2020-21 NBA Season Discussion

[falcolombardi]

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Chris Paul is obviously really good at minimizing turnovers, but I think people are making too big of a deal of the zero turnovers thing. In game 2, the announcers were talking about him not having any turnovers during some particular stretch, and literally right then, someone poked the ball out away from him from behind, and it pinballed around between multiple players and bounced back to him in the paint, and he made one of his midrange shots. It was a total fluke that he got it back and it wasn't a turnover.

For a guy who handles the ball as much as he does, I'm not sure that zero turnovers on the regular is a good thing. Is he only making safe passes? Is he not willing to take chances because he doesn't want turnovers? It's all good as long as they're winning, but Denver has looked as soft as a marshmallow so far, and it will get tougher in future rounds.

Just an observation and speculation.

the lack of agressiveness is a common criticism to cp3 but i have always felt it more "feeling" that evidence based tbh when his portfolio of great offensive teams is so strong

cp3 teams always are great to elite in offense wherever he goes, this suns team included (top 5 this year i think) so i dont think results indicate a problem with his aproach

[Colbinii]

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Chris Paul is obviously really good at minimizing turnovers, but I think people are making too big of a deal of the zero turnovers thing. In game 2, the announcers were talking about him not having any turnovers during some particular stretch, and literally right then, someone poked the ball out away from him from behind, and it pinballed around between multiple players and bounced back to him in the paint, and he made one of his midrange shots. It was a total fluke that he got it back and it wasn't a turnover.

For a guy who handles the ball as much as he does, I'm not sure that zero turnovers on the regular is a good thing. Is he only making safe passes? Is he not willing to take chances because he doesn't want turnovers? It's all good as long as they're winning, but Denver has looked as soft as a marshmallow so far, and it will get tougher in future rounds.

Just an observation and speculation.

Like any statistic, context matters.

It doesn't undermine the fact the statistic is impressive as literally nobody has ever done it since the 1980s and Chris Paul is the only one to do it since then and has done it multiple times.

[Colbinii]

is weird that pace and space took nearly 40 years to truly get going when you think about it

in hindsight it looks so obvious that you wonder why it took this long

Lots of things take forever to change. You don't need to look past the political climate in America to see how resistant many people are to change.

[Doctor MJ]

Who was coaching the Warriors when they went small back in ‘90 (I think) and upset the Robinson Spurs, was that Nelson?

Ya, it was Nelson from '89 to '95.

[Doctor MJ]

Seeing the Dirk vs Jokic discussion and I am really struggling to compare players from 2000-2010 and players from the last few years. The league is talented as its ever been but this really feels like a completely different sport being played out there now. It is approaching the passing stats change in the NFL in terms of difference.

The analogy to the NFL becoming a passing game instead of a running game is dead on. Both the NFL & NBA have had some strategic shifts on offense that makes the game more offensive - and yes, both have been further stoked by rule changes, but the strategy is the key change.

By contrast, I've been saying for decades that hockey needs to make changes because the supremacy of defensive strategy has made it really hard to get non-hard core fans excited.

The thing that's funny about hockey is that it's so, so easy to fix but hockey purists don't want to do it. If hockey goalies have to be allowed to wear absurdly excessive padding in the name of their safety, then you have to make the goal bigger if you want to have a similar balance to what it was in the Gretzky era.

Then of course there's baseball who put themselves in just a really tough position when they covertly embraced steroids and then had to backtrack with performative outrage when it became too obvious.

many other sports have became optimized too

soccer doesnt have rule changes but offense and scoring have gone up as strategy and táctics get better in both sides (less long ball game, more defensive pressing, eh )

baseball with bunts or base stealing becoming discouraged

Boxing has become Cleaner and more tsctical/technical with violent slugfests becoming a thingh of the past

statistics have changed the way the games are played to be more optimized, but optimized doesnt always means it is liked by fans

nfl, soccer, basketball, baseball, volleyball a bit from what i have seen

all of them seem to have evolved/changed, whether aided by rules or not to their most optimized styles

and in all of them part of the fans dont like the changes and sometimes blame somethingh, whether new rules or player "softness" or "advanced statistics" for running the game.

it seems to be a common trend in all sports i have series at among its fans

Agreed that all sports have evolved. Some more dramatically than others, some in a direction that makes the sport more fan-friendly, others effectively fan-hostile.

[Doctor MJ]

As in, Nelson tended to have a lot of wacky lineups that couldn't really be said to be proto-pace & space. They had elements of pace & space, but then "Hey, let's get the 7 foot 7 guy who killed a lion!".

By contrast, guys like Mike D'Antoni and (the forgotten) Rick Pitino had a specific theory based around the power of the 3 point shot which has now been shown to be absolutely correct.

I wonder how much of that is actually true about Nellie and how much of that is him intentionally playing up that image. He was such a fun guy and loved doing bits with the media from the fish ties to Pismo Beach Panthers and a million things in between. Absolutely he experimented with Bol shooting 3's and Wang Zhi Zhi and that sort of thing, but when it came down to it I think he was a pretty serious coach who imo deserves to mentioned with those other guys for how he created offensive advantages for his teams.

And he absolutely was playing tons of small ball before small ball was a thing.

I might see it different if we saw continued refinement of small ball in a smarter and smarter direction, but that's most definitely not what we saw. It's not just that he didn't win titles, it's that he'd move in a direction we'd now see as progressive only to then veer off-course.

I don't know who all was involved in trading for Antoine/Antawn, but this was a massive misstep.

[Texas Chuck]

I don't know who all was involved in trading for Antoine/Antawn, but this was a massive misstep.

Yes and No. Walker was they gave Raef $70M and then realized his knees were pretty much shot. They did not make that deal for basketball reasons but to escape the contract. Obviously on the court that trade sucked and imo led directly to Nash's departure.

NVE for Jamison was I think simply a value grab/extend a salary slot. NVE was expiring and older and I think they saw the chance to swap him for Jamison as a value play worth making.

The Jamison trade was an intentional decision and baked into their team-building plans. The Walker trade happened days before the season started and wasn't. Jamison as a scoring 6th man replacing NVE seemed very reasonable. And he had arguably the best year of his career in the role he was probably ideally suited for. Walker shoe-horned in as a starter without a position not so much.

And obviously the team immediately moved on. Jamison asked out because he wanted to be a starter and Walker because Dallas realize how much he sucked. And they got really nice value when they traded them. But it absolutely wrecked that 03-04 team after the run to the WCF.

Nellie was obviously running the team then and Cuban was still relatively new so I do think most of the blame probably is on Nellie, but the Walker deal is forgivable because it was never about Walker as much as not having the Raef deal on the books for years to come.

[KD35Brah]

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[Colbinii]

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This will be his first above average defense faced.

[falcolombardi]

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This will be his first above average defense faced.

nothingh above bucks has looked above average this series

[Fundamentals21]

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Paced himself pretty well after his RS injuries and is now tearing apart the Bucks. Not much to say here, simply a legend.

[parsnips33]

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That Clippers series is still my favorite KD moment. Just totally took over when the team was in general kinda listless and the Clippers were clearly energized

[eminence]

Intriguingly I have the Clippers (maybe '19 playoffs in general) as the lowpoint for KD with the Warriors. Froze the rest of the team out is how I saw it.

[parsnips33]

Intriguingly I have the Clippers (maybe '19 playoffs in general) as the lowpoint for KD with the Warriors. Froze the rest of the team out is how I saw it.

I associate that more with first half of the Houston series that would immediately follow. Warriors were sleepwalking through the Clippers series, giving up super easy offense to Lou Will and Harrell. There was an element of KD dominating the ball, but I saw it as for the good of the team. They needed somebody to set the tone and bring the intensity

[HeartBreakKid]

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Chris Paul is obviously really good at minimizing turnovers, but I think people are making too big of a deal of the zero turnovers thing. In game 2, the announcers were talking about him not having any turnovers during some particular stretch, and literally right then, someone poked the ball out away from him from behind, and it pinballed around between multiple players and bounced back to him in the paint, and he made one of his midrange shots. It was a total fluke that he got it back and it wasn't a turnover.

For a guy who handles the ball as much as he does, I'm not sure that zero turnovers on the regular is a good thing. Is he only making safe passes? Is he not willing to take chances because he doesn't want turnovers? It's all good as long as they're winning, but Denver has looked as soft as a marshmallow so far, and it will get tougher in future rounds.

Just an observation and speculation.

I mean yes - but by that notion any big time scoring game is also a fluke. Damian Lillard doesn't normally score 55 points, but it's still impressive.

At the end of the day, if what you said counted as a turnover he would have had 15 assist on 1 turn over. So is it really worth mentioning?




for your second paragraph, it's very much a good thing to not have turnovers. The team he is on has the 2nd best record in the league and they're on path for the WCF, so I'd say he's not playing it too safe. They're a good offensive team.



I think the idea that Chris Paul plays too safe kind of undermines his playstyle. This is a player who regularly dribbles in the paint, and hits passes in between opposing defenders. He's also a player who scores a high amount of his shots on mid range jumpers which are supposed to be the unsafest shot in basketball. CP3 hitting a bounce pass into the paint is considered safe play, but someone like Harden who regularly gets assist by kicking it out to wide open corner 3s is a risk taker.

It would seem like to me that instead of seeing a highly efficient player with low PPG, high APG on low turnovers - people will conclude he must be playing it safe instead of concluding that perhaps he's just very good.

[falcolombardi]

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Chris Paul is obviously really good at minimizing turnovers, but I think people are making too big of a deal of the zero turnovers thing. In game 2, the announcers were talking about him not having any turnovers during some particular stretch, and literally right then, someone poked the ball out away from him from behind, and it pinballed around between multiple players and bounced back to him in the paint, and he made one of his midrange shots. It was a total fluke that he got it back and it wasn't a turnover.

For a guy who handles the ball as much as he does, I'm not sure that zero turnovers on the regular is a good thing. Is he only making safe passes? Is he not willing to take chances because he doesn't want turnovers? It's all good as long as they're winning, but Denver has looked as soft as a marshmallow so far, and it will get tougher in future rounds.

Just an observation and speculation.

I mean yes - but by that notion any big time scoring game is also a fluke. Damian Lillard doesn't normally score 55 points, but it's still impressive.

At the end of the day, if what you said counted as a turnover he would have had 15 assist on 1 turn over. So is it really worth mentioning?




for your second paragraph, it's very much a good thing to not have turnovers. The team he is on has the 2nd best record in the league and they're on path for the WCF, so I'd say he's not playing it too safe. They're a good offensive team.



I think the idea that Chris Paul plays too safe kind of undermines his playstyle. This is a player who regularly dribbles in the paint, and hits passes in between opposing defenders. He's also a player who scores a high amount of his shots on mid range jumpers which are supposed to be the unsafest shot in basketball. CP3 hitting a bounce pass into the paint is considered safe play, but someone like Harden who regularly gets assist by kicking it out to wide open corner 3s is a risk taker.

It would seem like to me that instead of seeing a highly efficient player with low PPG, high APG on low turnovers - people will conclude he must be playing it safe instead of concluding that perhaps he's just very good.

people judge cp3 on style rather than results for some reason since his results dont show the limited offense people talk about with him

[parsnips33]

A lineup you can make out of only 2nd round picks from the 2014 draft:

Jordan Clarkson
Spencer Dinwiddie
Joe Harris
Jerami Grant
Nikola Jokic

Not too shabby

[falcolombardi]

seems like bucks are sticking with the same lineup

expect nets to keep hitting all their open jump shots as López drops every play and the nets to easily defend giannis off the paint as López clogs it

incredible dissapointed in how budenholzer seems like he will keep trying the same thingh that got him down 0-2

[eminence]

I don't get having Lopez in against the small lineups if you never use him on offense. No early 3's Giannis!

Energy good in Milwaukee though, Nets look a bit out of sorts.

[HeartBreakKid]

I still think Giannis is not used right. When he's put in movement he's pretty damn hard to stop.

All this isolation he does from the perimeter is jibber jabber.