Why Arent You Guys Acknowledging The Small Ball Trend?

[LyricalRico]

The NBA has changed so much in the last ten years. I've said this in another thread, but I'll never forget the days this entire board (myself included) was harping on Eddie Jordan's small ball incessantly. Was he a visionary?

Problem was Jamison defending PFs. He was never good at it and it pretty much offset any benefit to having Jamison as a stretch 4. EJ a visionary? No, it was born out of necessity as Kwame got hurt & never developed and Jamison slid from the 3 to the 4 when he got to DC.

My recollection is somewhat different. EJ in the post game " we couldn't get any rebounds or
stop their post players when we had to" (paraphrase)

This after playing Ruffin and Etan at 4/5 for major minutes against an imposingly
large lineup like CLE in the playoffs.

EFJ's hatred of Haywood combined with his infatuation with Ruffin/Etan/Songaila was a bigger issue than Jamison IMO.

[Kanyewest]

The NBA has changed so much in the last ten years. I've said this in another thread, but I'll never forget the days this entire board (myself included) was harping on Eddie Jordan's small ball incessantly. Was he a visionary?

Problem was Jamison defending PFs. He was never good at it and it pretty much offset any benefit to having Jamison as a stretch 4. EJ a visionary? No, it was born out of necessity as Kwame got hurt & never developed and Jamison slid from the 3 to the 4 when he got to DC.

Problem was Jamison defending small forwards, power forwards, and centers. I really can't blame Jordan for continuing to play Jamison given that Kwame wasn't that good, even under Phil Jackson. Kwame was probably already damaged goods mentally from the Michael Jordan era.

[Kanyewest]

Problem was Jamison defending PFs. He was never good at it and it pretty much offset any benefit to having Jamison as a stretch 4. EJ a visionary? No, it was born out of necessity as Kwame got hurt & never developed and Jamison slid from the 3 to the 4 when he got to DC.

My recollection is somewhat different. EJ in the post game " we couldn't get any rebounds or
stop their post players when we had to" (paraphrase)

This after playing Ruffin and Etan at 4/5 for major minutes against an imposingly
large lineup like CLE in the playoffs.

EFJ's hatred of Haywood combined with his infatuation with Ruffin/Etan/Songaila was a bigger issue than Jamison IMO.

People would have complained less if they called traveling on James

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_mdDBjpNME[/youtube]

Or if Arenas made those two free throws.

Or if Butler/Jeffries hadn't fouled out in game 5 and Jarvis Hayes wasn't injured- and if Jamison did what he was supposed to do and close off the baseline.

[Kanyewest]

The NBA has changed so much in the last ten years. I've said this in another thread, but I'll never forget the days this entire board (myself included) was harping on Eddie Jordan's small ball incessantly. Was he a visionary?

Jordan was a visionary offensively. Defensively not so much. I don't think there were the pieces there on the roster to be better TBH, especially after Arenas got injured.

[krii]

I think standard spelling emerged even later--in the 19th century with the advent of industrialization and near-universal primary education/literacy. You look at old letters from the Revolutionary War period and see lots of alternative spellings.

My hypothesis is that we are now seeing standard spelling go away as we enter the "post-literate" age. Correct spelling can now be automated and is not a skill people will need to have outside of a small minority. Most of the written communication people need to do on a day to day basis (e.g. texting, message boards) doesn't require correct spelling.

Well it`s quite interesting for non-native speaker as me. The very difference can be observed while comparing standard English grammar (UK version) with American - some tenses are used only in the UK as they blurred over the years in the US. Most of you guys will notice it when trying to speak to British, especially at the uni level (I`m graduate of the British uni and I`m working on a daily basis with both Americans and British people).

Even funnier is when you are trying to compare pronunciation (try to say "Leicester". In the UK they are pronuncing it as "Le`ster" ).

Well, it's all part of a "standard language" thing that has helped us a lot since Shakespeare. We can still understand Shakespearean English from 400 years ago. 100 years ago Russians were speaking old church slavonic and it's a completely separate dialect - Russians can't understand it. It's because cyrillic was only invented in the 19th Century. Printed words are what prevent languages from completely mutating every 100 years. It aids the retention of knowledge. Same reason Latin was the official language of the Roman Catholic Church for a thousand years.

It is well-illustrated in Polish. It is basically one of the most complicated languages in the world as in 19th century, when Poland was occupied by three neighboring countries (Austria, Germany and Russia), people were trying to distringuish their language over other Slavonic languages. They basically reinvented the whole grammar spectrum and wrote it down, while trying to do "something different thn Russian and other Slavic". The effect is quite simple for Polish (greetings ) but it usually seems impossible to use for other people

Anyway - I kinda like the small ball plays lately but I cannot understand why Kris is playing over Marcin or even Nene. Ok, I understand that he is better in midrange shots but it is affecting defence of the team IMO.

[tontoz]

Anyone want to take on the challenge of teaching hands the proper usage of the words loss, lose and loose?








Anyone?









Bueller?

[pineappleheadindc]

Also, the misspelled word in this thread title is driving me nuts.

It's...

Acknowledging

Must make it hard for you to read Hands' posts, huh?

Keep in mind that "correct spelling" is a fairly recent concept -- it began w/ typesetting machines a couple of hundred years ago (I did say "fairly recent"). You can look at a Shakespeare quarto and see the same word twice on a page -- spelled two different ways.

We want to mod gently. But also try and keep things from getting away.

Look, I view Hands like I view Ji. I tease, shake my head (like the "Historic Storm Approaches", etc. But, even with my frustrations with them and they with me, they're still OUR Hands and OUR Ji.

Joshing is cool. But don't only josh. If you guys want to have a back and forth, please hit the insults and trolling thread,don't start on the main board. Attack the idea, not the person.

Consider this a gentle reminder, all.

By the way, I *like* small ball. Not all the time. But I like that Randy is flexible enough to try different strategies and line-ups in order to seek wins. Read the boards of some losing teams, they're all over the coach for not handling rotations well.

You can have at me (if it's vociferously, in the insults thread), but I have to admit: Randy is growing on me.

Happy holidays all!

Pine

[hands11]

The NBA has changed so much in the last ten years. I've said this in another thread, but I'll never forget the days this entire board (myself included) was harping on Eddie Jordan's small ball incessantly. Was he a visionary?

Problem was Jamison defending PFs. He was never good at it and it pretty much offset any benefit to having Jamison as a stretch 4. EJ a visionary? No, it was born out of necessity as Kwame got hurt & never developed and Jamison slid from the 3 to the 4 when he got to DC.

Problem was Jamison defending small forwards, power forwards, and centers. I really can't blame Jordan for continuing to play Jamison given that Kwame wasn't that good, even under Phil Jackson. Kwame was probably already damaged goods mentally from the Michael Jordan era.

Actually, since we are rolling back the clock, the solution at the time was Blatche at PF. This was back in his early years when he showed so much promise. AJ off the bench was something I wanted to see so much but he was always to damn expensive to do it. Dallas did it one year and he was 6th man of the year off the bench. But he was to expensive so they traded him. I figured, hell, you are paying him anyway, you may as well win some games. And all that should have never happened. They should have just kept L8ner one more year until he expired so they could rebuild properly. They needed a real PF, not AJ who was always a hybrid and NO DEFENSE. He always gave up as many points, if not more, then he scored. You could never be a good defensive team with AJ at PF and Gil at PG and my God, EFJ as the coach. I don't even think they practiced defense. And remember teams raining 3s on us. LOL

Anyway, back then, Dray was always much better as a starter. He seemed to always suck off the bench. It wasn't until BRK that he finally got better at coming off the bench.

But man, that's behind us. This is the best team in 40 years. Don't want to think about all that old mess.

[Kanyewest]

Problem was Jamison defending PFs. He was never good at it and it pretty much offset any benefit to having Jamison as a stretch 4. EJ a visionary? No, it was born out of necessity as Kwame got hurt & never developed and Jamison slid from the 3 to the 4 when he got to DC.

Problem was Jamison defending small forwards, power forwards, and centers. I really can't blame Jordan for continuing to play Jamison given that Kwame wasn't that good, even under Phil Jackson. Kwame was probably already damaged goods mentally from the Michael Jordan era.

Actually, since we are rolling back the clock, the solution at the time was Blatche at PF. This was back in his early years when he showed so much promise. AJ off the bench was something I wanted to see so much but he was always to damn expensive to do it. Dallas did it one year and he was 6th man of the year off the bench. But he was to expensive so they traded him. I figured, hell, you are paying him anyway, you may as well win some games. And all that should have never happened. They should have just kept L8ner one more year until he expired so they could rebuild properly. They needed a real PF, not AJ who was always a hybrid and NO DEFENSE. He always gave up as many points, if not more, then he scored. You could never be a good defensive team with AJ at PF and Gil at PG and my God, EFJ as the coach. I don't even think they practiced defense. And remember teams raining 3s on us. LOL

Anyway, back then, Dray was always much better as a starter. He seemed to always suck off the bench. It wasn't until BRK that he finally got better at coming off the bench.

But man, that's behind us. This is the best team in 40 years. Don't want to think about all that old mess.

Andray Blatche is in the Kwame Brown category of people who clamored for him to play but he wasn't that good. As a backup he's alright but anything more than that and he'll be frustrating to watch especially at the power forward position.

[hands11]

Problem was Jamison defending small forwards, power forwards, and centers. I really can't blame Jordan for continuing to play Jamison given that Kwame wasn't that good, even under Phil Jackson. Kwame was probably already damaged goods mentally from the Michael Jordan era.

Actually, since we are rolling back the clock, the solution at the time was Blatche at PF. This was back in his early years when he showed so much promise. AJ off the bench was something I wanted to see so much but he was always to damn expensive to do it. Dallas did it one year and he was 6th man of the year off the bench. But he was to expensive so they traded him. I figured, hell, you are paying him anyway, you may as well win some games. And all that should have never happened. They should have just kept L8ner one more year until he expired so they could rebuild properly. They needed a real PF, not AJ who was always a hybrid and NO DEFENSE. He always gave up as many points, if not more, then he scored. You could never be a good defensive team with AJ at PF and Gil at PG and my God, EFJ as the coach. I don't even think they practiced defense. And remember teams raining 3s on us. LOL

Anyway, back then, Dray was always much better as a starter. He seemed to always suck off the bench. It wasn't until BRK that he finally got better at coming off the bench.

But man, that's behind us. This is the best team in 40 years. Don't want to think about all that old mess.

Andray Blatche is in the Kwame Brown category of people who clamored for him to play but he wasn't that good. As a backup he's alright but anything more than that and he'll be frustrating to watch especially at the power forward position.

Again, at the time, Blatche was young and hungry. He hadn't twisted that ankle 1000 times. He actually would put up some impressive numbers at times. And he was light years ahead of AJ at defending the post.

This was all before lap dance Tuesday.

[Kanyewest]

Actually, since we are rolling back the clock, the solution at the time was Blatche at PF. This was back in his early years when he showed so much promise. AJ off the bench was something I wanted to see so much but he was always to damn expensive to do it. Dallas did it one year and he was 6th man of the year off the bench. But he was to expensive so they traded him. I figured, hell, you are paying him anyway, you may as well win some games. And all that should have never happened. They should have just kept L8ner one more year until he expired so they could rebuild properly. They needed a real PF, not AJ who was always a hybrid and NO DEFENSE. He always gave up as many points, if not more, then he scored. You could never be a good defensive team with AJ at PF and Gil at PG and my God, EFJ as the coach. I don't even think they practiced defense. And remember teams raining 3s on us. LOL

Anyway, back then, Dray was always much better as a starter. He seemed to always suck off the bench. It wasn't until BRK that he finally got better at coming off the bench.

But man, that's behind us. This is the best team in 40 years. Don't want to think about all that old mess.

Andray Blatche is in the Kwame Brown category of people who clamored for him to play but he wasn't that good. As a backup he's alright but anything more than that and he'll be frustrating to watch especially at the power forward position.

Again, at the time, Blatche was young and hungry. He hadn't twisted that ankle 1000 times. He actually would put up some impressive numbers at times. And he was light years ahead of AJ at defending the post.

This was all before lap dance Tuesday.

I mean the window we are talking about when it actually mattered in retrospect was from 2006-2007. Once Arenas went down, this team was toast unless Blatche was actually going to become the next KG.

[20MexicanosIn1Van]

The NBA has changed so much in the last ten years. I've said this in another thread, but I'll never forget the days this entire board (myself included) was harping on Eddie Jordan's small ball incessantly. Was he a visionary?

Jordan was a visionary offensively. Defensively not so much. I don't think there were the pieces there on the roster to be better TBH, especially after Arenas got injured.

I think I agree with this. Those EJ offenses were fun as hell to watch - even though we're a much better team now I sometimes miss those days.

[dobrojim]

deleted in the interests of comity

[dckingsfan]

[doclinkin]

Just to stick a word in for handsy, no matter if his style is abrasive and he has trouble lampooning himself or admitting error, but when it comes to spelling etc he admitted early he deals with dyslexia and runs everything through a spellcheck simply to make sure everything is an english word (thus y'all gets corrected to you'll, 'damm' to 'dame' not damn, etc). So in that respect generally I'll only argue the quality of his ideas not the style of his grammar-- well ok unless I'm clowning for the sake of clowning, or writing a poem about it.

Small ball. Yeah that's a match-up thing, situational and dependent on the opponent's reaction and bench resources. I like Pierce against any of the bigger stronger SFs, LeBron Melo etc, or elder match-ups like Kobe whose game he knows well. Otherwise I think he does hold his own fairly well in the front court, and have been really appreciating his team defense in the fore court especially.

The thing is our frontcourt muscle is a strength for us, where our wing 3 position is thin, so of necessity he plays more 3 than 4. Especially since Hump is proving a revelation pulling down 20 boards and all.