who do you think

Yay slacktivism!

With six days notice? Brooklyn should tell him to eat balls and just not trade him. When/if healthy, they're probably the biggest threat to the Celtics in the conference. It's not like they'll get anything of value back for him, especially not from the Lakers, who have even less to trade than they did before they went digging for couch change so they could bring in Rui Hachimura of all people.

Tropicana Field isn't in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, it's right off of 275 in downtown St. Pete. Not ideal, but nearly as much of a hassle as Glendale or Sunrise. This new hipster fantasy that the team would suddenly become a local institution and pack the house if they were in downtown Tampa instead is just that. If you want attendance to become somewhat respectable, rig the schedule so that the Red Sox, Yankees, Mets, and Phillies are the only visiting teams coming through.

Nobody cares about the WNBA. Make your own thread. Meanwhile, Bob Myers tells a local sports radio station to not expect much of a trade deadline: Some jackass really is gonna trade 3 first rounders for :censored:ing OG Anonuby, aren't they? I wonder if Tim Connelly's dunce cap is big enough for two heads.

The Lakers and LeBron have each had how many absolute BS calls go in their favor over the last 2+ decades? I'm not shedding any tears. Funny that LeBron's meltdown happens right after I wrote that he seemed to be out of his professional victim phase.

The A's are running out of time, for realsies this time! Well sure, MLB already has two dead franchises with nowhere to go, why not add two more?

80+ games has been the standard since 1960 and wasn't a problem for anybody until very recently. And no, the common fan doesn't benefit from a shortened schedule, since less supply of home games = higher ticket prices. Not one single solitary person in the Oklahoma City area bought a ticket so they could watch Al Horford. Why do you think players have the room to get off all those threes in the first place?

Maybe as a piece of standalone art, but it was unbearable to actually watch a game on it.

Since when did championship count affect how difficult the fans are? Philly fans have always been a notoriously tough crowd. Boston fans were miserable well before the championships started coming and remain so, sheeeiiit before the 2005 Red Sox season was over they were calling for Francona to be fired, Theo to be fired for signing David Wells, David Wells to be starved and then DFA'd, and Foulke and Graffanino to be shipped to India. If Schilling didn't have a bounce-back 2006 they probably would have turned on him at some point too.

Nah. Call me when the NBA a) plays 6 games per week on average or b) allows its players to routinely tackle each other at midcourt with a running start or throw each other into the stanchions and scorer's table. It's irrelevant because it's not happening because revenue trumps all, so brainstorming the possible benefits of a shortened schedule is a useless endeavor. (But I do enjoy the seemingly internet-wide assumption that load management will stop if the players get their shortened schedule and they won't just load manage their way down to playing 50-something games out of the new 72 game slate.) Hey, now we're on to things that I never said! Is this the part where we kill an entire page lecturing each other about what the other person ackshually said? Players from other leagues play under more demanding conditions than NBA players do, that is common sense.

You're right, the likes of Jose Alvarado and Patrick Beverley risk their lives every time they're out there. One errant theatrical flop and their skulls will go right into the hardwood and they'll never be the same. Irrelevant because not happening. Common sense with an assist from whichever ringer bro interviewed JVG recently.

Basketball players have less right to the "we need more days off" whining than any other big four sport, especially after they fully outlawed defense a few years ago. NBA players who called it quits 15 years ago aren't walking around like Bob Newhart or blowing their own heads off because of CTE. Hockey plays the same schedule and those guys all weigh 220 pounds plus gear and spend all game running into each other and the boards at full speed (and they also have CTE concerns). Baseball plays every goddamn day, back-to-backs are the standard, and day games after night games are not uncommon. Not only that, but if Jeff Van Gundy is to be believed (he's been out of the game for a while now so who knows), they hardly even run team practices anymore; it's about individual drills now. All while the modern equivalents of Mario Elie and Matt Geiger make triple what those guys did in the late 90s. Yeah, they have it so hard. I think what pisses me off more than anything is that Steve Kerr knows as well as anyone that the NBA would never cut their regular season schedule and reduce their own revenue. He doesn't "advocate" for dick when he's not hijacking his own press conferences to go off on some unprompted political rant. Kerr's high-horse routine is all for show. He might be the single phoniest f-ck in this entire league, especially now that LeBron seems to have gotten over his professional victim phase. The game just isn't very engaging these days, even without getting into the problem of that guy you paid money to see play tonight having an achy vagingo from that brutal 3 games in 5 days spanning 2 different cities stretch and needing his load managed. No refunds! (I follow the league out of habit because Celtics and because I enjoy the sport but haven't given a dime in over a decade now) Bill Simmons and undercover social media shills like to use "the league is soooooooo talented now" as their go-to for selling the game, but all that really means (especially combined with the lack of defense) is that every game now plays out like the All-Star game. I don't know about anyone else, but I was done with All-Star games after my first two, because once you got done whacking off over the fact that Allen Iverson, Kobe Bryant, Tracy McGrady, and Michael Jordan were all on the court together, it was no fun to watch. I score, now you score, okay now I score again, now your turn, defense is hard. Much of that scoring comes from lazily spamming threes because that's the right way to play as decreed by the church of analytics. Where it deviates from feeling like a perfunctory Y2K-era all-star game is that players all have the same skillsets and do all the same things and play everything ultra-safe and are more afraid to make mistakes than ever before, because the NFL-ization of the league means everything's under a microscope and any miscues or suboptimal decisions (like shooting a midrange shot or crashing the boards) will be immediately posted to /r/NBA, MMQB'd to death, and result in fat whitey-white urban northerners climbing into their twitter DM's calling them nephews and bum-ass dudes. Players are still human at the end of the day and can only take so much of that crap. Starter pack of ideas that might make things better: NBA expands by 4-6 teams (don't ask me where they would go after Seattle and Las Vegas), the league reinstitutes hand-checking, corner threes are eliminated, players abandon their public social media profiles. None of this will happen.

There's still nobody in the west that's clearly better when healthy and rolling, but the play-in would really be pushing it. The Lakers (as the defending champs) and Nets were the resident spooky play-in teams the past two seasons and neither made it out of the first round. Going back a bit further, the 07 Heat won 44 games in their mailed-in (and injury-plagued) title defense, and they got swept. At some point you've just dug too deep a hole.

"I'm sorry that you people bought tickets to see me load manage my pampered stars tonight. If you don't like it, petition for a shorter schedule (where we might not even come to town at all)." What a c-nt.

And they would be wrong. Miami is a terrible pro sports market. It shows in their consistently sorry home crowds in just about every major sport where they are represented. Tampa, for whatever reason, just doesn't care about the Rays and in all likelihood never will. The team should just be scrapped for parts because they do have a smart organization whose efforts are being wasted here, but that won't happen in the near future because muh Tampa Bay population growth.

I'd believe this for just about anyone other than Skip Bayless. He technically says the right thing, but only once you scrape the thick layer of outrage bait (this is such an important game!) off the top. He gets the attention and the strange wording gives him plausible deniability. I bet this tweet was very deliberately worded to be this way.

> Phoenix Suns > orange and purple team since forever > teal uniforms Nike's deliberately antagonizing us now, right?

waahhhhhh Jonathan Kuminga was mean to us and now our vaginas are achy waahhhhhhh

doginburningapartment.png

Losing to f***ing Orlando at home should be worth 10 losses. That is beyond inexcusable. > noooooo but they're on a winning streak I don't care, you are what your record says you are and their average age is like 19.

Even if the Warriors blatantly coast and end up in the bottom half of the west bracket, it's tough to say (duh, it's December) who in the West would beat them in the playoffs. Memphis and NO - assuming they keep going the way they are, there's plenty of time for the Pelicans especially to fall off since that group has done nothing yet over a full season - are unproven newbies in the May-June contention arena, and history has shown that that matters. Phoenix and Denver are yesterday's news, the former is still a dumb team that disappears when it matters then blames everyone else, the latter is still larping as the neighties Rockets (surrounding their MVP center with a bunch of randos and wondering why their season's always over in mid-May). A healthy Clippers team with home court advantage would probably be favored, but come on they're not gonna make it.

I can't believe I had doubts about this game. The Suns (like every Chris Paul team) beating up on slumping lottery teams and then getting pasted against good teams when it matters is approaching death/taxes territory at this point. Maybe I should succumb to the ads and start betting on it.

I'm not gonna say the Celtics need a win in Brooklyn... but visiting Toronto on the second half of a back-to-back is a scheduling loss if I've ever seen one, and then it's out west to face three quality teams and then the Lakers, who I was going to say might well decide to play up to their talent level for a night just because... but then I looked at their ESPN depth chart and Troy Brown Jr., Austin Reaves, Wenyen Gabriel, and Thomas Bryant are in their top ten. I,um... I don't know these people.

An old coworker of mine has an autistic 11 year old daughter who, according to her, gets into tons of flame wars on reddit, many of them political and LGBQT related, then when she gets mad enough she gets off the computer and starts having full-blown meltdowns in the house, and that it got really out of control during quarantine. I remember having an epiphany that day, that this is what I've been arguing with on reddit.

How dare the Nets deprive us of that sh**tshow. Also the Devil's Tritone Jazz are 10-3.