Slava wrote:I can actually tolerate SImmons and look forward to his mailbags. They are usually hilarious and he has the ability to poke fun at himself and Boston teams to keep things light.
However I'd much appreciate if the basketball guys mainly Lowe can be as objective as their football and baseball people. Bill Barnwell is an excellent writer, great at unearthing the most obscure of stats and making correlations to previous games, same with Jonah Keri and baseball.
However you have to occasionally bear/skip the hipster arts major smugness that comes with certain writers, most notably that infamous Smush Parker article and Lowe taking subtle jabs at the Lakers calling the management clueless and lacking a plan at any opportunity possible.
I mean he even said the current Warriors are as good as our repeat teams in terms of talent. I mean that team won 67 games and was just thoroughly dominant since the Grammy road trip in the regular season.
I put Lowe on the same level as an NBA analyst. He watches a ton of games and is constantly coming up with smart and insightful observations in terms of tactics and strategy. He also has an excellent grasp of the salary cap, which can be like nuclear physics. And he does all that with a very readable style, which is so, so difficult when you're dealing almost exclusively with numbers and stats and stuff.
I get the hipster arts thing with a good chunk of their writers -- and basketball writing in general, which for whatever reason you see more of than any other sport, and it can definitely be too cute by half. But I rarely, if ever, feel like he's gotten insufferable or anything. I didn't read the GS comparison, and I disagree with that completely. That's borderline silly. But what pundit, when you're cranking out opinions and assessments, isn't going to have some duds?
As for the no-plan thing...how do we know that they do? Or at least, a good one? Not to re-open this can of worms, but the Kobe extension was terrible IMO -- time will tell -- and then, even worse, they tried to double-down with 30-year-old Melo. Conversely, I like the fact that we didn't get bogged down with any contracts that won't help us do anything but be mediocre, and we can take another shot this year. Which he touched on in a recent piece:
If free agency becomes a more important team-building tool, the teams with the most attractive markets might gain another edge. This isn’t something you hear only from small-market teams; their big-market brethren acknowledge the league might have inadvertently helped them a bit by prioritizing free agency.
There is a reason the Lakers punted on signing any long-term contracts this summer. They could have signed Kyle Lowry or Luol Deng, but they avoided such commitments and rolled their cap space over for the next starry free-agent class. The Lake Show might be fooling itself, but they get meetings with every superstar who hits the market. You can say that for only a half-dozen or so franchises, including Houston.
I guess that could be interpreted as a shot, but I look at it as a realistic assessment of where we're at -- a rebuilding team that might not be a particularly attractive destination at the moment by virtue of its lack of talent, but also one that grasps the landscape and took smart steps accordingly.
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