KCP aka "Mana from heaven"

I also have to say how very underrated Eric Gordon is.

He gets kind of washed over with how much of an offensive force Harden is but man, Eric Gordon is a BASKETBALL PLAYER.

I would like it if he got a ring along with Coach 'Antoni.

Proprietary data indicates Giannis not degrading to Marvin Williams from minutes 36-40.

Who are you guys giving minutes to instead?

Looking at the small sample of their playoff advanced stats it seems clear that Javale should get the Lebron/AD rest minutes and that Caruso is by far your least shitty other option.

Green is your next best guy and he is +0.9 on D but -2.6 on O, but you've got to think that O is somewhat if not mostly runbad.

Kuz -3.6 on O similarly can't be sustainable. Everybody else's horrific numbers feel real.

So yeah, if you want to modify it to playing Caruso/Green/KCP 39 minutes each and dropping Kuz to 27, sure.

But there's no way Rondo, Howard, Waiters or JR should see the floor

What happened to Dwight’s career resurgence?

Dwight MURDERS some teams, but this Houston team probably isn't one of them. His best skill that I have seen is bullying guys on ORebs, but them Houston boys pack a lot of meat that he can't push around imo.

Or maybe we'll all be like "lol us Lakers are great" tomorrow when/if they destroy Houston.

I know why the Lakers head coaching has been subpar these playoffs.

Joe from Impractical Jokers is actually the head coach of the Lakers:

The Lakers roster sucks. Without Avery Bradley they have only three players who should be playing past the 1st round of the playoffs and one of them can't hit a shot. (edit: Actually, Avery Bradley sucks, too, he shouldn't be playing either.)

Blame Vogel all you want but their depth is terrible. They should have traded Kuzma before the league realized he sucked. Hell, I would have traded him instead of Josh Hart.

I think the Lakers will win in 7 mostly because of Lebron's heart and Harden's choking but if he finds a way to beat the Clippers with this team that would be a bigger achievement than beating the Warriors in 2016.

I don't really agree with this. Their role players are fine, but like we've seen (and heard in TZ) no less than four times, when you're struggling in the playoffs as a team the role-players tend to be the ones that struggle the most. We've heard the same thing said about most of the teams at this point.

Yes their role players are worse than say Houston or LAC, but that was the case prior to entering the bubble to begin with.

i mean neither side are wrong

kuzma is a complete liability and rockets will bumhunt him to the point of embarrassment probably

but he's probably still better than alternatives

Kuzma sucks and his perceived value was always so much higher than his actual value somehow but even if the lakers front office realised it, it's not like they could flip his contract for a better asset considering he costs nothing and lack of cap space

My least favorite players in basketball are players where the best thing they do is ball-dominant scoring, and they're not even elite at that. I think these guys are efficiency and roster creation cancer, and the Lakers have FOUR of them (Kuz, Waiters, JR, KCP)

I don't think it's controversial that Hart >>>> all of those dudes, but I think NO realized that and wanted him too, he wasn't just a throw-in. Could be wrong.

I have been hammering the Clippers > Lakers all year and somehow went 2-2 in regular season games and absolutely lost my ass on the Clips to win the division bet. (Still have on idea how I lost that one. In addition to being better, the Clips are way deeper. Figured either Lebron or AD would sit out a dozen games or so and the Lakers would go like 4-8 in that stretch, but somehow the Clippers had like 10x as many games missed)

I'm still nominally a Laker fan so idk if I will fire as much if they play unless the price is insane. There's also just the chance that Lebron willpowers his way to a win, which I agree would be ****ing insane

FWIW right now the lines are pricing in a ~59% chance the clips win their next round conditional on them beating Denver (which is like 97%) and that the Lakers are 45% to win if they beat Houston, so roughly 56-44, which seems more like it should be 2-1 ta worst but idk.

I did unload a ton on Clippers/Lakers to win the title at roughly 53% combined probability. Leaning on the Bayesian reasoning that I'm not sure whether either team is elite but the odds that at least one of them is good enough to be a > 60% favorite are pretty high, and the odds that that is the team that ends up winning are also pretty high.

Hard to imagine that Kawhi would play more games than LeBron.

Everything else is just window dressing in the regular season.

The regular season means absolutely nothing. Guys who aren't playing for their jobs are giving at most 60% effort so scrubs like Caruso can get by in the regular season purely on effort. In the playoffs, these guys get exposed.

The playoffs are all about attacking weak links.

Fading Kawhi teams in the regular season seems like a sharp play, I can't think of another player in NBA history who's value goes up more when the games actually matter than the Fun Guy

He's smart and realizes the regular season is pointless. Really wish the NBA would have a BYE system like the NFL where getting a top 2 seed would really matter. Maybe double bye for 1 and 2 seeds and a single bye for 3 and 4. With best of 5 in the early rounds to increase variance.

Props to the Bucks for putting the Q tag on Giannis for gm 4

"If we put it out there you were hurt and this is why we're down 0-3, will you stay?"

They should get rid of the playoffs, make the regular season 58 games, and have relegation.

Both of these teams are better than the Clips.

man Tatum complains to the refs like he is Kobe/LeBron level already

Just like tha Mavs right?

raps announcers trashing bud lol

this color guy needs to stop trying to be funny