No Kawhi tonight

Switch out Wiggins for Mitchell, I don’t think butler is demanding a trade this year and I think the wolves are the clear cut 3rd best team in th West.

Also, I think Mitchell goes iso ball more out of necessity sometimes because he is the only guys on the jazz that can create his own shot.

On the wolves, Kat,butler and maybe even Teague are better at creating their own shots than wiggins

Yeah when you say nobody thinks he's great and follow that up with top 15-20 it sort of hits my point. If you take the big advanced stats from last year here are his ranks, qualifying players >1000MP

RPM - 50th (4th on his team)
BPM - 94th (8th on his team)
PER - 96th
VORP - 48th (5th on his team)
WS/48 - 196th

The best he ranked was around 50th, and that is on a team that is absolutely tailor-made for him to do what he's good at. And the whole "not shying away from big moments" thing is a narrative that needs to go imo. PLENTY of players wouldn't shy from big moments if their team and coaching staff had no problem letting them jack a bunch of off-the-dribble 3's despite not being good at them.

I'd say he was about the 70th best player in the league last year, which is a far, far cry from the hype.

Then there are things I don't like about the shots he's getting. Like I've said before he's taking a ton of off-the-dribble 3's that teams are letting him have, and that has inflated his PPG. Teams go under for a reason, and him taking the shot that he's given and making them at poor-efficiency isn't something that should be celebrated imo.

I wonder how much worse or better Utah would have been had Devin Booker (younger), Jamal Murray(younger), or hell even Will Barton been put into that role and given the green light? My guess is Utah would be better (Booker), better (Murray), slightly worse (Barton) in that role... And before we talk about defense, we have to look at how different the roles are with Rudy and Favors as your back-line vs crippled Tyson Chandler and Jokic.

[edit] Also yeah DMitch >>>> Wiggins. I do wonder if Andrew would be much better with Quin's coaching though.

Yeah I could see Utah even getting as high as the 1 seed if Golden State start coasting. I think they don't want to play more games at Verint than they need to, so they'll probably push for #1 but who knows.

What makes you think that though? They run a beautiful offense most of the time and have no problem generating good shots and 3's. When Rudy came back their offense was fire. What I see and saw last year is a guy who calls his own shot late in games and like the great players do, yet made shots at a far lower rate.

I think there is something wrong about a rookie taking 25% more shots than Damian Lillard and even more than noted chucker RWB unless he's at least above average at it, and it wasn't close.

They do run a good offense, but in the NBA a lot of the time when the game is close down the stretch you need guys that can go 1 on 1 and get their own shots. Even Golden state runs a lot of iso or pick and pop/roll with Durant and Curry in the last few minutes of a close game. Rubio, Gobert and Engles aint going to create their own shots often.

Seems like the only reason to use eFG instead of TS would be to punish Wiggins for posting up and taking the ball to the hole where guys had to foul him instead of getting dunked on. I'm sure if they let him have the dunks his eFG would have been better.

Towns and Lavine were both awesome, yes, but Zach was hurt for half of the year and the Wolves were starting Brandon Rush. Given that the Wolves were starting Gorgui (14.0 usage), Ricky (17.6 usage), and Rush (9.6 usage), I would say it was pretty necessary for Wiggins to shoulder heavy usage, just like it was necessary for Mitchell last year.

I'm talking about 2 years ago when Wiggins played with Rubio, who i am positing pushes any score-ey guard teammate to precisely 29 usage, .540TS, and 16.5 PER.

When amazing setup guy Rubio got replaced with super ball stoppers Jeff Teague and Jimmy Butler, Wiggins turned into a pumpkin. I think Mitchell would look less good without him too. With Rubio out vs Houston Mitchell shot 36% from the field, 25% from three for some small, flawed sample-size theater.

I think they would be a far better crunch-time offense putting the ball one of the best and most creative passer’s hands with one of the great roll-men. Especially now that Ricky is taking and hitting 3s off the dribble.

Seems like a shrewd move this early in the season.

This pregame video is amazing. Reminds me of the final battle in 8-Mile.

The narrator on that vid whining insecurely about Raps fans’ insecurity every 5 seconds was funny.

Jimmy Butler sitting out tonight for rest.

Hmmmm. trade brewing?

He's now missed more games this season than Towns has in his entire career.

Need to repost this every few weeks when raps fans start to show insecurity ITT.

This is the opposite of whining or expressing insecurity.

I just traded Fultz + W.Chandler for Butler in the ESPN trade machine & it says that it projects Philly gets better by 27 wins. Clearly they wouldn't be that much better but how much better do you think the 76ers become if a trade like that were to go down? Fultz+W.Chandler + Miami pick is about as good as it gets for a one year rental.

The difference is that Mitchell looks like a kid out there, having fun. Wiggins looks like a beaten kid out there, not having fun.


As I've said in the past, Booker > Mitchell franchise/longterm wise

Explain?

They could have just gone

“The Past”

spliced the montage of Casey/DDR/etc

“Is the Past”

Instead of repeatedly reminding the audience to stop whining

Pretty sure I've been showing hubris and not insecurity in this thread

Not enough CANZ talk

Silver wants to tie ending one-and-done to requiring draft prospects to share medical info and participate in the combine, at least for measurements and interviews. I don't think it is crazy for the league to push for that.

What if they made it so that you can only get 100% and not 120% of the rookie scale if you don't do those things?

Got on the Wiz +1.5 late last night. This is good news

Silver’s idea and your idea both look good.

wow - there's a lot going on in that craptors vid. first, its obviously a (pathetic) attempt to guilt kawhi into staying, but more importantly they really come across very pro management (glorifying masai) and anti-player (berating previous stars for leaving and trolling defrozan and casey).

cant believe im going to have to root for danny ainge this season, but here we are.

would be peak wiz for them to lose and then talk about how good they actually are after

Except the Ainge part.