Devin Booker

Ugh. GG Booker. Needed this first one without CP3.

Can we skip a step and just go straight to the small lineup this time and not spend another game trotting out Boogie and Zubac for 30 mins? Cut that in half, max.

Zubac starting the 3rd Q worked out well, can't just let Ayton get 15 shots at the rim in a game

Unless Kawhi gets back this series is over though, Clipps got up 47 3's at 40% and still lost fairly easily despite the little flurry late.

You won't be able to play bigs vs CP and Ayton will kill the smallball

Glad for Booker, hopefully people start talking more about him and less about cp3 missing

I don't think he is saying Giannis is likely to overtake Lebron or even likely to ever be better than KD.

He's just saying that KD is close enough to the end of his career that his chance of overtaking Lebron is zero, whereas Giannis has maybe 1% or 5% or whatever.

Like even a random 10 year old on the street might be more likely to top Lebron than KD is.

(Although that's also an exaggeration... I mean KD could carry BKN to the next four titles in a row or something. It's very unlikely but it's not zero)

Devon Booker's Playoff COMING OUT PARTY!!!

#WholesomeTripleDouble

LAC +4 came all the way back, then stumbled at the finish line

Nah, not everyone is as tribal as you. You guys are talking about changing hindsight like it isn't the ldo rational thing to do. Curry very much seemed to have overtaken LeBron. The 2016 series showed he pretty clearly hadn't. You don't just go "well I genuinely thought for the past year that Curry was better so I gotta stick to that no matter what" lol. Well, maybe you guys do idk

Suns-4 ship it

Curry overtaking LeBron was always fake to me, Bron wasn't going as hard regular season at that point and Curry was on the perfect team for him. I didn't even think he was better than Durant then.

However, I also don't see the top 5-10 players in the league as some ever changing stock market where we need to constantly and obsessively rank them.

hmmmm

I feel like this guy probably is not going to become an NBA legend, bump this in 2034 if I'm wrong

Agree Clippers will have bigger D problems than last two series. A lot of their losses there were unsustainable run hot. The Suns having two guys who can roast the bigs and carve up PnRs instead of just one makes a big difference.

If they can figure something out on defense they have a good chance though. They shot their season average from three today, plenty of good looks that could have gone down at the end to keep it closer. Didn’t see anything that Suns were doing to prevent them from getting the same shots they’ve gotten the first two rounds, don’t think Paul coming back changes that.

idk, Bogi looks ok going in a straight line, but not sure about cutting

You're missing the point but aside from that, this is a terrible take. Westbrook and Giannis are about as far from each other as players - they have nothing in common other than both being mediocre shooters. Westbrook is a ball-dominant scoring point guard whose primary value at his peak was volume scoring and playmaking. Among the MVP-caliber players right now, Giannis probably provides the most value off ball (including defense). Westbrook at his peak was barely average in scoring efficiency - Giannis is one of the most efficient bulk-scorers in the game. Also, athleticism may come and go, but size doesn't age. Giannis is probably the best rim-runner and one of the best defending bigs in the game. He's much more like David Robinson, Kevin Garnett and Tim Duncan. Also, Westbrook's decline has a lot to do with his game becoming somewhat obsolete in the hyper-efficient modern era, on top of the decline in athleticism. Over that exact time period during which Westbrook struggled, Giannis was arguably the most valuable player in the game across both regular season and the playoffs.

Pretty much this. I think Giannis is the only active player that could reasonably get there.

I'm not saying you should never change your opinions - I'm saying that nothing noteworthy happened in the 2016 Finals that should warrant people changing their minds. It was a close Finals series and both players performed exactly as one would expect. If you thought before this, Curry > Lebron, but after this Lebron > Curry, you probably hadn't really watched basketball much before. I guess there are some fans who use the regular season performance to rank players during the regular season (because that's what the media talks about), then use the playoff performance to rank players during the playoffs, but even those people aren't retroactively changing player rankings multiple years afterwards. This is not a thing people do - Hakeem's two championships in 94 and 95 didn't get people to wonder if he had already been the best player in the league even with MJ, Lebron's ascendance (whether his first title in 2012 or the first MVP season in 08-09) didn't make people re-examine if he'd already been the best player since 2005. We all know the circumstances around KD's success with the Warriors - there really isn't anything he can do to be retroactively considered better than Lebron. Some people could in theory change their minds around whether Curry or Durant was the best player on the Warriors, since this is more of a toss-up for more people and Curry's historical standing is a bit more fragile (and KD and Durant are very close in the all-time ranking), but I doubt this significantly affects how people view Curry.

Lol what? Bolded is absolutely insane. Curry is pretty universally thought of as having a pretty poor series, and NOONE predicted Lebron doing what he did. Look at betting markets, anything written at the time, 2016 TZ, I don't care. I'm honestly amazed at bolded lol, I couldn't possibly disagree more.

Bogi starting for Hawks

Lebron's performance in the series is not an outlier relative to what he'd previously done - his performance Game 5-7 was otherworldly, but his performance on the whole is inline with his established level. What people were surprised by wasn't his individual performance, but the way the series played out and the eventual result, especially after they went down 3-1. Curry was also effective in the series - his stats looked bad because the Cavs absolutely sold out to stop him and dared everyone else to beat them. We're not having this conversation if, for instance, Klay or Harrison Barnes showed up and forced the Cavs to readjust their game plan. Curry had a TS% of .580 (vs the league average of .541) in that series. KD just had a TS% of .594 against the Bucks (vs the league average of .572) - the idea that Curry was bad in that series is a huge myth, like the idea that Lebron was bad in the Finals against the Mavs. Sometimes teams game plan specifically to take a super star out at all costs and sometimes they don't. You can't judge a player's contributions in the playoffs by reading box scores.

Doesn't matter man, forget it, we're so far apart on this one, we aren't going to get anywhere. All g.

in for the Philly meltdown

+1

Also In for some Sweet Lou Lemon Pepper Action!

Lol, seth gets flying knee and its not even a flagrant 1

Just catching up, but

Trae 1/12, Hawks up 2

Yeah I thought Philly looked awful that half

Seth Curry is clearly their 2nd best offensive player at this point and they're struggling to score against a team playing 3 white guys

doc says some stupid, meaningless **** during timeouts. im a big fan