Giannis - 2X MVP - FMVP - DPOY - Offseason discussion

[TroyD92]

Didn't even notice CHL going into hiding. Didn't pick him being that soft. Imagine taking your sports opinions that seriously? Come on mate if you're lurking, who gives a **** about being wrong, you can still be a fan of a champion team right?

Think TD disappeared too

[AussieBuck]

Didn't even notice CHL going into hiding. Didn't pick him being that soft. Imagine taking your sports opinions that seriously? Come on mate if you're lurking, who gives a **** about being wrong, you can still be a fan of a champion team right?

Think TD disappeared too

Blanking on who TD is?

[RiotPunch]

Didn't even notice CHL going into hiding. Didn't pick him being that soft. Imagine taking your sports opinions that seriously? Come on mate if you're lurking, who gives a **** about being wrong, you can still be a fan of a champion team right?

Think TD disappeared too

Blanking on who TD is?

Can't be TroyD92, right?

[mediocrityrules]

Didn't even notice CHL going into hiding. Didn't pick him being that soft. Imagine taking your sports opinions that seriously? Come on mate if you're lurking, who gives a **** about being wrong, you can still be a fan of a champion team right?

Yep, everyone starts the season fresh now. Clean slate and all that stuff.

We can start our horrible hot takes after a couple of games in, as i have no doubt we will, but for now, it's all good. Everyone is forgiven. Everyone is loved. Everyone starts anew.

[LuessiT]

Luckily I'm an optimist at heart so I'll never go fully overboard but I'm pretty sure I was in the 'I would trade Giannis for Luka' camp. TBH I still don't think that would be an outlandish opinion to have thinking about longevity. That said, this team grew immensely during the playoff run. The team that went into the Nets series wouldn't beat the Suns. The team that bested the Suns would probably take the injured Nets in 6. Something just clicked.

[DutchManDanFan]

Luckily I'm an optimist at heart so I'll never go fully overboard but I'm pretty sure I was in the 'I would trade Giannis for Luka' camp. TBH I still don't think that would be an outlandish opinion to have thinking about longevity. That said, this team grew immensely during the playoff run. The team that went into the Nets series wouldn't beat the Suns. The team that bested the Suns would probably take the healthy Nets in 6. Something just clicked.

Fixed

[TroyD92]

Think TD disappeared too

Blanking on who TD is?

Can't be TroyD92, right?

The guy who was crying for bud to get fired. TD something iirc

[Pachinko_]

Cmon man, we've said it a thousand times... what happens in game thread stays in game thread. Nobody's thinking clearly, never mind when you're down 0-2 in the playoffs.

[jute2003]

Blanking on who TD is?

Can't be TroyD92, right?

The guy who was crying for bud to get fired. TD something iirc

He's like a low budget magic giannson/chl mashup

[jute2003]

Tbf, Giannis completely reinventing himself mid playoffs was pretty unprecedented. He was pretty retched for a the first handful of games. I dont know why or how it all clicked for him but it definitely did.

[HKPackFan]

I didn't think we would lose posters over a championship run. I thought everyone would just celebrate all bad takes and all.

[greekbuck34]

Tbf, Giannis completely reinventing himself mid playoffs was pretty unprecedented. He was pretty retched for a the first handful of games. I dont know why or how it all clicked for him but it definitely did.

Giannis had 23.5-15-8 on only 3 turnovers against Miami's wall with complete shutdown defense on Jimmy Butler in the first series.

[MartyConlonOnTheRun]

Tbf, Giannis completely reinventing himself mid playoffs was pretty unprecedented. He was pretty retched for a the first handful of games. I dont know why or how it all clicked for him but it definitely did.

Yeah, you need some crazy star performances and a lot of luck. I kind of feel like our championship is comparable to the Raptors a few years back. Re-simulate the playoffs 100x and we probably win 5x. (For fun... 60x Nets, 8x Clippers, 5x Lakers/Suns, ~3x Jazz, 6ers, etc) That doesn't mean we were a damn good team and stepped up with amazing performances when it mattered.

[TroyD92]

Tbf, Giannis completely reinventing himself mid playoffs was pretty unprecedented. He was pretty retched for a the first handful of games. I dont know why or how it all clicked for him but it definitely did.

Giannis had 23.5-15-8 on only 3 turnovers against Miami's wall with complete shutdown defense on Jimmy Butler in the first series.

Miami were frauds. They got exposed. Not sure this disproves the idea that he had a mentality shift and turned into Shaq

[Milbucks96]

Tbf, Giannis completely reinventing himself mid playoffs was pretty unprecedented. He was pretty retched for a the first handful of games. I dont know why or how it all clicked for him but it definitely did.

Giannis had 23.5-15-8 on only 3 turnovers against Miami's wall with complete shutdown defense on Jimmy Butler in the first series.

Spoiler:

Like I said in a post earlier, I don’t want to go back down this road of negativity after such a great run and after being one of the most vocal about giannis’s playoff shortcomings but have since admitted I was wrong after giannis turned it around.

But post like this are the things that really made me so frustrated and still does sometimes. I know you’re probably a huge Giannis fan first and a bucks fan second so it’s instinct to defend Giannis and I get that fr but Giannis was nowhere as good as those numbers suggest. It was also the third series in a row that he played bad against a non-bottom feeder team.

He had a 50% ts% and shot 6% from 3 on 4 attempts a game and although the assist numbers look great at the end of the series, he got half of them (15) in game 4 when he finally decided to pass to the hot hand instead of force shots. If anybody’s still denying that before game 4 of the nets series that Giannis was bad by his standards then I can’t take them seriously.

At the end of the day, winning cures all. So the bad performances of the past don’t mean as much as they did before, but the points and arguments I and a few others made were valid at the time. I remember making a post about just wanting to see Giannis play at his regular season level in series against a good team, and people was acting like it was blasphemy. It was multiple posters shifting the blame and doing mental gymnastics about why he was going 1/8 from 3 in a game and it really wasn’t his fault.

TLDR: Giannis wasn’t good in the first half of the playoffs and it’s ok to admit that. He turned it around in the second half and the rest is history.

[Sigra]

CHL looks like guy who posts only to talk about what is wrong. When nothing is wrong he doesnt post. Simple as that.

Something was very wrong about Giannis for years. He played like he wants to be Kobe. Then in the middle of last playoffs he changed 100% and started to play like Shaq. In the finals he even shortened his FT routine to 8 seconds and then in game 6 had 17-19 free throws.

Inteligent people attacked him for playing like Kobe because he should play like Shaq. CHL was wery right in 99% of things regarding Giannis. But Giannis then changed. It was not logical to expect that change honestly. He was very stuborn to play like Kobe for years. And to be disapointmant in playoffs. Not sure what happened. Some trully divane intervention. But he changed.

CHL did post after finalls. You can search his post history and see that. He is probably just not a guy who posts things like "oh yeah" or "i am so happy". I guess.

[greekbuck34]

Miami's wall with Bam inside not getting called for fouls or moving screns and box outs is not a joke. Efficiency will go down when you are defended like that but when you average nearly a triple double with just 3 turnovers while shuting down their best player it doesn't matter.

Miami thought they can get away with it again by throwing all their defense on Giannis and forcing the others to beat them but Giannis was improved(no charges, great passing), Jrue wasn't Bledsoe and he was in fact our 2nd best player this series, Khris was great, Forbes and the rest made crucial open 3s and we wiped them out easily.

Everytime the Suns tried to wall Giannis off later, Giannis counteracted with the perfect pass or Jrue/Khris had a great PNR and Monty Williams had to switch back on normal defense. He was not the same this entire playoffs but not because he switched from Kobe to Shaq but mainly because he and our team could adapt more quickly to diferrent types of defenses. If there is a wall at 100% of the time Giannis can't play like Shaq. He has to make the correct pass , Jrue and Khris have to take advantage of Giannis' gravity and our shooters have to make the completely wide open shots.

Honestly it felt that we can win easier against the wall this season than having Giannis dominate 1v1 while Khris and Jrue go from 20% to 50% efficiency game by game. We just struggled a lot because our perimeter shot was trully garbage this season(the worst of a championship team the last 17 seasons).

[Pachinko_]

Spoiler:

Like I said in a post earlier, I don’t want to go back down this road of negativity after such a great run and after being one of the most vocal about giannis’s playoff shortcomings but have since admitted I was wrong after giannis turned it around.

But post like this are the things that really made me so frustrated and still does sometimes. I know you’re probably a huge Giannis fan first and a bucks fan second so it’s instinct to defend Giannis and I get that fr but Giannis was nowhere as good as those numbers suggest. It was also the third series in a row that he played bad against a non-bottom feeder team.

He had a 50% ts% and shot 6% from 3 on 4 attempts a game and although the assist numbers look great at the end of the series, he got half of them (15) in game 4 when he finally decided to pass to the hot hand instead of force shots. If anybody’s still denying that before game 4 of the nets series that Giannis was bad by his standards then I can’t take them seriously.

At the end of the day, winning cures all. So the bad performances of the past don’t mean as much as they did before, but the points and arguments I and a few others made were valid at the time. I remember making a post about just wanting to see Giannis play at his regular season level in series against a good team, and people was acting like it was blasphemy. It was multiple posters shifting the blame and doing mental gymnastics about why he was going 1/8 from 3 in a game and it really wasn’t his fault.

TLDR: Giannis wasn’t good in the first half of the playoffs and it’s ok to admit that. He turned it around in the second half and the rest is history.

It's the language that bothers me. People turn around saying things like Giannis was bad, retched, horrible etc.
And they are saying this about a guy who could literally finish every single game with 9 points and he would still go straight to the hall of fame, because he's basically Dennis Rodman everywhere else. And in the 1st game against Brooklyn the guy had 34 points on 67% shooting, he was easily the best player on the floor, and he got called the same adjectives because we lost.

Now I understand this is the language that NBA fans and media use. I understand there is a different standard for MVP type players, and I understand that winning is the most important thing. And I dont give a ****. Because it's wrong, simple as that. Words have a meaning, people can read numbers and should be able to understand what individual players do on the floor regardless if the team got over the line or not. Because when people don't, star players bolt to go and form superteams, and this is absolutely 100% the right thing for them to do.

[sidney lanier]

Spoiler:

Like I said in a post earlier, I don’t want to go back down this road of negativity after such a great run and after being one of the most vocal about giannis’s playoff shortcomings but have since admitted I was wrong after giannis turned it around.

But post like this are the things that really made me so frustrated and still does sometimes. I know you’re probably a huge Giannis fan first and a bucks fan second so it’s instinct to defend Giannis and I get that fr but Giannis was nowhere as good as those numbers suggest. It was also the third series in a row that he played bad against a non-bottom feeder team.

He had a 50% ts% and shot 6% from 3 on 4 attempts a game and although the assist numbers look great at the end of the series, he got half of them (15) in game 4 when he finally decided to pass to the hot hand instead of force shots. If anybody’s still denying that before game 4 of the nets series that Giannis was bad by his standards then I can’t take them seriously.

At the end of the day, winning cures all. So the bad performances of the past don’t mean as much as they did before, but the points and arguments I and a few others made were valid at the time. I remember making a post about just wanting to see Giannis play at his regular season level in series against a good team, and people was acting like it was blasphemy. It was multiple posters shifting the blame and doing mental gymnastics about why he was going 1/8 from 3 in a game and it really wasn’t his fault.

TLDR: Giannis wasn’t good in the first half of the playoffs and it’s ok to admit that. He turned it around in the second half and the rest is history.

It's the language that bothers me. People turn around saying things like Giannis was bad, retched, horrible etc.
And they are saying this about a guy who could literally finish every single game with 9 points and he would still go straight to the hall of fame, because he's basically Dennis Rodman everywhere else. And in the 1st game against Brooklyn the guy had 34 points on 67% shooting, he was easily the best player on the floor, and he got called the same adjectives because we lost.

Now I understand this is the language that NBA fans and media use. I understand there is a different standard for MVP type players, and I understand that winning is the most important thing. And I dont give a ****. Because it's wrong, simple as that. Words have a meaning, people can read numbers and should be able to understand what individual players do on the floor regardless if the team got over the line or not. Because when people don't, star players bolt to go and form superteams, and this is absolutely 100% the right thing for them to do.

Absolutely right. Like you and me, Justin Termine on the Sirius NBA channel has little patience for Giannis critics because what he has accomplished is unprecedented.

NBA champion (2021)
NBA Finals MVP (2021)
2× NBA Most Valuable Player (2019, 2020)
5× NBA All-Star (2017–2021)
NBA All-Star Game MVP (2021)
3× All-NBA First Team (2019–2021)
2× All-NBA Second Team (2017, 2018)
NBA Defensive Player of the Year (2020)
3× NBA All-Defensive First Team (2019–2021)
NBA All-Defensive Second Team (2017)
NBA Most Improved Player (2017)

And he's 26. And, for advanced stat fans, he finished the 2019-20 season with the highest PER ever recorded.

There has never been a player with this kind of resume at this age. Not Wilt, not Michael, not Magic, not Bird. Nobody. He's a shoo-in for the HOF already, and he's still getting better.

So when people carp about his FT shooting or airball threes, or occasional mental lapses, or playoff mistakes, I totally agree that their criticisms are not only misguided -- they betray a fundamental misunderstanding of what greatness in the NBA means.

[Milbucks96]

But where is all that energy for Khris, somebody who had to claw and fight even harder than Giannis to stick in this league to become a two time all star, one of the best bucks in the last 40 years. When he has a bad series, people are begging to trade him for scraps and questioning if he’s been partying and drinking(see it all the time on this board). I’ve seen guys say **** cedi osman, Bojan Bogdanović etc… could replace Khris. It’s avatars and usernames literally disrespecting Khris on this board. Language?!

And don’t even get me started on Bud, Giannis and Khris puts up their mvp/all star numbers in 2017 and we cap out as a 7th seed. Bud comes in with soon to be outta the league Pat and Brook, and a washed up George hill and we become a **** juggernaut with one all nba player.
Do people know that Bud is going to be in the hall of fame right? And we got guys bring posters to the parade saying to fire him while he’s speaking . He got almost no credit for the run we just had, especially on here. “Well he wasn’t as bad as he usually is, still should’ve done this or that”.

I’m sorry but people saying Giannis played terrible or wretched or horrible is nothing at all. If Khris can be traded at anytime, Bud can be fired on the spot, then Giannis can be called out too.