2020-2021 NBA Season Thread

[GDAWG]

 

[MilSox]

I didn't even know Ciampa lived in Milwaukee until a few months ago. 

[Digby]

I’m also thinking about how much, I guess, good fortune got the Bucks here… it started with the Giannis draft, were the Bucks really inherently smarter than 15 other teams or did they just happen to strike gold? And then all the way to this playoffs, where they can at least partially thank KD’s poor footwork. And remember when everyone was ready to ship Bud out mid-playoffs?

 

none of this is to take anything away from that well-earned title, mind. Just a reminder that even the best teams could use the wind blowing their way, and the Processism/analytics-nerd approach that sees sports as puzzles that can be perfectly solved is inherently flawed. You have to be lucky AND good, you have to put yourself in a position to take advantage of opportunity; process is really having a vision and self-belief even when all the knowitalls try to fire your coach every other week and crow about how your star must surely have a foot in LA by now.

[Sport]

13 hours ago, BBTV said:

 

It's actually an argument for tanking.  The fact that everyone was so amazed that the Bucks of all teams could make the finals shows how hard it is to break through if you're not one of the destination teams, and they had to find a diamond in the rough to do it.  It's hard to find a diamond in the rough.  It doesn't prove anything.

 

 

A team who won a championship without tanking is an argument for tanking? You have Sam Hinkie Stockholm Syndrome. 

 

Steph Curry was the 7th overall pick, Giannis Antetokounmo 15th, and Kawhi Leonard went 15th. Landing a diamond in the rough is more common than you make it out to be. Do you have a better chance at landing a great player when you draft higher in the draft? Of course, but sucking on purpose, maybe winning the lottery, and drafting high doesn't have a great success rate of winning championships either with the added bugaboo that you make your fans sit through s*** basketball for years. And if it doesn't work, like it didn't work for the Sixers, then you've made your fans sit through s*** basketball for no reason. 

 

 

 

[floydnimrod]

The NBA draft is such a crapshoot anymore, especially as the top picks become all about potential since their only 19 (but my mind is old).

 

Here are the Bucks first round picks since Giannis:

 

Jabari Parker - 2nd

Rashad Vaughn - 17th

Thon Maker - 10th

DJ Wilson - 17th

Done DiVincenzo - 17th

Kevin Porter Jr. - 30th

RJ Hampton - 24th

 

One, this follows up the point by @Sport . The Bucks routinely picked in the teens. Any tanking they did, did not work because their two highest selections have yet to pan out (I wanted both to pan out).

 

Two, Khris Middleton was picked in the second round! By the Pistons!

 

Three, the only other player on this list that has been remotely important for the team was DiVincenzo, who got hurt and missed most (all?) of the playoffs.

 

I also hate that less than three weeks ago, Budenholzer was almost "not good enough" to coach this team.

[DG_ThenNowForever]

12 minutes ago, floydnimrod said:

I also hate that less than three weeks ago, Budenholzer was almost "not good enough" to coach this team.

 

They barely made it past the Nets and were gifted a young ATL team without Trae Young for the second half of the series.

 

Bud won in spite of himself. Giannis is that good.

[floydnimrod]

6 minutes ago, DG_ThenNowForever said:

 

They barely made it past the Nets and were gifted a young ATL team without Trae Young for the second half of the series.

 

Bud won in spite of himself. Giannis is that good.

By that logic, shouldn't he still get fired?

[Sport]

I'm not saying tanking doesn't work. I just think it's a lame way to go about building a team and it's not the only way to build a winning team.  Also Sam Hinkie is a venture capitalist jackass fraud who conned an entire American city.

[DG_ThenNowForever]

40 minutes ago, floydnimrod said:

By that logic, shouldn't he still get fired?

 

That's the problem. They're stuck with him now.

 

But yes, I think they'd be better off with someone like Ty Lue or Rick Carlilse or Spo who know how to make adjustments. Bud is a system guy who had everything fall into place for his system to work.

 

They won a title so it ultimately doesn't matter, but they could have maybe also won in 2020 had Giannis not been limited to 36 minutes a game.

[BBTV]

1 hour ago, floydnimrod said:

The NBA draft is such a crapshoot anymore, especially as the top picks become all about potential since their only 19 (but my mind is old).

 

Here are the Bucks first round picks since Giannis:

 

Jabari Parker - 2nd

 

 

Ironically, had Joel Embiid not been injured, they probably would have taken him at #2 (assuming that was the Wiggans draft and he was the consensus #1.)

[crashcarson15]

3 hours ago, Digby said:

I’m also thinking about how much, I guess, good fortune got the Bucks here… it started with the Giannis draft, were the Bucks really inherently smarter than 15 other teams or did they just happen to strike gold? And then all the way to this playoffs, where they can at least partially thank KD’s poor footwork. And remember when everyone was ready to ship Bud out mid-playoffs?

 

none of this is to take anything away from that well-earned title, mind. Just a reminder that even the best teams could use the wind blowing their way, and the Processism/analytics-nerd approach that sees sports as puzzles that can be perfectly solved is inherently flawed. You have to be lucky AND good, you have to put yourself in a position to take advantage of opportunity; process is really having a vision and self-belief even when all the knowitalls try to fire your coach every other week and crow about how your star must surely have a foot in LA by now.

When it comes to randomness, I don't even think it's a "Processism" thing as much as it is a sports culture thing in general. Narratives are pretty black and white and not really nuanced at all — it's all "Jay Wright can't win a big game" until "whoops, Jay Wright just won two titles in three years" happens and then we move on and conveniently forget we ever did that.

 

In part as a consequence of coaching, I've been thinking about this a lot in the last couple months — that there's really two ways to win a championship in sports: (1) be undeniably better than everyone you play or (2) be one of many teams good enough to win and have the breaks go your way. The Bucks were (2), and so are most champions, because American professional sports are literally designed to prevent (1) from happening very often. The way that (2) manifests itself differs based on the sport and competition — the MLB postseason is more explicitly random on a game-by-game basis, for example, compared to the NBA's more big-picture, injury-driven randomness — but nevertheless that it's part of this equation at all is something we just do not address well as a sports culture.

 

How you get there is and always will be a debate, but team-building in the NBA is more about quasi-randomly finding a core of 2-3 guys, then tinkering around the edges until the postseason random number generator breaks in your favor anyway. Tanking is nothing more than tilting the scales a bit in your favor; I mean, hell, the existence of the only undeniably good team in recent memory is down to some bit of randomness when you really think about it. The Warriors needed Minnesota to twice take a point guard who wasn't the generational talent in that draft, then they needed that generational talent to be hurt at an opportune time, and a few years down the road, hey would you look at that, they had just enough cap space to sign the generational free agent who hit the market.

[The_Admiral]

4 hours ago, crashcarson15 said:

In part as a consequence of coaching, I've been thinking about this a lot in the last couple months — that there's really two ways to win a championship in sports: (1) be undeniably better than everyone you play or (2) be one of many teams good enough to win and have the breaks go your way. The Bucks were (2), and so are most champions, because American professional sports are literally designed to prevent (1) from happening very often.

 

Can't stress enough how good it was for the NBA to have a normal American playoff again. The idea that what confers legitimacy upon the NBA playoffs is that everything that was supposed to happen happened came to drive me nuts. I don't want to know in my heart what should be. Play the games! This was cool. 

[MilSox]

On 7/22/2021 at 10:06 AM, DG_ThenNowForever said:

Bud won in spite of himself. Giannis is that good.

The parallels between him and Mike McCarthy having Aaron Rodgers to blow a smokescreen over his shortcomings hasn't gone unnoticed.  I hope the Bucks prove to be a more competent organization than the Packers and don't waste Giannis' prime by letting a terrible coach linger around longer than he should.

[The_Admiral]

"The Packers are incompetent" gets a lot more play than it should. They're nothing if not competent.

[who do you think]

 

Imagine gutting your franchise for Kawhi and a guy whose nicknames are all self-given, only to have Kawhi f*** off elsewhere after two seasons.

 

Also imagine failing to properly embed a twatter post.

[dont care]

5 hours ago, who do you think said:

 

Imagine gutting your franchise for Kawhi and a guy whose nicknames are all self-given, only to have Kawhi f*** off elsewhere after two seasons.

 

Also imagine failing to properly embed a twatter post.

Twatter? Is that like Twitter but with more porn?

[GDAWG]

NBA Players in the Olympics (excluding Team USA):

 

Argentina: Luca Vildoza (Knicks, although I don't think he played a game for them yet as he only signed in May), Facundo Campazzo (Nuggets), Gabriel Deck (Thunder).  Former NBA Player Luis Scola is on the team.

Australia: Patty Mills (Spurs), Josh Green (Mavericks), Aron Baynes (Raptors), Dante Exum (was with Houston but now a free agent), Joe Ingles (Jazz), Matisse Thybulle (76ers)

Czech Republic: Tomáš Satoranský (Bulls)

France: Nicholas Batum (was with the LA Clippers in the playoffs), Rudy Gobert (Jazz), Frank Ntilikina (Knicks), Evan Fournier (Celtics)

Germany: Isaac Bonga (Wizards), Moritz Wagner (Magic)

Italy: Nico Mannion (Warriors), Danilo Gallinari (Hawks)

Japan: Rui Hachimura (Wizards)

Nigeria: Chimezie Metu (Kings), Josh Okogie (T'Wovles), Gabe Vincent (Heat), Jordan Nwora (Bucks.  Was not a part of their Championship Parade), Precious Achiuwa (Heat), Jahlil Okafor (Pistons), KZ Okpala (Heat), Miye Oni (Jazz)

Slovenia: Vlatko Čančar (Nuggets), Luca Doncic (Mavericks)

Spain: Ricky Rubio (T'Wolves), Marc Gasol (Lakers), Willy Hernangómez (Pelicans), Juancho Hernangómez (T'Wolves).  Former NBA Star Pau Gasol is on the team

 

[Discrim]

Quite a brother act Spain's got going on there

[packerfan21396]

What a time to be alive

[Unocal]

8 minutes ago, packerfan21396 said:

What a time to be alive

 

Fittingly, both of these instances occured in years where the team with said players won a 6 game NBA Finals by clinching on home court against a Pacific Division team that beat the Lakers in round 1