HeartBreakKid wrote:eminence wrote:HeartBreakKid wrote:
I know but it seems like a weak statement. Like you're covering your bases to look more moderate.
You essentially listed an army of bench players half of which were not in the NBA last year, and the only one good enough to start is injured - that is not "solid" relative to what the Suns have, or to any good team really. Why do you think that is not a KAJ situation (I'm not really sure what this means as his career is long, but I'm guessing it means something bad).
If you acknowledge they're not a contending team and they're getting their ass whooped by a contending team - what's the problem? That seems to add up.
How good do you think they should be doing when their 2nd best player is playing poorly and the rest of the team are way worse than their opposition (serious question, you said they are underachieving - what should the series look like to meet their standard?)? If we take out Jokic and CP3, the Suns players are all much better than their counter parts.
It was a statement of moderation because the rest of the board is going aggressive with the hot-takes. We have folks in threads on the board calling the current Nuggets guards 'not nba players', hence my 'folks are going too far', so yes, I tried to moderate it from both directions. The Nuggets are obviously missing Murray who is a big part of their team and nobody should be expecting them to go deep without him. They also aren't left with unplayable trash. (Kareem had a series run where his backcourt went down and the guards he was left with were low quality NBA players)
3/4 of them were most certainly in the NBA last season. And the one who wasn't in the NBA (Campazzo) wasn't because he sucked, he would've been a fine NBA rotation guard last season too. They're all playable NBA guards.
There's a large gap between losing and losing by ~19 ppg.
Gordon is certainly at least Crowder's equal.
I would expect the Nuggets playing well to be able to make 1 to 2 games in the series close (whether or not they win is not a big deal either way), so far they're 0-3 on that front.
When I said better than their counter parts I didn't mean positional counter part, more like 3rd best player, 5th best player etc. Gordon is what, the 3rd best player on the Nuggets on paper? He is worse than Ayton I would say.
But this brings me to another point, most of those players aren't playing well. Gordon isn't playing as good as Crowder is in that series for that example. Can Jokic do much about that?
That's fair. I'd agree. Suns are certainly better 2-6 (Nuggets have pretty good depth after that, but not very relevant at that point).
It's certainly not mostly Jokic, but yes, I think Jokic could be doing better offensively (by his own standard). He hasn't been able to pick the Suns apart with his passing like he did all regular season. His own scoring tanking in efficiency also doesn't help open up opportunities as well.
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