The Jabari Discussion Thread - Back 2/2

[DingleJerry]

This board is sometimes really tough to take.

I may have to go full coolhandluke. I actually like the guy. But the board believing it wasn't mostly a PR stunt to promote himself after the biggest win for the franchise in over a decade in which he had nothing to do with is a kin to believing Thon is 20.

That is the definition of a d-bag move. The part I really can't believe is our savy mods have fallen for it.

Again, you can make that argument that it was PR for him etc. It's not an asinine take. usually the simplest answer is the correct one though, so I lean toward he's just a nice dude wanting to support his friends.

To act like it affected the actual game play is extremely misguided and falls in the 'who wants it more' type takes of skip bayless. It's about the game, the Xs and Os. Middleton got the flu, Tor went to the small ball etc, our coach is an idiot, Tor just has better players and figured us out, etc.

[SupremeHustle]

Welcome to the "4 game losing streak" portion of the Jabari thread.

[ReginaldDwight]

Lettergate, it was obviously pandering and I am pretty sure that was at least proofed and edited by a PR team, but did he write that most likely.

Really all that matters is how he looks when he comes back, but if he gives 25 minutes a night and gets buckets, he can write a novel for all I care.

Needs to not leak locker room talks to the media either.

[averageposter]

I mean yeah like 70 percent of that letter was how great his teammates are, and the city in general. So I can see where the players would be pretty upset about being complimented like that. How dare he pat them on the back like that during a playoff run?

Has anybody told Gordon Hayward to stop shooting half court shots from a chair in promotional videos yet, the Celtics are on a winning streak.

[DingleJerry]

Basically if Giannis had written something similar it woul've been loved as look at this guy, how much he loves mke, trying to fire this up and go to the next level, etc.

no one would be saying Giannis was looking for a bigger shoe deal.

[chonestown]

The Players Tribune, in conjunction with Jabari Parker, under the supervision of the reverse vampires...

[TroyD92]

The Players Tribune, in conjunction with Jabari Parker, under the supervision of the reverse vampires...

I see a infowars episode in Jabari's near future.

[jute2003]

This is a whole new level of obsessive crazy with an affinity for long meandering paragraphs. ****

Sent from my SM-G955U using RealGM mobile app

[Triple 7]

Organized crime should look into getting players to write letters. That way they can profit from gambling on the obvious losses coming. Seems like a no brainer to me. (In one way or another)

[coolhandluke121]

Yeah, figured that'd be the response. You'll relentlessly rip on Jabari at every opportunity and make these strong claims but when the actual results disagree with you, you'll change the arguments and come up with any excuse possible to avoid accepting it. You're 100% right about all things Jabari (excluding all the times you're not right).

Just like last season when you would regularly take shots at Jabari when we had remotely decent defensive showings post-Jabari injury, talking up a FTD 2.0 run. But when the team cooled off and it was shown to you that the DRTG was actually slightly worse post-Jabari injury, you tried to downplay it by acting like Middleton was hobbled all season when you were just a month prior to that talking about how "Middleton is that good, Jabari is that bad".

It's ridiculous to suggest the team wasn't much better when Khris replaced Jabari. First off, the post-Jabari stats include 6 or 7 consecutive starts from Beasley before he got hurt, and that includes giving up ~125 points to the Nets and Lakers, among other defensive duds.Basically they got an even worse balance of all offense and no defense from their starting sf, so of course there wasn't much improvement. In such a limited number of games, outings like that skew the post-Jabari stats. If you want to explore the nuances of their post-Jabari run, you have to include that.

Khris started one of those games, but he didn't regularly start until March 3rd and started 22 consecutive games after that. The Bucks went 16-6 after being 7 games under .500 and looking awful. Khris had a net +/- over 100 in those games, which is absurdly good. I remember calculating the difference between what their opponents normally scored and what they scored against the Bucks, and they literally held opponents about 10 points below their season average for about 3 weeks straight. Pace was a factor, but that's still astounding. When your argument amounts to "the evidence that they were much better with Khris instead of Jabari is actually somewhat ambiguous" (and it's not even that ambiguous), that's actually kind of pathetic considering all the consideration people have given Jabari and the kind of trade suggestions they've panned. For games With Jabari and then Beasley, they were playing the worst basketball we've seen since Monta's last year.

And a lot of people still want them to match offers for him and are talking ~$20m or year or more. It blows my **** mind. Is it too much to ask that a guy you believe that much in to consistently and unambiguously make the team better when he plays? They got much better the first time he tore his ACL too, and that was when Dudley (a salary dump from LAC) replaced him. He consistently has negative splits, and as cinematographer showed, nearly every other player on the team has worse splits when isolated with Jabari vs. playing without him. This **** goes all the way back to coach K benching him in the tournament. Any one of these things by themselves should be taken with a grain of salt, but there's just constantly mounting evidence that he's not that helpful.

I may have over-estimated Khris and some other guys on the team in this year's predictions, but I see no reason to think I under-estimated Jabari. He would have gotten a little better if he hadn't gotten hurt again, but he would have been going from maybe a 4 to a 6 on a 10-point scale and people act like he was gonna go from a 7 to a 9 or some b.s. Khris, Brogdon, and Delly are playing bad defense right now, but even now with the frustrations of the current season, at least they're mostly losing to playoff teams instead of losing embarrassing games to terrible teams like they were last year. Frankly I'm still pretty confident they will be a strong team and win ~50, and I can only hope and pray that they have the sense to trade Jabari for some more help while they still can.

[Ill-yasova]

Jabari Parker losing the playoff series for the Bucks by writing a letter =

Watch on YouTube

[coolhandluke121]

As for the letter, it's not really good or bad. It probably has nothing to do with anything. I thought it was odd the way people embraced it. It was empty words. All that matters is how he plays and how he recovers. I do suspect his agent was involved, which I guess you could argue makes it a bit of a negative.

[mlloyd10]

Stop writing paragraphs

[sidney lanier]

It's gratifying to see how some of our smartest posters demolished the preposterous argument that "I love you, my brothers" is an enervating distraction.

On the other side, a new low of addle-headed points in the service of a long-standing prejudice.

[chonestown]

As for the letter, it's not really good or bad. It probably has nothing to do with anything. I thought it was odd the way people embraced it. It was empty words. All that matters is how he plays and how he recovers. I do suspect his agent was involved, which I guess you could argue makes it a bit of a negative.

You could certainly argue it was a negative.

[SupremeHustle]

It's gratifying to see how some of our smartest posters demolished the preposterous argument that "I love you, my brothers" is an enervating distraction.

On the other side, a new low of addle-headed points in the service of a long-standing prejudice.

Indubitably.

[buckboy]

Stop writing paragraphs

Yeah, stick to pithy one-liners. Screw your analysis!

[DavidDunn21]

This is our last chance and humbly suggest we trade him before he has no value left and we get stuck with a mammoth contract that cripples this franchise for years. Thanks for taking your time to read my post.

Really good post and thanks for a good overview of the Jabari era, which I hope will come to a merciful end soon. The most important part of this post is just that they would be fools to pay him a lot. It's much too risky. They're better off saving that salary slot to add an MLE player every year. As long as they don't go into the lux tax, they can use the full MLE, and as long as they have Giannis, some of the best MLE players will at least consider Milwaukee.

I agree that it's a little unfair to imply that his letter affected the Toronto series. I do have issues with the letter but that's not one of them. It's correct to point out why the letter was kind of inappropriate, but I doubt it affected the Bucks. It did leave me wondering about his agent's role, and I was really disappointed with the way he acted like he's still so important to the team and a leader. Did it not register at all that they were arguably better without him? Is it too much to ask for him to at least ONCE acknowledge that he needs to improve on defense? He did interject himself unnecessarily. I wish we had a more detailed account of what happened in that team meeting where all the vets shot him down for speaking up, but there's evidence (albeit circumstantial) of a MAJOR disconnect between what Jabari's actually place is on the team and what he thinks it is. Asking for a max deal in his situation doesn't help. He won't improve on defense if he's so delusional about his impact that he doesn't think he needs to. Just because he has a more likable persona than Big Dog doesn't mean he's any better on the court.

Where were you during all those debates? We could have used you. I had forgotten all about the Lillard debates very early on. Wow. What a miserable thing to think about at this hour. Other trade debates you forgot to mention include Porter/Gortat, Hood/Exum, Hood/Favors, the 2017 or 2018 BK pick, the Jaylen Brown pick, Jokic, Conley, and Cousins. They were almost all hated here, and there was a poll where something like 80% of people said they wouldn't trade Jabari unless they got a top 10-15 player in return. It was a really bad time to be here if you didn't have a thick pair of homer glasses to wear at all times.

I actually don't think it is unfair to say he had some part in the fiasco that took place in the Toronto series. That long self-promoting letter became a real distraction. It was all over the local and national media. Even during the National TV broadcasts the commentators were saying how much better the Bucks would be doing if Parker was there. If I was on the team and hustled my butt off only to take a backseat to a Diva, it could very well affect my focus and hustle. Then when we lost the series, everyone was saying if only Jabari was playing we would have won. This, after he had nothing to do with why the team was in the playoffs in the first place.

I would have no problem if he tweeted and one or two sentence post encouraging his teammates, but instead he wrote life story and became the story. This selfish act took away from how amazing and hard the Bucks played to earn a playoff spot. I do believe it was a distraction and did cause a lack of focus and hustle. After this letter the Bucks looked like a completely different team. You can't tell me players were not talking about it among themselves.

The Bucks lost that series because DeRozan outplayed Middleton when the chips were down.

[MickeyDavis]

It wasn't Middleton's fault, he was thinking too much about the letter.

[engelmartin]

Bronson Koenig wrote a letter too, and look what happened to him. So did Nigel Hayes!