Anyway, enough sobbing, time for the red carpet.
Tyson's gone with the all black look in memoriam of the Suns season. Very thoughtful of him.
Spoiler:
Duds has continued with the don't give a **** theme and is rocking the fresh t-shirt hoodie combo.
Spoiler:
Waiiiiiiiiit a second? Who's this? No really, who is this and why is he here? How'd he get past security?
Spoiler:
So whoever this guy is (he says his name is Eric?) claims he's on the run from a buck. Huwwwwwwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa? Oh well, not many people have shown up so I think we'll let him in.
Heeeeeeeeeere's Book. And he's wearing the turtle neck again. They'll be all the rage soon, don't you worry.
Spoiler:
JJ took the bus here. Apparently it's team policy now? I think it has something to do with super-extreme PJ.
Spoiler:
Oh an here's Tyler Ulis!
Spoiler:
So ummm, we can't seem to find TJ. But he's tweeting as we speak. We're still trying to figure out what about. We'll get back to you when we do.
And a proper update before the main event
So before we get going with the main event I thought I'd fill you in on what's happened with the voting this year and what the plan is for next season.
I actually programmed up a thing to tally all the votes from each thread and it's pretty handy! In the first season I did all the tallying manually and it was a painful process. Now that it's automated I have a whole lot of wiggle room. The ultimate goal is to get the program to be so good that anyone can run the Nashty's.
I'm thinking that by next season the entire process may be automated. That is- process the page and let the program decide the votes and automatically put them in the spreadsheet. If that does come to fruition there will be a new look spreadsheet (although I'm not sure that too many of you know what the old spreadsheet looks like anyway!
)And also... this year's Nashty might feel a bit shorter. That's because it... well.. is. Our last 4 roster spots this season were filled by a BUNCH of guys. 22 players have suited up for the Suns this season. Remember Mike James? Feels like so long ago. Remember when we thought Mike James was good? Yeah me neither. Sorry Mike. I don't know why I'm picking on you.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dragan Bender
Wow, what a place to start. How the hell do you describe Dragan's season? Not good. Bad? Disappointing? Turbulent? Promising? I'm running out of words here. The good news is Dragan played a full 82 games! Every single game! Imagine how bad we'd have been if he missed some games. Oh? OK, don't do that then.
Things started well. It looked like Dragan had a chance of backing up the "almost unicorn" award from last year- that is the player with the best positive/negative vote ratio. Spoiler: he won't be winning that this year. Things went downhill after the hot start. But a 5 game resurgence from games 52-57 gave fans a bit of hope. The run included a 16-9-5 game against Utah, 18-5-1 against Charlotte and a monster 23-8-4 against Denver.
Oh, and Dragan was our hottest player over the last 5 games of the season, averaging 1.4 votes per game. There's some good in here, but ultimately I think you'd call this a pretty underwhelming season from Dragan.
Devin Booker
That's our JBL 3-Point Contest winner to you! The good news is Book's season, despite not being a full one, was a good one. My favorite tweet about Book this season came from KP:
Book improved from 8th to 3rd in positive/negative vote % at 71.82%, while taking on as big, if not a bigger role on offense. He plateaued a few times this season but the positive runs of form were there like last season, and the poor runs of form were much less frequent. Another very promising thing from a franchise building perspective: Book's best run this season came amidst a road stretch. @NO, @MEM, vOKC, @ATL, @MIA, @OKC, scoring 3-2-3-(-2)-3-3. In all those + voting games he scored 30+, with a couple a super nice lines: 40-10-7 and 39-6-8.
Tyson Chandler
Is old.
Marquese Chriss
And the award for the most ridiculous graph of all time goes to this man. In fact, I've gone to the effort of graphing his next 5 years of Nashty voting based on this season, and here's what it looks like:
Spoiler:
The bursts of good were excellent. He went on a 5 game stretch of positive voting (2-2-1-3-2) after Boxing Day and finished the season without polling a negative vote in the last 11 games, while posting 12 positive votes. Another interesting tidbit is that he only polled the full -3 votes in 2 games this season (as many times as Nashty poster boy TJ), which basically means he doesn't like fully disappointing you. Final standings for Quese: 3rd in the Cactus and 4th in the Nashty.
Troy Daniels
A pretty interesting season for Troy. Floating around evens until a decline around game 55. And boy, was it a pretty big decline. He had a disastrous February in which he accumulated 13 Cactus votes and not a single Nashty vote. In fairness, this probably correlated pretty closely with the engagement of category 1 tanking. Space on the floor began to shrink and Troy probably just didn't have as many good shots available to him. If the Cactus was given for 2018 only, he'd have been stiff competition to the eventual winner.
Jared Dudley
Has been on the PJ nacho diet by the looks of things.
Josh Jackson
Geeeeeeeeeeeez, there's a lot to say about this man and it's pretty much all good. 2017 was a rather nondescript year for JJ. But holy smokes, 2018 was incredible. For a rookie to poll as well as he did is phenomenal. He averaged 1.39 votes in 2018 (44 games). He only polled negatively in 6 of those games. Amazing. His energy and tenacity was intoxicating (and not in the PJ way). If the Nashty was an award exclusively for 2018, he'd have won it. But I still think Mexican Booker is more of a thing than New Year- New JJ.
Elfrid Payton
And the award for 2nd most ridiculous graph of all time goes to Elf. We need a wanted poster for Elf. It would read: "WANTED: Professional basketball player last seen Saturday March 4 in Atlanta. Believed to have gone missing that night on the journey to Miami. Wanted with or without hair."
2-3-2-0-1-0-1-1-1----------------------------------------(abducted?)--------------------------------------(-2)-(-2)-0-(-2)-0-0-(-3)-(-3)-1-(-3)-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
Alex Len
We were all greatly anticipating (OK maybe not) contract year Oleksiy. It was kinda alright. He improved his +/- vote % from 49% to 59%. Solid. He posted back to back 3 point games @MIN and @DAL, and only once had 2 bad games in a row. A rather uninteresting season but certainly not a bad one either. If Alex knows what's good for him he'll be making sure his agent uses these not-terrible stats when pitching for teams to give him a $5M contact.
Tyler Ulis
There are two types of Tyler Ulis to talk about here. The one that only appears when Sauce is healthy, and the other one. Y'all think Tyler's here because he's friends with a potential franchise player. You're right, but you're also wrong. Because that player is Big Sauce Williams. How else can you explain such a substantial improvement in play other than to acknowledge the incredible bond Sauce and Tyler have?
Anyways. Let's talk a bit more about the other one. Cos that version of Tyler Ulis finished 2nd in the Cactus, and if it weren't for some late season heroics a certain someone associated with Ninja Turtles, he'd be taking home the award. That version of Tyler Ulis sucked a lot. At that stage in time numerous Suns fans were thinking "oh, that's what happens when you play a 5'9" 170lb guy against some of the tallest, most athletic people in the world".
Good news is he finished strong, posting +s in 5 consecutive games late in the season (1-1-2-2-1). I'm of the opinion that we should use some form of hypnosis to trick Tyler that we're 70 games into the season at all times.
TJ Warren
Last year's Coach's Pet was back at it again this year, with some more of the same. TJ's biggest strength is his fear of cacti. He almost managed to end up with less Cactus votes than Elf got in 20 games. As such, he was a standout again in the +/- vote percentage @ 85%. Buuuuut, unbelievably that's not good enough for 1st in those rankings this year. That honor will go to someone yet to be mentioned here. TJ had multiple exceptional runs, the best probably being a (3-3-1-3-3-3-1) in December.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Advanced stats
That's right! It's Shaq! He gets the "Almost Unicorn" award this season, missing out on a perfect season by 1 vote. Still, a grand effort by him. Most fans enjoyed his defense on a team that otherwise refused to play any.
TJ again backs it up as the only player to post over +1 net votes per game played. He improved on last season's 1.03 Net/GP with a 1.12 Net/GP this year. Book also a big improver from 0.55 to 0.89.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Our first award is known as 'The Coach's Pet'. This award is given the Suns player with the highest net Nashty votes. As they say, "once a coach's pet, always a coach's pet". You've probably deduced the winner of this one already, it's......
TJ Warren!
Our next award is for the Most Outstanding In The Field of Tanking. This was a hotly contested battle with 4 players in the running until late in the season. But this year the Cactus goes to....
Dragan Bender
And we will have a new Nashty winner this year! Managing to do so in just 65 games, it's the poster boy himself.
The second ever winner of the Nashty, a big congratulations to...
Tony "Buckets" Warren Jnr.
I'm getting word in that TJ will be cryptically tweeting his thanks for the award through old song lyrics and such... some time in the next few weeks, so stay tuned for that!
Show BombsquadSammy some love if/when he posts for giving us the lovely photoshop!
