Good for lue

So Skal Labissiere seems pretty damn good.

Love apparently sitting too.

Lue goat

NBA is gonna get crushed in the next tv deal

Gg huge ******ed salary bubble

The NBA brought this on themselves, I don't know why they extended the AS break but didn't extend the season. Just start in mid-October. Yeah, you won't get national TV ratings against baseball playoffs, but nobody pays attention to early season national games anyway.

Nurk with the 12pts-9reb-6ast-5blocks-2steals

Denver games remaining	Portland games remaining
Houston	at Miami
at Houston	Milwaukee
Cleveland	New York
at Indiana	Minnesota
New Orleans	at Los Angeles
at Portland	Denver
at Charlotte	Houston
at Miami	Phoenix
at New Orleans	at Minnesota
at Houston	at Utah
New Orleans	Minnesota
Oklahoma City	Utah
Dallas	San Antonio
at Oklahoma City	New Orleans

I would rather off myself than listen to this commentary tonight. Jvg and mark Jackson are completely insufferable

Jackson just said that the new trainers and their science and how they do things now is an attack on old trainers and coaches cause they just told them to go play

He literally is so ****ing stupid. Huge net negative in the world

And what about coach lue. He's battling vertigo. Who's protecting them!? He's going out and getting his team ready every day

This is literally what they're saying

NBA scheduling appears to be completely loltastic. Denver play two teams 3 times each and another twice in their last 14 games, whilst Poirtland also play a team 3 times in their last 14.

Always a bad sign when the coaches are battling old black and white Hitchcock movies. Though it's probably fair to say that when Portland lose Stotts is having struggles with The Lady Vanishes.

I can't remember a broadcast being more insufferable
than this one

They're still talking about it

"You know what's interesting. You see these guys working out but I don't know how much they like to actually go out there and compete"

Just watched 2 minutes of CLE-LAC, that's enough.

Idk why they have to sit everyone tonight instead of tomorrow vs the Lakers. Just to stick it to the league? To prove he doesn't care? Why do the coaches just decide to **** up the nationally televised games?

Is this really about rest when they play the Lakers tomorrow?

It makes zero sense and all they're doing is massively jeopardizing future revenue. ESPN already going broke due to how much they pay no networks are going to be as dumb going forward.

The owners should be stepping in and telling the coaches they can't do this anymore.

Very short-sighted

It's pretty meh. It's a regular season game with nothing much riding on it right in the middle of March Madness. I don't suppose it matters much even to the broadcasters.

It matters because it's not an isolated incident. I think I read the NBA is paid 2.6 billion from the networks. Pretty much everything depends on that number. It's not like they won't be able to find a home for their games, but that number is not sustainable.

Airing these games are no longer worth it to the networks at that price. It was going to come down anyway and this sure isn't helping. Player salary's are going to come crashing back down to Earth.

Cavs might not score 60 points

You may be right, but I imagined that the networks get their ad revenue mainly from the play-offs (and maybe a few things like Christmas Day or w/e). I could be completely wrong.

I think I see some strategic rationales for resting your stars in bulk (if you have play off asperations and don't need the wins to make it to there) - in terms of hiding information - even if maybe they don't ultimately make that much sense.

I think a more real problem is the commentators not acknowledging the structural realities of the league, when the fans clearly do.

van Gundy teeing off on top teams resting players is just cheap exhibitionism/headline grabbing. You have to be pretty stupid as a viewer, given Labron's absurd usage level so far, to believe that he enjoys working out, but hides away from playing - as 8bus pointed out vG saying. And the commentators should disillusion/educate those who do.

At the other end of the league there's a remorseless grind in, eg, the last half dozen Knicks games, by home, away and neutral commentating teams equally, to refuse to acknowledge that every loss helps them and every win harms them.


Finally, take a look at http://www.tankathon.com/

There are 5 teams in the league 7-3 or better over the last 10 - the Spurs and 4 teams making a determined effort at getting a 7/8th seed in the playoffs (Por, Mil, Den and Miami). Apart from Chicago, who are sinking like a stone, every other team in the league above the bottom 7 are within a game of 5-5. One view of this would be that all of these teams have pretty much given up for the year as far as the regular season is concerned. (And maybe more fool the Spurs for pressing on.) Ofc the bottom 7 teams are engaged in a race to lose as many games in next 14 as possible.

Literally nothing you said has anything to do with the subject at hand.

Playoffs are bid on differently from the regular season I think.

his employer is on a path to bankruptcy if things dont change

http://www.espn.co.uk/nba/story/_/id...deals-espn-tnt

I have no idea. I just googled and that was one of the first hits. It seems from the ESPN article that the package ESPN negotiated was a joint regular season and play offs package - or maybe two packages were agreed at the same time (which from a business pov comes to the same thing).

I really don't believe that whatever financial problems that espn have are actually caused by the handful of games where top teams rest players leading to slightly fewer viewers leading to less ad revenue.

The correct response in any case would be for the people employed by ESPN to explain/educate about/build a narrative about the strategies of resting players. That these are rare, but predictable events and blah blah blah. Just like every single football league in the world has to do.

Per the article above it seems that they are locked in for 9 years from 2016 - so I'm not sure whining is really going to help.

Au contraire. These are the doldrums of the NBA season. Less than a third of the teams in the league are trying hard to either win or lose their games at the moment. Most are sitting pat. Whether Lue rests his team today or another day is irrelevant in the grand scheme of the sporting aims of the teams. (Tho' the specific days might (conceivably) actually matter - eg, last week Kerr had some kind of narrative for his specific choice of resting against the Spurs.) And those aims are what their fan bases are interested in and what gets them sales of baseball caps in China and so on.

ESPN should educate its viewers/understand that its viewers are already educated enough to understand that not everything is FRANTICALLY IMPORTANT - OMFG OMFG YOU HAVE TO WATCH THIS.



The schedule should be more spread out. Back to back games are an absurdity. (I don't agree with it, but you could also alternatively argue reasonably that the reg season should be shorter.)

Lol at this

tony parker definitely needs to play less, this is painful

Denver just put Tom Brady on the jumbotron to bring out the boos as Harden was shooting FT's LOL

I'm beyond trying to figure out W/L because it seems both teams are pulling wins out of their butts and losing stinkers. I think Denver basically needs to be 1 clear of Portland after their meeting on the 26th because I like their schedule after that a little more.

That will be hard to do though, if Portland loses to Miami I'll feel a little better about it.