Worst gift in the pile: 2023 NBA Play-Ins

just seems like a good org presti obvs has the touch and daigneault is homegrown, big flaw is that theyre a small market team unwilling to pay the tax or at least that was the case last time around

i mean ingram missed half the season, zion 2/3 of the season and doesnt want to play and nance/alvarado were hurt for the play in. I think herb and murphy are good and still growing.

― Spottie, Thursday, April 13, 2023 3:02 AM (nine hours ago)

paying $101 million next year for three guys who are never on the floor at the same time. throw in another $10m for larry nance who also never plays. i guess you can say there is upside there based on the first few weeks of this season... but it's looking pretty bad!

xp yeah usually i'm skeptical of org quality but it seems real in okc, the vets who pass through always rave about how they're treated and how everything is set up which in turn prob gets a lot of goodwill with agents. it's a decent shield against tanking affecting morale.

i'm stealing this stat from one of the podcasts but the pelicans have had 4 years of ingram & zion together and their finishes in the west are 13, 11, 8, and 10th. i guess you can say they're moving up lol?

i'm astounded that ppl in the national media continue to advance the narrative that the pelicans pushed the suns to the brink in the first round last year, and thus are a latent "contender" or whatever. it's so bogus

just seems like a good org presti obvs has the touch and daigneault is homegrown, big flaw is that theyre a small market team unwilling to pay the tax or at least that was the case last time around

― lag∞n, Thursday, April 13, 2023 1:46 PM (twenty-one minutes ago)

big flaw is that they had kevin durant russell westbrook james harden & serge ibaka on their team and made the NBA finals one time cuz sam presti put a roster from the stone age around them. but maybe his ability to identify & develop role players has changed...

does anyone remember that 39 year old derek fisher averaged 26 mpg for OKC in the 12-13 finals

xxp i was thinking about your "is david griffin bad again?" post and idk, they have unquestionably collected a lot of talent but so much of it is in the form of one-way players....they need to turn it into a real team. and right now they have no idea if that real team can include zion or not.

and then averaged 16 mpg in the playoffs the next year while shooting 31/29 shooting splits xp to myself

i'm kinda trolling but i actually do think presti should have to answer to the hague about what happened between the years of 2010 and 2018 in okc

xxp i was thinking about your "is david griffin bad again?" post and idk, they have unquestionably collected a lot of talent but so much of it is in the form of one-way players....they need to turn it into a real team. and right now they have no idea if that real team can include zion or not.

― call all destroyer, Thursday, April 13, 2023 2:14 PM (three minutes ago)

i was kinda genuinely asking bcuz there was this huge whiplash in the national media NBA punditry world about how griffin was maybe gonna lose his job, but then they were the breakout stars of the playoffs & had built a contender, and now they got bounced out of the playoffs by a tanking team. so i'm curious like... what the temperature is gonna be on this one. keeping in mind of course that griffin appears to be one of, if not the, most popular/connected GM w/in the media, who all call him "griff"

yeah i get it, i think it's an interesting question and not one with a clear answer. i never considered them a contender myself but in theory they have a path to get there

i think he'll be shielded by the teams injuries yet again. but yeah 4 years of those guys and nothing to show for it is not good. i guess give it one more shot idk

i mean they kinda have no choice

well, ingram still prob has real trade value. but feel like they won't be doing that

lakers pick swap really didn't end up working out for them either

would any one of us have NOT drafted Zion with the first overall pick? obv the pels get a free pass on making that pick. what's hard to say how much better a different team would have managed his injury issues since then. a lot of rehab outcomes are down to how the player handles them.

yeah he was the only pick to make given the upside but some of the bigger concerns about him have come to fruition. the underrated one is how long it seems to take him to recover and ramp up, that's not going to get better.

big flaw is that they had kevin durant russell westbrook james harden & serge ibaka on their team and made the NBA finals one time cuz sam presti put a roster from the stone age around them. but maybe his ability to identify & develop role players has changed...

― J0rdan S., Thursday, April 13, 2023 2:11 PM (thirty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

tbf they made the finals as a very young team had injuries then lost a squeaker to the warriors and that was it, if you wanted to take issue with prestis roster construction choosing russ over harden was his biggest offense, still quite obviously an absolute master of the craft tho

"Went 18/36, it had to have an affect."

Scottie Barnes heard DeMar's daughter yelling pic.twitter.com/wQ2lRT8Z9B

— Yahoo Sports Canada (@YahooCASports) April 13, 2023

amazing lol

would any one of us have NOT drafted Zion with the first overall pick?

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Friday, 14 April 2023

i was a pretty big zion skeptic at the time but it wasnt a view that was widely shared.

you don't want to understate how hard it is to build a contender as a small market team, and when it starts with the klutch mafia conspiring to steal your best player well it is going to be an uphill battle

I was a Ja guy instead of a Zion guy because I'm a contrarian. Per the other thread, that take hasn't aged well either, for other reasons.

amongst the nba hardcore the consensus on zion was a potential mvp with extremely high injury risk but you gotta take the chance, if people had known how good ja would be that risk mightve been enough to push him to 1 idk

peak healthy zion has also generally confirmed the belief that he was is that good when not injured, so it's not like it was a crazy take

i think i'd still take a 100% healthy zion over a 100% healthy ja

(but the injuries exist and it looks like he's never going to be 100% for more than stretches so obv ja should have been the choice)

crazy thing is i dont think weve ever seen close to full power zion, and sadly prob never will

and hes still been dominant when hes played

on offense with the ball in his hands yes

its honestly good enough which is crazy but without the injury history and worries he prob wouldve been out there moving around a lil more

"We've got to be available. We've got to do what we need to do off the court in terms of preparation, in terms of getting treatment, in terms of getting the right sleep, the right type of hydration, having the right type of diet."

- CJ McCollum after Pelicans play-in loss pic.twitter.com/VkrCcAcIUN

— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) April 13, 2023

its true hydration is important

“gentle reminder to drink water”
— cj mccollum

Tbf, if I was a millionaire living in New Orleans my diet would be terrible

ok i want jokic to get it again

“A lot has been said, and a lot of people haven’t been happy about how the whole thing has been going on, about how people keep bashing each other and all that stuff. Where was all that [sympathy for me]? People kept bashing me the last two seasons, putting me down. But now other… pic.twitter.com/Z7QHqSJ1bu

— NBACentral (@TheNBACentral) April 13, 2023

amongst the nba hardcore the consensus on zion was a potential mvp with extremely high injury risk but you gotta take the chance, if people had known how good ja would be that risk mightve been enough to push him to 1 idk

― lag∞n, Thursday, April 13, 2023 4:09 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

and the consensus was more or less right, tbh I would still probably take zion’s next 5 years over ja’s even considering injury risk. zion is already knocking on the door of being an elite elite dude it’s just a matter of staying on the floor. I’m much lower on ja than the consensus but to me he’s like an evolved derrick rose, a really good player but overvalued as a max guy imho

lol embiid is such a baby

it’s only because I have a soft spot for philly that I don’t completely hate him. had a long talk with my dad last night that I was going to have to root against them in the first round it pains me to have to do it

lol

I'm not going to defend Embiid - he obviously wants an MVP very badly - I just want him to shut up about it after he wins.

i want embiid to get it because i don't want to hear him talk about it for the rest of my life if he doesn't

yes. also just worry about having energy in the 4th quarter of a tight game 6 or 7 coming up.

https://theathletic.com/4408252/2023/04/14/nba-playoff-preview-celtics-bucks-nuggets-grizzlies/?source=user_shared_article

hollinger picks the ILH bowl celtics vs nuggets

lets do this

strus has remembered how to shoot

miami has 12 points "all strus"

23 point strus half

This is shaping up to be a good finish. Hasn't been more than a couple points either way since I started watching in the 2nd.

its strus world baby

strus time

congrats to heat they have played it in

fun game, liking the play ins so far, warts and all