2021-22 NBA Season Discussion

[Doctor MJ]

Ok maybe not no reason per se, but disproportionate and unnecessary

Sincere Question: What were Jokic's options?

1. Do nothing.

The NBA, incorrectly, is more tolerant of cheap shots on big players rather than smalls. From Shaq to Lebron to Wilt, if you have a size advantage refs will often let smaller players hit em.


Second, White European players are stereotyped by many of the mostly black American NBA players as softies who you can physically push around. The belief may be false but the existence of the belief isn't.

Doing nothing is a recipe for getting treated this way for years. This is a sensitive topic for understandable reasons but it is an important subtext.

2. Wait till Morris turns around and start a fight.

Why does he owe Morris the right to defend himself after Morris gave him a blatant cheapshot?

Oh I get why Jokic did it. Heat of the moment can make people do things and I don't want to throw stones from a glass house

I still think what he did was dangerous (we saw what happened to Morris) and I think he probably should have got more than just a 1 game suspension. Does Campazzo do what he did if Jokic had gotten (pulling a number out of a hat here) a 15 game suspension?

I kinda see it like the Will Smith slap - I get why he did it, but that doesn't make it right. And the people in charge are responsible for making sure that type of behavior is not encouraged.

I think you make good points, and it was certainly dangerous, but I'm glad you brought up the Smith slap, because it's something my wife and I have been talking about.

From my wife's perspective, she's proud of what Smith did defending his wife. Whatever the consequences are to Smith, if his wife is glad he did it, then he's likely not going to feel like he did anything wrong even if he publicly apologizes.

This is where incentives get tricky. If you're going to let Morris get away with the cheap shots forever, and Jokic wants to send the message that there will be consequences even if the NBA does nothing. then Jokic has to do something like this. Want to disincentivize this behavior? Then take cheap shot artists like Morris seriously before things escalate.

ftr, one thing I told my wife: Would you advise Rock to have done the same thing to Smith if the role were reversed? Because, Oscars-on-TV aside, if a much smaller man does this to a much larger man, the larger man probably beats the smaller man to a pulp. You might be proud of your man for standing up to a bully and nurse him back to health...but unless the law gets involved, you aren't changing the larger man's behavior with this approach, and the theme regardless of who the attacker is, is that might makes right. Which is incredibly dangerous.

All this to say, I want to avoid the creation of contexts where "might makes right" wins, which includes the Jokic debacle...but you can't just blame throw the book at the guy who is responding to the aggressor of others and expect that to achieve what you want. The Morris brothers have been thugs - and I know that's a racially charged word now, but keep in mind this is not a word I'd use for basically any other NBA player - their entire career, and the NBA has let that happen. And so what happened with Jokic is on the NBA as much as it is on Morris or Jokic.

As I say all of this, were I the NBA after the shoulder check incident, I'd tell him, "From here on out, I don't care if you just sneeze on a guy. If he's injured and misses time due to a non-basketball play on your part, we're going suspend you for a very long time. You get no more benefit of the doubt."

[feyki]

He deserved that hit, though.

This weekend wiil be amazing, Nets-Celt,Min-Mem,Raps,Sixs and even Bulls-Bucks and Warriors-Nuggets. Will be awesome.

[Colbinii]

He deserved that hit, though.

This weekend wiil be amazing, Nets-Celt,Min-Mem,Raps,Sixs and even Bulls-Bucks and Warriors-Nuggets. Will be awesome.

As your SRS indicated, there should be a handful of competitive series.

[sp6r=underrated]

8 Play Game Predictions

Hawks Win Tonight - Confidence Level 65%

The Cavs Point Differential post all-star break was -2.8. Hawks was +4.1. The Hawks won the season series 3-1 by an average of 7.3. Admittedly Allen was out for part of that but Cleveland's implosion in the 2nd half along with Atlanta's strong improvement in the 2nd half gives me confidence the road team wins tonight.

Clippers win tonight - Confidence Level 55%

New Orleans is a lot better than people give them credit for. Talent wise I see these teams, sans-Kawhii, as basically even. Given that, HCA is what makes me think the Clippers in.

[parsnips33]

Paul George health and safety protocol. Now that is some unfortunate timing

[RCM88x]

PG out tonight, big definitely, but I wonder how it impacts the psychology of NOLA. Might come in thinking it'll be an easy win. Clippers have been solid without him, not sure if I'd count them out.

[sp6r=underrated]

PG out tonight, big definitely, but I wonder how it impacts the psychology of NOLA. Might come in thinking it'll be an easy win. Clippers have been solid without him, not sure if I'd count them out.

Clippers to their credit play hard all the time even under unfavorable circumstances. They are basically the anti-James Harden.

In a single game, I still give the Clippers a chance but they are now decided underdogs.

[sp6r=underrated]

My ideal COVID-NBA policy: The standard should be fully vaccinated players don't have to get tested. Unvaccinated players do have to get tested and enter safety protocols if testing positive.

George is vaccinated. The Clippers as a team are fully vaccinated, per Lue. Vaccines are extremely effective at preventing infection. And breakthrough infections rarely result in significant illness for the vaccinated. Thus I'm pissed he has to miss tonight. And feel bad for him and the Clippers. They did their civic duty.


IF this was Kyrie or one of the other Typhoid Mary types, I'd be fine with him missing the game and wouldn't fell sorry for him or the organization that enabled him.

[MartinToVaught]

Between the Wolves instantly playing a million times better without Towns and now this, this stupid freaking play-in tournament is yet another classic example of the type of BS that only happens to the Clippers.

[parsnips33]

I'm really not a fan of the play-in thing, don't know why the league is pushing it so hard

[eminence]

I've enjoyed the play-in to date.

And big props to Paul George for doing the safe thing when he got symptoms (I'm guessing it's more than a really light sniffle if they bothered to report it). Hope he doesn't have it too rough over the next couple days and gets back to 100% soon.

[sp6r=underrated]

Something I was wrong about years ago was Stern fining the Spurs for that TNT game when Pop sat all their stars for a national TNT game vs Miami during their rivalry. I thought Stern and the people who were angry at San Antonio were troglodytes who didn't understand the math. One RS game is just that and teams should rest their players in the games they are mostly likely to lose: games against top teams.

From a short-term, self-interested perspective this is right. Pop's logic is sound. Beating the Heat is hard. Why not concede that game and get the rest for April. But from a sport's perspective, which Stern was focused on, it is terrible. Fans want to see Miami vs San Antonio compete in the regular season even if a title isn't on the line. That matter a lot and you can't let the culture of the sport get completely taken over by analytic types who only care about June titles.

I was reminded of my error and Stern's insight when I saw the Dodgers pull Kershaw in a perfect game, 27 hitters up 27 hitters down. For non-baseball fans, perfect games are enormous events. The season is 162 games long. MLB has existed since 1903. There have been 21 perfect games in the MLB era. 2 pre-MLB

It is the defining individual achievement in the sport.

Baseball is the sport were the analytically inclined have been most successful in taking over the commanding heights of the sport. From the analytics perspective, perfect games are who cares events. It is all about October and the World Series. The dodgers pulled Kershaw from the perfect game. Their manager has done this before. HE is the only manager to pull pitchers with potential perfect games in the history of the sport. It turned off everyone in the stadium. It pissed off every non super-analytically inclined fan.

But since baseball has a culture in which the commanding heights are now dominated by the analytically inclined it was defended. This will cost baseball fans long-term.

How does this relate to basketball? You need analytics to identify efficiencies and proper strategies but you also need to recognize people don't become fans of a sport primarily just because of the NBA finals. They become fans because of Kobe's 81 game or time Reggie Miller reined down all those 3s on NY. They become fans because of random games in the RS between elites teams with all the stars playing.

Every year there will only be one title. It is a zero sum competition. You can't let that zero sum competition take over your sport. The rulebook for individual games needs to be always focused on maximizing fan interest. The rulebook for team management has to be focused on maximizing fan interest. Fan interest has to take precedence over individual zero sum title competition.

I have my ideas on what that entails but there is no need to go into that here. The central point of this post is fan interest not maximizing efficiency must be the north star.

[MartinToVaught]

I'm really not a fan of the play-in thing, don't know why the league is pushing it so hard

It's easier for Silver and the owners to distract us with more gimmicks than to address the league's actual issues. Next up will be the even more useless midseason tournament.

Will any of these gimmicks stop entitled divas like Simmons and Harden from quitting on their teams and demanding out? Fix the ridiculous modern approach to officiating that incentivizes star guards to flop on every possession in the regular season? Reduce teams' general overreliance on the three-point shot? Not have their media coverage dominated by people who hate the sport and despise anyone who currently plays it? Shut down the blatant conflict of interest with Klutch Sports? Of course not. But that takes hard work, and it's easier to just dangle another shiny new gimmick in front of everyone instead. Plus it lets Silver live out his fantasy of running a European soccer league instead of the sport he actually runs.

[eminence]

My one change to the play-in would be that the 7-8 seeds are still entered into the draft lottery (maybe even all teams, but I get that it would feel ridiculous for the NBA champion to win the lottery).

For RS rest I think shortening the season a bit is the way to go. Not drastically, but 3 games against your conference, 2 against the other conference is fair (72 games) and should drastically cut the B2Bs and whatnot that folks are concerned about in terms of rest.

[sp6r=underrated]

It's easier for Silver and the owners to distract us with more gimmicks than to address the league's actual issues.

I love the play-in tournament since it addresses a real systemtic issue basketball faces. The nature of the sport favors coasting for the post-season and tanking if you're not a legitimate title contender. Every year there are a couple of clubs that open the season with intentionally garbage rosters to lose games. Every year teams that qualify for the playoff start coasting early on.

The play-in keeps more teams in playoff contention and also put significant risk on falling out of the top 6. That's great.

There isn't any real risk of this knocking out a title contender since the dirty secret of the league is low seeded teams really aren't good enough to win a title. NBA went to 8 teams in 1984. Only 10 times have these bottom 2 clubs won a series.

https://www.sportingnews.com/ca/nba/news/nba-playoffs-upsets-top-seed-warriors-mavericks-spurs-celtics/1n3tkomb1r0yr14j71o33nxfwf

Basically the play-in increases incentives for team to play hard throughout the 2nd half of the season, keeps teams in playoff contention longer, adds a fun single elimination tournament which doesn't risk knocking out a title contender since low seeded team can't win anyway.

Next up will be the even more useless midseason tournament.

I'm not a huge fan but if it it encourages players to take the RS seriously it is a good thing. A sport can't exist simply with the concept that the only think that matters is championships.

Only 1 team can win a title a year and the fundamentals of basketball ensure most clubs will go into their year knowing they can't win it. this is basically unsolveable. So you need ideas to keep fan excitement up.

Maybe the mid-season tournament isn't a good idea but it is focused on a real problem.

Will any of these gimmicks stop entitled divas like Simmons and Harden from quitting on their teams and demanding out?

Simmons and Harden are different problems that need to be understood as such. Simmons refused to play and didn't get paid. He damaged his marketability with fans which is vital for endorsement. He's going to arbitration but as long as he loses no one is going to take his approach going forward. He does not represent a systemic problem but is more of a one off.

Harden is a real problem. Players showing up and being intentionally bad to get a trade is a chronic problem but is fixeable: keep the soft cap/luxury tax but eliminate max individual salaries/contract lengths.

Superstars wanting to pair up is a product of decisions owners made.

Every person in the world prefers having more talented co-workers than less. Every person in the world prefers working with people they like rather than people they don't. Every person in the world prefers having a greater chance of occupational success than less. All of that can be furthered by joining superteams. It is self-interest driving the superteam creation.

And that self-interest is a product of the Owner created CBA. Post 1999 superstars are paid the exact same salary without any difference.

A Jokic cannot earn more than a Tatum despite a Jokic being far better at basketball than the quite great Tatum..

Obviously under that system players are going to make signing decisions on factors other than money. And the driving factor will be the quality of teammates/location.

If you eliminate the max individual salaries/contract lengths superstars salaries will go up to were they should be. Pairing up will be far less attractive than maximizing your contract. And the way to maximize your contract is to play great. Owners dislike this because it would require giving up a higher percentage of income to the players.

You are right that HArden symbolizes a real problem that hasn't been fixed. It is solveable though.

Fix the ridiculous modern approach to officiating that incentivizes star guards to flop on every possession in the regular season?

This is a problem but the NBA is taking steps to fix it. It didn't stick but the NBA in November made a big push to crack down on the activities that drive you and a lot of fans including myself up the wall: Hardenball. It was boring to watch Rileyball. And it is boring to watch a guy who mainly tries to get FTA not actually shoot the ball. The enforcement didn't stick and we returned to the old rules sadly but there was an effort indicating the NBA knows it is a problem

Remember Rileyball took years to kill off. The NBA has begun going after things like unnatural shooting motions but it will take time.

Thankfully the NBA did take some steps this year.

Reduce teams' general overreliance on the three-point shot?

This is something I worry about but I'm also cognizant of the fact my aesthetic preferences are not everyone elses. A lot of people love the 3 point shot. It is unquestionable that the 3PAr did improve league popularity for most of its history. There is some evidence that it causes a gradual decline in popularity above a certain level.

https://www.econ.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/Harrison_Jake_The%20Effect%20of%20Play%20Style%20on%20NBA%20Revenues.pdf

I take a wait and see approach here. If this paper is correct and the ever increasing 3PAr is driving people away we'll see greater evidence. And if we do the solution is quite easy. Move the line back to target a 3PAr that is optimal for fan interest.

But right now this is a wait and see issue.

Not have their media coverage dominated by people who hate the sport and despise anyone who currently plays it?

What do you mean by people who hate sport and people who currently play it? I can interpret it multiple ways.

If you're talking about people who knee jerk favor older players that has always existed but frankly out of all the sports, I know of none that is more dismissive of its history than the NBA. There are a lot of fans and media types who treat anything pre-Jordan as non-existent.

If you're talking about people who just hate the NBA but end up covering it I don't see that at all. And I don't even know how you could solve this if you wanted to beyond not letting them on official NBA broadcasts.

If you mean people like Skip Bayless who hate Lebron, I think you need to recognize Skip Bayless is playing "Skip Bayless" the way Dwayne Johnson plays "The Rock" on WWE. It is a heel a character a lot of people enjoy watching. I don't think he takes him seriously nor do I think anyone else does.

Do you mind elaborating here?

Shut down the blatant conflict of interest with Klutch Sports?

How would you shut this down? If you're complaining that players talk to each other about wanting to play together that is a product of max individual salaries as I explained early. If you dislike players in general talking to each other about playing together you just need to recognize this happens in every industry known to man.

Of course not. But that takes hard work, and it's easier to just dangle another shiny new gimmick in front of everyone instead. Plus it lets Silver live out his fantasy of running a European soccer league instead of the sport he actually runs.

What does this soccer crack me? Silver has never proposed anything like an EPL. Under his era the NBA has aggressively gone the opposite of the EPL system of promotion/regulation: it behaves even more like a cartel with one voice rather than individual competing franchises.

[sp6r=underrated]

My one change to the play-in would be that the 7-8 seeds are still entered into the draft lottery (maybe even all teams, but I get that it would feel ridiculous for the NBA champion to win the lottery).

Completely agree with you, I'd go even further, the winner of the 7-8 seeds should get slightly better odds than the 9-10 teams. A chronic thing fans complain is how hard it is to get mid-level teams to improve. This would be a good way of doing so. IT also makes those play-in games even more exciting.

Admittedly, I don't think there should be a draft. Keep the soft cap/luxury tax, eliminate max individual salaries/contracts and have everyone enter as a free agent. Contrary to what the "everyone will sign in NY crowd" thinks almost every franchise would have a chance of signing top players. But this will never happen.

For RS rest I think shortening the season a bit is the way to go. Not drastically, but 3 games against your conference, 2 against the other conference is fair (72 games) and should drastically cut the B2Bs and whatnot that folks are concerned about in terms of rest.

I used to be hardcore opposed to shortening the season but I am open to it now. What I think is a terrible idea is the 58 game season that constantly gets floated. You still end up with the same resting issue/boredom to the playoffs now with even less basketball to watch.

I think a better idea is trying to come up with incentives to get players to play in more games even if the MPG is lower. But like I said I am open to eliminating games.

[MartinToVaught]

I love the play-in tournament since it addresses a real systemtic issue basketball faces. The nature of the sport favors coasting for the post-season and tanking if you're not a legitimate title contender.

And yet, in year three of the play-in, teams are still tanking and coasting. The idea of the play-in fixing this is more slogan than reality. Tanking especially is going to continue to happen on a grand scale as long as it's the only method of rebuilding available to most of the league.

There isn't any real risk of this knocking out a title contender since the dirty secret of the league is low seeded teams really aren't good enough to win a title.

Which makes the play-in even more pointless in the grand scheme of things. Who cares that the 1 seed might get to play a slightly different fodder opponent than the one they otherwise might be playing?

I'm not a huge fan but if it it encourages players to take the RS seriously it is a good thing.

Nobody's going to take it seriously. The NBA already has playoffs with a rich tradition and history behind them. Adam Silver's Mickey Mouse Midseason Invitational can only be a cheap facsimile of the real thing at best. It will be about as meaningful as the Summer League championship. Any team that hangs banners for the midseason tournament will be laughed at, any team that wins it and doesn't go on to win the Finals will be laughed at.

Only 1 team can win a title a year and the fundamentals of basketball ensure most clubs will go into their year knowing they can't win it. this is basically unsolveable. So you need ideas to keep fan excitement up.

You can't force excitement. Fans aren't as gullible as Silver and the owners believe we are. We know when we're being sold a bill of goods by the league. Look no further than the abysmal ratings the NBA had in the bubble.

NASCAR tried to paper over their issues by constantly adding new gimmicks and it's all but killed the sport. Instead of increasing fan excitement, it turned fans off by becoming less connected to its own history and more needlessly convoluted to follow every year. Silver seems determined to make this exact same mistake with the NBA.

Harden is a real problem. Players showing up and being intentionally bad to get a trade is a chronic problem but is fixeable: keep the soft cap/luxury tax but eliminate max individual salaries/contract lengths.

Contracts already mean nothing to divas like Harden, so I don't see how changing contracts will deter this kind of behavior. Your idea just makes it so Harden gets paid even more money while he quits on his team.

Every person in the world prefers having more talented co-workers than less.

This has gone way beyond wanting more talented co-workers. Harden was already on a mega-stacked superteam in Brooklyn. He quit on them because he felt like being a good teammate for once and holding down the fort during a couple months of adversity in the regular season was beneath him. This isn't even ring-chasing anymore, it's just narcissism. Screwing franchises over because you can.

The one thing I blame the owners for is coddling the Hardens of the league too much. And it's a problem across the board. Outside of extremely rare cases like Simmons, there isn't a single team in the league that can hold players accountable for stuff like this because there's always another team out there like the Nets who will throw all their dignity away and pin their entire franchise on the irrational whims of people like KD, Harden and Kyrie.

lThis is a problem but the NBA is taking steps to fix it.

They really aren't. Calling the games fairly in October and November and then going back to the usual bogus reffing afterwards isn't fixing the problem, it's just providing the illusion that they care in order to shut fans up.

Move the line back to target a 3PAr that is optimal for fan interest.

I'm not sure moving the line back would do anything. The good three-point shooters are too good to be thrown off by that and the bad ones will still be told to take them anyway because 3 > 2.

Maybe if they made dunks worth three points instead of shots from beyond the arc, you'd see a more radical change in style.

What do you mean by people who hate sport and people who currently play it?

The NBA's media coverage is dominated by TMZ drama, butthurt retired players insisting that everything was better back in their day, and people like JVG spending entire games whining about how the product sucks (which is ironic when JVG's own teams as a coach tended to be unwatchable). Sure, other sports have their own elements of that, but the NBA's media is so bad that it's actually hurting fans' understanding of the sport.

Remember when the Pelicans won the lottery and the media started counting down the days until Zion would "inevitably" force his way to the Knicks? There wasn't nearly as much of that BS when Jacksonville got to draft Trevor Lawrence. And people wonder why the NBA can't catch up to the NFL.

What does this soccer crack me?

The league has repeatedly justified ads on jerseys, the play-in, and the proposed midseason tournament by pointing to soccer. The problem is that the NBA is not soccer and never will be, and lazily copy-pasting the tropes of a different sport only diminishes the league's actual tradition. Just because Silver isn't going around publicly dismissing his own league's championship as a "piece of metal" like Manfred did doesn't mean there can't be a similar impulse at play here.

[parsnips33]

Yeah I could be wrong but it doesn't seem like the play-in has had much of an effect on tanking. Or on how seriously the regular season is taken

[Fadeaway_J]

Yeah I could be wrong but it doesn't seem like the play-in has had much of an effect on tanking. Or on how seriously the regular season is taken

It maybe makes a couple more teams a year delusional enough into thinking they might be able to do something despite being 23-35 or whatever. And even then, we still had eight teams out of 30 who stopped trying to win long before the end of the season.

As long as the most efficient way for bad teams to get materially better is to tank, bad teams are going to tank.

[Texas Chuck]

Yeah I could be wrong but it doesn't seem like the play-in has had much of an effect on tanking. Or on how seriously the regular season is taken

agreed. Teams committed to hard-core tanking didn't hesitate to do that. Teams whose season fell apart, didn't hesitate to pivot to tanking once that happened either. Players dealing with injuries still rested on one night of b2b's, etc... I mean we had what 5 players in the entire league play every game?

What it does is give those franchises who don't tank, but are going through a down patch, or had a key injury to still possibly compete in the playoffs.

I think its mostly much ado about nothing. I'm a traditionalist so I'd just go back to top 8 in each conference, but I'm glad the league has people constantly thinking about could we do it better.