Brooklyn didn't get enough from Harris in the series to cover for Irving's absence & Harden's limitations; 16-49 on 3's.

I’m glad the correct call was made. That’s all I care about.

However, why isn’t the clock given a full reset?

What about Green? He can play and proved it. Not when you won't let him.

the player who just played all 53 minutes in an overtime playoff game wasn't mega-efficient, says the worst poster on this site.

Green was getting cooked on D really bad, but yeah surprised he didn't play more

Nash has done a great job this year I think, probably just figured Bucks had made the proper adjustments on him

Blake's D was way better

Thank you for the clarification. Just another thing I thought I knew that I didn’t know.

Maybe he should've passed more. When you're getting doubled all the time, there probably are some open teammates you're not seeing.

Luckily for me, you're still here.

Dude they changed that rule a year ago. It’s 14 on all orebs. Even when it’s batted around and goes out of bounds or whatnot. They didn’t just pick a random # to set the clock at after the rebound.

Edit: slow pony.

candybar is probably best poster in thread imo

It sucks I had to root against KD because I didn’t want Kyrie to win a title. KD was awesome tonight

Guy asks for rules clarification and gets this sort of response. **** off!

Durants legacy is tricky. Hes running out of time to stack enough titles for all time top 5.

I personally feel hes one of the best players ever, but I feel he won't win enough titles for enough people to rank him in the top 5 if he doesn't win a couple in the next 3 years. He also has another player entering the league in 2 years who has his same skillset, but with slightly better dimensions and athleticism, who could make him seem diminished, especially if that player ends up with more titles.

Btw, I'm kind of glad the Bucks won just to shut down all the recent chatter around how players like Gobert/Simmons/Giannis aren't good in the playoffs. Superstars of nearly every kind imaginable have been rendered ineffective by scheming at times and there's no particular superstar archetype that's immune to this. Sure, better and more versatile players are more resilient, but practically every player has at least some weaknesses and the main way teams counter having their superstar being schemed is by having better and more complementary talent. Gobert and Giannis aren't surrounded by that much talent and it's not like their coaches have done anything without them.

I think the volume iso scorer archetype (i.e. bucket getter) has recently come to be seen as the type that does well in the playoffs, but I've never seen any justification for this. Honestly, I think it's mostly about the fact that casual fans really see the 1-on-1 aspect of basketball and that sometimes the best way to scheme against such players end up being letting them take a lot of inefficient shots, which hurts the team, but often result in a respectable stat line for the player. I guess it doesn't hurt that the two best players that belong to this archetype (mainly KD and Kawhi) have probably had the best luck in terms of supporting casts among superstars outside of Curry.

To who? If Kyrie and a healthy Harden were playing I'd agree with you, but I think you're being very harsh on him as is. Sure 58.8% TS is nothing special if considered in a vacuum, but efficiency should always be thought of in the context of what else the offence could have been expected to do with those shots IMO. Without Kyrie, Harden injured and against a game 7 Bucks D, I think it's pretty damn great. The fact that despite the massive load he still had a higher TS than his team overall, tells me he was probably shooting every bit as much as he should have.

Why the douche response?

candybar just has a hate boner for KD. If that was Lebron instead of KD he would have made an 800 word post about how much the rest of his team let down their superstar, how Harden went 5-17 and Harris couldnt hit the backside of a barn. instead the conclusion that he drew from the game was that KD was not mega-efficient.

You're missing the context here - I called his performance great, but not transcendental and explained why this was merely a great performance, not an all-time, transcendental performance, despite scoring 48 points. Then a troll called me the worst poster on the site, not having understood what I was saying. I think we both agree that he did what he was supposed to do and his extremely high scoring is an artifact of playing time + usage. For this to be transcendental performance despite average-ish scoring efficiency, he had to be doing a lot more outside of scoring but he didn't.

I think one of the reasons he didn't pass more is they played Bruce Brown 52 minutes to Jeff Green 13, I don't really hate the decision as they came damn close to winning and Brown played well overall (made some huge plays) but it was a little vexxing. It definitely mucked up their offense at times. When KD had his massive run in gm 5, it was going 5 out and Brown barely played.

Given how talent deficient the Nets were after KD, surprised they didn't try to run the 5 out attack more and let him take it home.

This is true to an extent, I talked about it before. When Giannis, Westbrook, Simmons suck it just really sticks out like a sore thumb, it looks gross and unnatural for these big, strong, athletic freaks to be so limited (even LeBron at times)

When KD, Kawhi or Curry struggles, they basically just miss some shots that they otherwise hit and that is all. So less grand narratives emerge.

In Simmons/Gobert case though, they do have real limitations that seem to make their regular season value >>>> their value at the highest levels...I mean, Simmons isn't even struggling at the highest levels, he's struggling vs the Hawks

Giannis as well I guess, he's just a 2x MVP legend so just being really, really good in the playoffs is still enough.

Yea that's fair, I mean it's not even his own best game in the past week, so...

some random takes from a washed up has-been TZ reg - terribly formated because they're mostly stream of consciousness:

- The way I've come to think about how we evaluate players, and how that has evolved over time, is that there are cycles of how large the 'gap' is between the stat nerds/blog bois evaluation of the game, and the regs/casual fan evaluation of the game. Basically someone will come up with a new way to think about the game that's revolutionary, there'll be a large 'gap' between the early adopters and everyone else, and then eventually the rest of the league will catch up as it becomes proven.

An unsurprising example of this is the 3pt revolution. Even with the SSOL Suns or the Dwight/Rashard/Turkoglu Magic teams, it really didn't take off until the Rockets and Warriors broke the league. And it was around then when you had a pretty large gap in thinking - some people thought players like DDR were amazing, and other people felt differently. Then, over time, the rest of the league and its zeitgeist caught up.

Anyway, I'd say right now the 'gap' in that understanding feels like it's fairly small at the moment - pretty much everyone agrees that 3s are good, efficiency is important, you need switchable defenders, etc. And I think in some ways this can make discourse quite difficult, because you really have to look and think and analyse to be able to add lots of value beyond the obvious. I still haven't really thought this concept through, but it's fun to think about.

- Anyway, with the above in mind, I think it has led to us a natural point of tension when evaluating players - where we look at players who are have serious flaws, and really struggle to compare them to more versatile players. So when we look at the likes of Gobert, Simmons, present-day Draymond Green, etc. - it's easy to see their value as 'capped' because they can exploited, or there's 1-2 key things that they can't do (mostly shooting efficiently, because we value that so highly right now). There are other players who, by our eye test, are much more well-rounded players and so there's theoretically no ceiling to their value on a team - but is that really the case? Or are we just looking for the wrong things?

For example, Ben can't shoot and that hurts his value on offense, especially towards the end of the game. But Curry is never going to be able to switch onto wings and bigs and protect the rim the way Ben can, and this hurts his value on defense.

Now, the obvious counter to that example is that Curry doesn't need to be good at defending in the way that Ben needs to be good at shooting - one of those skills has far more utility at the PG position than the other. But, I think it bears thinking about, because in theory Simmons' skillset *should* allow for flexibility and experimentation at other positions

Personally, I'd put forward a few positions based on this:
1. 95% of players today are more versatile and well-rounded than 95% of players in the past - and this is a key aspect of the 'evolution of the league'
2. That said, every player today has 'capped' value, we're just still not very good at seeing it beyond some very obvious examples
3. At the moment, the way the league is currently structured, some of these skill 'caps' seem to matter more than others (i.e. shooting and switchability on defense are hot commodities)
4. The way to compensate for point #2 is through coaching and roster construction - good teams do this consistently, but probably still not enough
5. As we move closer and closer to positionless basketball, #3 will become less true - although it will never go away completely. But if we get to a point where the PG on every team is 6'10, then someone like Curry would be exposed on defense (just like someone like Rudy is starting to be exposed against some line-ups)

There's a lot more in my head that I can't really be bothered putting on paper right now, but that's sort of where my head is at with a lot of these discussions.

Bucks matchup well with everyone left imo, nothing close to KD on any of these teams besides kawhi but he seems dead

Also, this is gonna sound kinda flimsy but this is really the first big playoff series Giannis won and I think the monkey is off his back a bit now. May be able to just go out there and play his game, so often he seems in his own head about what shots to take.

He really carried the Bucks tonight though, Jrue/Middleton showed up late but that is a blowout if he doesn't have the game he had through the first 3 quarters with how those guys played.

What’s the word on CP3 return. Guy always disappears when it counts but a heathy, full rostered Suns team has to be favored to ship now. No?

The same narrative exists to a lesser extent against Curry though - Curry gets a lot more shots in the context of a system, rather than isos, so when teams scheme hard against him, he gets fewer shots, but his teammates get more open shots.

You're probably overrating them in the regular season though. Gobert wouldn't be an amazing regular season player either in a neutral context. He may barely be the 10th best in the specific team context he's in, because they built a nice regular season team around him, but that's not how good he'd be on most teams. Simmons is like a top-30 player in a vacuum and may be more like a top-40/50 player in the specific team context (he'd be much better on a team without a star center). Players at that level are going to look redundant at times in the playoffs if they are playing badly.

Giannis has been roughly as good as KD this series. Despite that, with the series tied at 3-3, we had all these people talking about 1) how KD is the best player in the league and 2) how you can't win with Giannis as the best player. Lots of people were waiting for the Bucks to lose so that they could push these narratives further, but I suspect that those same people who were going to try to use this result in a very close series to push narratives are going to completely ignore the result, now that it's incompatible with those narratives.

I mean, with how good Giannis has been in the regular season, he hasn't been quite as good in the playoffs, but I think this is a phase that most superstars go through - younger superstars suffer from trying too hard in the regular season and not having their game be fully battle-tested in the playoffs. Older superstars hold back a bit during the regular season and they have a long history of being schemed against in the playoffs, so their game is more ready for the playoffs.

I thought the main reason for this was that Jeff Green was dealing with an injury? Btw, in terms of the overall talent, the Nets weren't deep, but Harden looked reasonable in Games 6/7 and Blake Griffin was very good in this series - he played at a borderline all-star level and certainly looked better than Jrue Holiday, despite some limitations. The Bucks were deeper but even with all the injuries, the Nets generally had a better top-3 than the Bucks (Kyrie >> Middleton > Hobbled Harden).

CP is out tomorrow, not sure on gm 2

Bucks are currently +190 to title, Suns +210 I am seeing

I think Bucks are the best team left, won't have HCA vs anyone though

Giannis could give Suns a lot of the same problems on D that AD did in gm 2 and 3 before dying, Holiday on ball very valuable vs them as well