, 2018 10:19 AM (forty-three seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm. dont think they make this mistake again next year. having 8 diff big guys who might or might not make a minor difference in different possible (but not probable) playoff matchups was just dumb. i think they roll w jordan bell and damian jones next year and then a couple vets / ring chasers. david west was their 5th best player for a fair chunk of the reg season but
unplayable in the final four. swaggy and casspi really didnt work out at all and the iggy / mccaw injuries killed their small ball rotations.

to clarify, pace should be as high as possible but you can 'shoot the moon' by having the lowest pace in the league

i thought KDs post game presser was really heartfelt, he was an open book. basically admitted to being shooketh by, once again, letting the outside noise eat up his brain space.

i will be creating a new stat to reflect this

dubs got absolutely killed on the boards by capela and tucker lol

i mean, why stack bigs when you're not gonna use em

tucker played his ass off. total baller.

xps they did but in the end only lost the rebounding battle by 2. draymond was perfect in the 3rd q. boxed out like a mad man.

tucker is that dude that every team wants on their team. he was their draymond as far as being the heart of the team. tuck's effort never wained. always loved him since the suns.

i thought KDs post game presser was really heartfelt, he was an open book. basically admitted to being shooketh by, once again, letting the outside noise eat up his brain space.

― they call me melo gelo (Spottie), Tuesday, May 29, 2018 1:30 PM (three minutes ago) Bookmark

probably what happened was KD used one of his alts to let off a bunch of steam on insta right before the game, which got his head in the right place

hopefully! but it woulda had to have been at halftime cos he was extreme trash in the first half

btw i looked up the scheduling stuff looks like this years playoffs started at roughly the same time as last year's playoffs so there goes my scheduling theory. d'antoni should still play more than 6.5 guys tho

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DeXd996V0AAE8XU.jpg

wonder if this was when durant was making crybaby face at someone?

curry attacking the basket this series was very beautiful to watch.

This is interesting. Per @nbastats ...

Curry's 81 drives was 3rd among all players in Conference Finals, behind Harden (144), LeBron (108). Despite getting just 2 FTAs off those drives, he scored the 3rd-most points off drives because he shot 61.7 percent on them.

— Marcus Thompson (@ThompsonScribe) May 29, 2018

The Houston Rockets have died. pic.twitter.com/5k7IzeXoYL

— perfect angel dan (@dannyteardrop) May 29, 2018

some of steph’s finishes at the rim in that series were nearly impossible

he has to be second behind kyrie among small guys who consistently use the rim as a shield and spin the ball off glass in crazy ways

ya his drives are rad

interesting how he toned down his crazy off the dribble 3pt game after losing to bron in the finals re our convo on harden taking all those stepbacks

some of steph’s finishes at the rim in that series were nearly impossible

― J0rdan S., Tuesday, May 29, 2018 3:17 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he reminds me a little of MJ actually

jordan did so many reverses feel like this is a forgotten aspect of his game

kinda cant wait for the 10 hour jordan doc. hope it reminds people of his all around game and not just the shrug game, the flu game, the b russell push off and the pass to kerr.

re curry better shot selection: tis nice being able to defer to durant on the 3-4 of those he would've had to hoist up every game. might take a hit on his highlight reel but it's a more sound level of basketball. his all around game is so rounded at this point. an all time great at the peak of his powers. his rebounding in the playoffs has gone relatively unnoticed.

yeah he took that one stepback 3 with Ryan Anderson on him in 3rd qtr and I was like whoa he's really feeling it, whereas couple years ago he was doing that on the reg

some good stuff in the athletic about curry's 3rd quarters:

Without Chris Paul — maybe even with him, as his strained hamstring was a sign of his shortcomings in the endurance category — the Rockets’ decline was just a matter of time.

After running around in the first half, off screens, through the clutches and grabs, he knows eventually the defense will get tired. He knows the rotations will be later, the contests on his shot not as strong. That’s what he trains for.

“Performance capacity,” said Payne, owner of Accelerate Basketball. “It’s a playoff work capacity. It is the amount of time you can play at full speed without losing mechanical discipline or losing any speed or accuracy when making on-court decisions. It’s the next level of conditioning, which is what we work on all the time. I don’t care who can simply work fast for a long time. I want players that can perform and win with perfect mechanics with fast and accurate decisions in the late stages of games.”

after this wc finals round I think it's safe to say that marv albert needs to retire.

he can't even identify the star players correctly anymore

was pretty sad hearing him try to explain hardens dumbass nosebleed celebration

cp3 thought his nose was really bleeding lol

what happened to kevin harlan?

i fucking love twitter man. people are saying it wasn't a foul on bell because harden grabbed his arm

― k3vin k., Monday, May 28, 2018 7:39 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's the correct call. The offensive player is rotated when the defensive player comes over the top and pulls him. The defensive player has the opportunity to stop or change direction but declined, and instead grabbed and pulled him in an attempt to draw an offensive foul: https://t.co/S1135VD5BV

— NBA Referees (@OfficialNBARefs) May 29, 2018

huh, bell is clearly moving before harden grabs him but ok

looked like a helluva moving screen when i saw it live and even the slow mo replay was suspect even with the arm pull. still cant belive it wasnt called but it looked like the refs were fed up with harden's theatrics by that point in the game/series anyway.

the really crazy one was where harden got absolutely sandwiched between dray and someone else when he was going up for a layup

the officiating in the second half was an utter disgrace

Scott Foster seems like the most hated ref of all time, how does a guy like that end up reffing huge games in the offs?

just read that steph had zero free throw attempts in games 6 and 7 btw.

funny all this handwringing is happening over the rockets roster or style or whatever, but DESPITE paul being out and harden sucking in the second half again, if it weren't some rigged officiating and a 1/72000 cold streak from 3 they'd probably be in the finals

obv all of life is probability and klay picking up 3 fouls in the first 2 mins of the game and the warriors in the 1H generally looking like they had never played together before are not necessarily things to count on either

i thought the series was over as soon as he got that 3rd foul.

def made it interesting, ultimately the rockets just cldnt play the style of defense they needed to with that few dudes without getting really tired

reffing is an art not a science

to be clear reffing has to be extremely hard, it's so easy for us to say with the benefit of camera angles and slo mo and things of that nature that the calls are bad

reffing is probably like twice as hard now as it was in the 90s