who do you think

Well Denver's up 3-0 so it looks like I may have to acknowledge them as a contender now. But more importantly:

Brown, Smart, and Grant Williams can all go.

It's over. Time to retool.

Denver was fortunate to get away with that one. They needed Murray to get white-hot just to take the lead, then they let the Lakers right back in and choked a bunch of defensive possessions at the end. That's the kind of game the established veteran team (Lakers) often steals from the hopefuls (Nuggets). I'm still not getting my hopes up unless Denver wins one of the next two in LA.

Daily regularly-scheduled reminder that: -The NBA's Vancouver Grizzlies, aka the Hardwood Coyotes, were airlifted over to Memphis after just six awful seasons, GrOwTh PoTeNtIaL in untapped Western Canada be damned. The league hasn't gone back, probably won't go back for a long time, and is absolutely no worse off for not being there. -The original Charlotte Hornets, after a failed arena pursuit and after the fans turned on George Shinn for whatever the hell he did, got shuttled down to New Orleans; half the size, much less corporate presence. (Charlotte's replacement expansion team has been a train wreck and would probably be the one moved if you put a gun to the BoG's collective head and forced them to relocate one existing franchise by tomorrow). -The Sonics, after their failed arena pursuit, were moved to Oklahoma :censored:ing City (less than third the size of Seattle going by raw CSA numbers). OKC has a great fanbase, is pretty much a model small-market franchise, and from 2011-2016 were as hot of a national TV property as any other team in the league. -The NBA bent over backwards to preserve a quality small market with a rabid fanbase (Sacramento) that they pretty much have all to themselves, over chasing the population numbers and muh corporate presence in Seattle just for the sake of being in Seattle. But you see, these moves were Actually BadTM, because Business Cosmo said so, on their annual numbers-we-pulled-out-of-our-colon list. The NHL needs these crappy, disinterested GrOwTh PoTeNtIaL markets if they're ever going to catch up with the NBA! You don't understand, there are [number] people in the [giant southern ballsweatville populated by northern ex-pats] area! AND LET US NOT FORGET that once things got truly comical with the Expos, MLB went banging on doors all over the U.S. looking for a place to drop them, and they spent parts of their two lame-duck seasons in Baseball Saskatoon, aka Puerto Rico. (The NHL found a similar arrangement with the Coyotes, back when their situation was merely comical, unacceptable because oof that would be a bad look, my dude.)

I could handle the Kings shifting to black/silver/white with purple as a tertiary color (wouldn't love it, but wouldn't ragepost over it). But a shift to red/blue would be awful; there's already way too much of that. I remember being pissed back in like, 04-05 when the Kings would have an ABC game and they'd be wearing those stupid powder blues instead of their primaries.

> noooooooo you can't go to Quebec City it will mess up the alignment! Gets more ridiculous every time I read it.

This isn't good at all. Miami looks pretty solidly like the better team thus far. EDIT: And now Jaylen Brown's heroballing, might as well just call it

And even if they were in the hunt for an arena, why would they want the Coyotes involved in any way shape or form? > To fill arena dates I know some Thrashers guy way early in this thread broke down all the costs and labor associated with maintaining NHL ice all year in a warm climate. If you commit to that, there better be fans coming. Well, it's been almost 30 years and the Coyotes still have about 30 fans. Add it up and the Suns would probably be better off letting their employees bring their kids to the empty arena to play hide-n-seek 41 times a year than letting the Coyotes in there. Also Kansas City is the meme of memes. Nobody there gives a single solitary rat's ass about hockey.

I'd say 2012 was the turning point. 11-12 was a pretty turgid year scoring-wise. Lowest overall league scoring average and # of individual teams that averaged at least 100 ppg since 03-04, after those things had mostly stabilized over the previous several seasons. Overall scoring bounced back in 12-13 (and would float around 100, where it had been before, until 16-17), but 12-13 was the first year of 3PA starting to noticeably rise year-by-year, and I feel like that's when we started to see a lot more small-ball, or at least a lot more "stretch four" type lineups. So that's where I would draw the line between "today's game" and "heckin unwholesome problematic stone age ball that redditors hate".

That was just a really good game in general.

Not sure which canned meme to respond to this with.

I'd ask what took so long, but gift horses. Too bad for Embiid.

Monty Williams has been scapegoated.

How much alcohol and/or heroin is currently in the body of the network exec(s) who is contractually obligated to broadcast the upcoming Raleigh vs. Ft. Lauderdale NHL playoff series?

The Lakers will probably beat the Nuggets too. I don't trust this-year-it's-different teams like Denver until they actually break through. They're the new Portland/CP3 Clippers/Webber-era Kings/what have you until they have officially proven otherwise. Beating up on the Phoenix Chokebillies isn't that. Beat the team that's won before and has the mojo going again.

Things are looking grim for the Warriors.

Goodbye, highly-paid stiff center. Goodbye, social media troll who still hasn't won dick without Human Centipeding himself to Curry's jockstrap. Goodbye, Kevin Martin 2.0. I haven't been this glad to be wrong about a championship prediction since at least 2019.

Meanwhile the Nuggets are up 30 in Phoenix at halftime, so regardless of the Lakers-Warriors outcome the WCF won't be a meteor series at least.

No clue, I had most of the game muted while multitasking other stuff.

Celtics live to fight another day despite a mostly horrible game by Tatum. Williams looked conscious and they only played 7 guys. See what happens when you show up tonight and stop playing for tomorrow?

They used to be pretty high profile, thanks in large part to having Shaq-Penny-T-Mac-Dwight Howard pretty much one right after the other. Magic jerseys were a common sight in the early 00s. But they imploded after the Howard era and have spent the last decade being Hornets south. (I was gonna go on to say that they've been terrible drafters during that time, but after looking it up, eh not really. They just never bottomed out at the right time until the Banchero draft. But while looking this up I learned that they drafted Domantas Sabonis, then immediately traded him and Victor Oladipo for Serge Ibaka, then traded Ibaka at the following trade deadline for a box of Nutri-Grain bars.) Anyway, the Nashville people have no actual money, and nobody in Portland is interested. Salt Lake might be decent, if they actually build that place, if the Sunday thing really isn't an issue like some people claim, and if the Miller group is still capable of being principal owners of a big-four team. If not then that's just another Nashville, i.e. just randos with a website.

Well good news, the Celtics will never change their approach and try to scrap out a win if the threes aren't falling, so all Philly has to do is just show up and hope for two more bad shooting nights. And when the Celtics do lose this way, their dopey coach will sit there afterward and go "uhhhhh well you see sometimes you just suck in this league". And then the dopey Lester Crest doppelgangers who cover and tweet about this pit of a league will back him up and spam "it's a make or miss league y'all, please stop with the results oriented thinking folx" until the dissenters get sick of it and move on with their lives. Moneyball ruined everything.

Giddy, and then upset in a few years when I'm having trouble getting a good US media deal again and can't understand why. Which reminds me, I can still hear the bleach fizzing from when the ESPN bigwigs had a few shots after the Bruins and Rangers both choked.