pepe1991 wrote:People need to calm down

It's preseason. There is viral video of Jokic last night refusing to play defense because, why bother, it's preseason?!
As i post this, Lakers are down by near 50, Jazz lost to Blazers by 38. Warriors are 5-0 in preseason, Nuggets 1-4, Kings 0-5. Non of it matters. They all start at 0-0 within few days.
Some teams used presason to really just throw s*** at wall expecting to get new Salvador Dali picture out of it, some use it to build chemistry, some treat it as waste of time with high injury risk.
Embiid isn't hurt, they just elected to not play him in preseason games this year .
Victor only played 37 min of preseason in 2 out of 5 games because Pop probably doesn't want his 7'2 athlete to be exposed to rackless talentless fools that will go with 100% force because they are fighting for contracts.
As for Black and "role". He simply wasn't playmaker as a rookie. Hence, 1,3 apg. Would his role change this year? I belive not by much, because on most nights Black still won't be playing more than 15-18 mpg and during that period lot of times he will share floor with Cole but also with Franz, who was last year bench connector.
Especially now, with Ingles gone, Franz will have even bigger role in keeping bench offense going.
Black looks better than last year, and we all expected that, over past 3 games he showed playmaking flashes but again,
context of it matters, majority of min he collected was against fringe nba players and kind a non existing defense. It's good he can take adventage of it, but we won't learn ANYTHING about ANYBODY watching preseason game, especially in situation where 3 best opposing players are out. And for damn sure next time we meet 76ers they won't be led by Ricky Council 4th and Jeff Dowtin junior. ( literally had to google who those bums are, turns out one of them even played 4 games for Magic

) .
We are just 5 days away from real thing!