Lol, we'll just agree to disagree here mr. fish.

Humans are pretty risk averse in general, especially if they're high up the hierarchy of needs.

Why gamble to become an elite head coach, if just being a head coach is a 10/10 life for you? You could lose it all defying convention. Just stay in yo lane instead. Especially if you know you're not one of the best coaches.

This seems spot on. Guys like Mark Price, Steve Kerr, and even Brent Barry or Allan Houston, who shot as well or nearly as well as Klay Thompson and Stephen Curry, would be big stars had they played now. Their shooting talents just not valued when they played. Hell, they were allowed to shoot threes only because they could hit 40%!

Of course this is the old school argument against shooting threes. When you miss a layup your big post guy hauls the rebound down sometime and puts it in, or the other team has to bring the ball all the way up the court, when you miss a long shot the long rebound is more likely to lead to points for the other guys. Probably there was a fair amount of truth to the argument when the model team had a completely immobile guy like Patrick Ewing or Moses Malone down low, and everyone packed in tight near the hoop. Now it makes much less sense.

It's totally this.

Sure Belichick can do whatever the **** he wants. He's earned it. HoF. Go for it on 4th and whatever at whatever yard line. Go for 2 PCs all ****ing season. Whatever.

But lets say you're Sean McDermott. 43 years old. Worked your way up. Now head coach of the Bills. You really going to risk your entire life's work, because some egghead says you have an extra +0.1 pt EV if you go for 2 instead of 1 after every touchdown? When you risk being on the negative edge of variance? Blow one game? Miss the playoffs. Get ass your ass canned. It's just not worth it for the vast majority of coaches.

But why is it some egghead? Why aren't the supposed best people in these professions figuring that **** out on their own? Why aren't they able to influence organizational change in order to gain support before pulling the trigger?

Yeah, everyone can sit up here and say "yeah always shoot 3s I learned it in NBA JAM when I was 7" "always go for it I never punt in Madden" "how can these idiot coaches and GMs not figure it out?" But when it's real life and real consequences and money is on the line it's a different ball game. I ***** all the time that coaches aren't aggressive enough and risk averse but I also know that they really like their million dollar jobs and they are going to do whatever it takes to keep that as long as possible even if it means not maximizing every bit of EV they can when it comes to on field decisions. Same goes for owners and GMs. Owners are gonna do what makes them the most money and GMs are going to do what keeps them their job the longest even if that means not always doing the optimal thing.

It can and will get to how you visualize at some point just realize it's going to take a long time. Minds change slowly. For now we'll just have to be happy with the few coaches, gms, etc that do get it.

Patrick Ewing was hardly immobile in the first half of his career.

Direct quote from the puke worthy, manufactured letter to manipulate and dupe the dumbass legion of minions:

"I’m not promising a championship."

It's crazy, but unsurprising, how clueless some people are.

There were a few guys back in the day who shot a lot of 3s. Dennis Scott comes to mind. Nowhere close to Curry's volume, of course.

3D did have one season where he shot .425 on almost 8 threes a game (7.7). That's in the Curry realm of volume. But yeah the guys that shot a good amount of 3s was few and far between back then. And yeah, nothing like what goes on today but shooting 3s is embraced now and it wasn't then.

Lol. Gotem pretty good. But it's tough to mock LeBrons letter when you're gonna title this year because of My Next Chapter

We've got a tough road ahead of us. Whatever happens in this series though, I will take comfort in the fact that the Cavs are and forever will be better than the pre-Durant Warriors.

It's not just the long rebound - it's also that there are way more of them. If you compare 3s @ 35% vs 2s @ 50%, the former is more efficient per possession, but you end up with way more missed FGAs. And it's not just the next possession - if you miss, the other team is more likely to score, which in turn means you're less likely to score the following possession and so on. Also, while 3-point attempts lead to more offensive rebounding opportunities, maybe long offensive rebounds are less likely to lead to quick scoring opportunities. I'm speculating because I don't have the numbers. I'm skeptical it makes a huge difference but basketball teams do go on big runs IMO because of the feedback loop like this.

Sure but I'm surprised that no one's making any quantitative argument either way. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough but I don't see anyone talking about the total value of different types of shots taking into account things like this.

Or, the Cavs beat the Warriors in a close series last year.

I have no idea who would have won if it had been possible to run that series fifty times, but I suspect that each team would have won at least 40% of the time.

As great as LeBron is, and he gets my vote for GOAT, even he could not duplicate his Finals performance on a regular basis. (In before "he's kept it up through this year's playoffs." I know.)

In short, variance is a thing. And yes, I'll say the same thing about the Cavs if the Warriors win a close series this year.

In

yeah, but i bet you shot (much) higher %s from 3 in nba jam or w/e than your actual player did irl. the purest shooters were prob also the only ones practicing shooting 3s much/at all, so given available skillsets i bet it was actually fine for most players not to take 3s from a strategic standpoint. but there were shooters out there already capable of taking 3s and teams should have realized their offensive value sooner

i guess that applies more to the 80s than 90s. in addition to the evolution of league average 3pt% and 3pt rates it would be interesting to see what the # of players who attempted 3s in a season looks like. it's possible, prob even likely, that the early rise in volume and % is due to having better shooters take more 3s rather than having more reliable 3pt shooters overall.

Who would ever have thought that when the best player in the world and another then-consensus top 10 player in the world joined a team that already had a multiple all star, that in just two short years and only about 3 or 4 more acquisitions, they would one day manage to beat the team that just got bounced in the first round by the clippers.

Stuff of legends really that underdog story...

The people who complain about the Durant signing "ruining the NBA" that also cheered Cavs last year are the absolute worst. LeBron friggin invented that ****. LeBron and Love to Cavs should have "ruined the NBA" too. The only reason it didn't is because the Warriors did exactly what these people claim to want everyone to do. Stuck with their own guys, improved from within. They just did it too well apparently, and so everyone cheered "underdog" LeBron with his 100% manufactured squad of teammates. Epitome of hypocrisy.

Steve Kerr had a really strange career to me. He played 910 games, and was on 5 championship teams. His career high in points per game was 8.6, rebounds career high a lol 1.6, assists career high was 3.2, and steals career high was 0.9. On the stat sheet, this guy did literally nothing, he has the highest 3pfg% of all time but attempted less than 2 per game and made 0.8 per game for his career. He was a scrawny little white guy so it's hard to imagine he was anything special on defense.

48% on 3 pointers during his time with the bulls though was pretty amazing. Made 430 in 378 games. He fell to 37% in the playoffs though, but his teams won rings while he played 20 minutes per game. Somehow he comes from Lebanon.

Just a strange career to me, and a strange player looking at the stat sheet. He always seemed to be a non factor for the most part, other than hitting 1 high percentage 3 point shot per game.

Maybe Steve Kerr in 2015 would've been more of a Klay Thompson? Exactly how did Steve Kerr warrant so many minutes on such successful teams when his one strength was hardly utilized?

That Magic team had a solid strat. Shaq would get double teamed and kick it out to a 3 point shooter (and these were the years when the line was briefly closer), and it was Dennis Scott and Nick Anderson ready to take those shots.

Probably due to the mysteries of The Triangle.

It's a hilarious idea. It would probably work now and then as a surprise play.