Everyone has of course seen this by now but it’s very relevant here. This is not a good look for LeBron, and it’s hard not to see this as having a direct bearing on the team’s ultimate results. They don’t beat the Warriors either way, but this is outright malevolence. This is now snowballing quite a bit, could this impact anyone’s rankings?
In a vacuum this isn't a good look for LeBron but I can't see this having an impact on my rankings for this year.
For Cavs to have long-term success with their new Big 3 they need LeBron and Blatt or a new coach to get on the same page but for this season only they were 2 wins away from a title. Even with a dysfunctional dynamic the team maximized its potential given the injuries.
If moving forward the relationship stays broken while the Cavs are not utilizing their players correctly then I *might* penalize LeBron in RPOY rankings.
JordansBulls wrote:The Warriors are basically a good college team until they meet a team with bigs in the NBA.
Everyone has of course seen this by now but it’s very relevant here. This is not a good look for LeBron, and it’s hard not to see this as having a direct bearing on the team’s ultimate results. They don’t beat the Warriors either way, but this is outright malevolence. This is now snowballing quite a bit, could this impact anyone’s rankings?
It's pathetic by Lebron, but I'm not moving him down in my season rankings over it. I would love to see Blatt just quit. He doesn't have to make any public comments, but just go out on his own terms. And if he doesn't quit and Tyron Lue ends up with that job as expected it's pretty Jason Kidd level bad on him as well.
ThunderBolt wrote:I’m going to let some of you in on a little secret I learned on realgm. If you don’t like a thread, not only do you not have to comment but you don’t even have to open it and read it. You’re welcome.
What a disgusting and sensationalist article, and he then uses Duncan as an example at the end as the cherry on the top, amazing. Not MJ and his persona/relationships with coaches, not Shaq, not Kobe, not Wilt, not Magic, not Hakeem... No, let's contrast LeBron's situation and career to Duncan, because Duncan surely isn't an outlier in terms of this. It's not like Duncan was drafted by the best organization in league history. Why should Duncan trust or argue with the coaching staff, it's not like Pop & crew won a title when Duncan was in his second season and then 4 more after that. It's not that they've racked up all these quality seasons year in and year out with different personnel based on smart adaptations. And still, I doubt that Duncan (freaking Duncan of all people, a guy who's personality isn't all that outspoken) kept his mouth shut for the duration of this whole ride and didn't offer any output on how the Spurs should play, especially if he disagreed with anything. Because if everything was so rosy, he wouldn't have tangoed with leaving the Spurs after just a couple of seasons under his belt, amongst other things.
And I admire Stein's ability to act as a sideline relationship expert. He's surely a guy who gets to spend a lot of time with both LeBron and Blatt asking them if they know each others favorite color and stuff. Like it almost seems that if LeBron and Blatt don't agree with each other 100% of the time and don't give each other back massages they must not like each other or they don't trust one and other. Something similar already popped earlier in the season when the Cavs were struggling. Naturally, the first thing people did was question if Blatt is going to be invited to LeBron's birthday party. After the Cavs had actually gotten healthier and added some more reinforcements to storm the league in the 2nd half of the season everyone magically just shut up. Not to mention stuff like this dates back to Spoelstra (or even further behind possibly). He bumps shoulders with Spoelstra once during a timeout and now he's the defacto primadonna who doesn't care about his coach or his team. But then he wins 2 championships so it's all good. Never mind all those times the best player on the planet watched Spoelstra run a play for Wade/Bosh/Battier 3pt when the Heat needed a crunch time bucket. Someone like Kobe would probably tore the locker room up after the game.
I know, the power of winning. Winning games seems to be the sole factor of determining if people get along and like each other. I've figured it out guys. The Cavs were losing, LeBron doesn't like Blatt. The Cavs were winning, LeBron's got coach Blatt's back. The Cavs lose in the Finals. LeBron is disrespecting Blatt. I see some cycle here.
LeBron cares about winning. He cares more about winning and getting there than Blatt. And that's not a knock on Blatt or to say that Blatt doesn't care, but Blatt came to the NBA for a paycheck, the experience of coaching in this league and everything after that is a bonus. LeBron is battling an unprecedented burden of success that was placed on him since he arrived in the NBA. And the burden he has placed on himself to be remembered as the best basketball player ever. I don't think it's in his nature to commit any acts of stupidity that would diminish his chances of winning every time he has an opportunity to do so and play some passive-aggressive charades with Blatt.
Anyway, they should fire this Stein dude and start hiring people who can post some quality basketball-related content. But it's ESPN and quality basketball content doesn't rake up money and ratings, so I wouldn't hold my breath.
Stein is one the better reporters around FWIW. He isn't your typical ESPN click-bait writer and more importantly 3 different ESPN analysts have said the same things now since the Finals ended. SAS whom I have no respect for as an analyst but has proven himself to be credible with league rumors over the years has said similar things.
I am not saying I believe the article 100% but I am not ready to dismiss it either.
And to add pretty much even the more balanced reporters around have said similar things.
JordansBulls wrote:The Warriors are basically a good college team until they meet a team with bigs in the NBA.
ESPN doesn't have great reporters, let alone analysts. And bringing SAS up in any basketball-related conversation as a means to reinforce a stance is asinine. I'm surprised he's actually not worse, conversing basketball with Skip Bayless for a living can't be good for your brain cells. An example of a respectable reporter and basketball mind is Zach Lowe, especially since the dude actually doesn't get caught up in ''he said, she said'' stories but rather focuses on how and why things unfold on the basketball court.
Yeah, it looks bad, but doesn't effect rankings at all. And I'm not sure I entirely believe it, I mean somewhat I do but at the same time its just so Hollywood sounding.
MyUniBroDavis wrote: he was like YALL PEOPLE WHO DOUBT ME WILL SEE YALLS STATS ARE WRONG I HAVE THE BIG BRAIN PLAYS MUCHO NASTY BIG BRAIN BIG CHUNGUS BRAIN YOU BOYS ON UR BBALL REFERENCE NO UNDERSTANDO
Mutnt wrote:ESPN doesn't have great reporters, let alone analysts. And bringing SAS up in any basketball-related conversation as a means to reinforce a stance is asinine. I'm surprised he's actually not worse, conversing basketball with Skip Bayless for a living can't be good for your brain cells. An example of a respectable reporter and basketball mind is Zach Lowe, especially since the dude actually doesn't get caught up in ''he said, she said'' stories but rather focuses on how and why things unfold on the basketball court.
Funny you bring up Zach Lowe, because he’s been talking about this stuff all season on his podcast. There’s smoke here dude, you can’t just dismiss this because you don’t like it.
EDIT: Also Lowe is an ESPN employee so like what?
“I’m not the fastest guy on the court, but I can dictate when the race begins.”
Dr Spaceman wrote:So my response didn't exactly get my point across well. I'll try again, and I hope you're not reading this as "I just won't go there", and instead "These are the specific reasons I don't think it works in this case".
Doctor MJ wrote:I think the distinction between "impact" and "goodness" is absolutely huge when we talk about the epistemology of basketball, but to me it's pretty clear that you can't in practice use "goodness" for debates such as these. But then we may have different semantics in play.
To me:
Impact or lift - raw form of value, how much you're actually helping your team Goodness - your general capability to add value to NBA teams
So first, if you're thinking of different definitions, please share them.
Your take seems to fit with my definitions though if it's essentially, "Green may be able to have more impact on the Warriors, but it's context-specific impact. In a more average situation, Curry would be more valuable."
So the reason I brought up the impact/goodness thing is because it can clarify what i'm about to bring up a little bit. I'm gonna hijack the term "resiliency" here and define it as "A defense can't stop you from doing what you want to do". So I think resilience can be a function of goodness, or maybe just goodness in specific areas, but it's really just a way for me to solidify my thinking. Impact+resilience is how I've been evaluating players, and this is how I'm approaching the Green debate. Just to illustrate:
High impact, high resiliency: Stephen Curry, LeBron James High Impact, low resiliency: Draymond Green, Kyle Korver Low impact, high resiliency: Carmelo Anthony
So with Green specifically: any argument that he's a top 7 or 10 or whatever player has a lot to do with what he can do as a 2-way guy, ir. we know his defense is great, but is his offense good enough for him to have that impact? Because let's be honest, he's a barely passable shooter, has zero isolation game, zero in-between game, and not a whole lot else. When we're talking about Draymond on offense, we're talking about his playmaking.
Players who are truly great at playmaking as the lead guy on their team become so because the threat of them saying "**** it, I'll score myself" is a losing proposition for the defense. As much of a wizard as Steve Nash was, we're not talking about him as an all-time offensive player if he doesn't have the ability to score at will. Now I'm completely open to seeing Dray as some new breed of playmaker that just does it in a different way and thus doesn't need to be a scorer, but that's not what I see when I watch him. He gets around his own lack of scoring by leveraging Curry's scoring threat to bend defenses.
I know he's a unique puzzle piece made to fit around a star, but how many teams actually have a Curry (or can even attempt to approximate him?) Even if we say he can do it alongside any similarly talented star even without the Curry-isms, how many teams actually have one of those? Maybe I'm underestimating the guy, but I don't see him as a "bend the defense and make the right pass" kind of guy, rather he's great at making the right decisions about attacking a defense that's already broken. Now that's valuable and all, but I think we know the truly hard part is the actual bending of the defense, otherwise why wouldn't Rondo be the best point guard?
This is where the context-specific stuff comes into play for me. Draymond doesn't scare defenses by himself. If a defense decided to stop concerning themselves with Curry and focus on stopping Draymond, don't you think they could do it rather easily? And if you accept that his offense is stoppable, doesn't his case for top 7 totally fall apart?
I think the Hawks' flame out this year is something we should really pay attention to. No one was right or wrong about what Korver was doing, but the fact is in the playoffs when teams started treating him like a star he stopped being able to do his thing. That's what I mean by resilience.
Now I have a tendency to look at Curry and see such a special snowflake that I just attribute everything the Warriors do to his uniqueness, so if that's what I'm doing here let me know. But I think y point is a good one, that it's possible both that Draymond provides more lift to the Warriors and that Curry is the one more deserving of praise.
Doctor MJ wrote:
Spoiler:
If this is the case, I don't necessarily disagree - though I'm not ready to even accept Green was more impactful to the Warriors, only that the data makes us consider this - but something that's been asserted a lot this year by smart people that I don't necessarily accept is that guys like Green are a new category of "context-specific superstars" which should be praised like crazy but still kept in a ghetto compared to more traditional superstars.
I'll put it like this: I think it's pretty easy to imagine players as puzzle pieces. A guy like Curry has a relatively simple shape that covers a lot of "space", aka impact or contribution, because he had outlier abilities in skills a team needs at its foundation. I would think then that a guy like Green would be seen as one of those weird spidery pieces that fits in the gaps between Curry and other simple shaped players.
To me the assumption about Green being "context-specific" is that you can't put that spidery piece in any other puzzle and expect it not to overlap with other players, and hence he'd be less valuable. But that falls apart if the spidery shape Green is currently taking isn't something he has to do, but rather is simply something he was able to take because he's a shape-shifter far more flexible than most the simple shape guys are.
Now, I don't think there's any doubt that Green only has the impact he does because of how Golden State has decided to build and use him. I'm not literally suggesting you could put him in anywhere and he'd have this impact. I think it's pretty clear actually that in practice Curry would contribute more impact to other teams than Green. But the reason why I think it's clear, is because at this point I'm convinced even the stupidest coach would know how to use Curry, and I'm not convinced of that with Green.
And this gets us to something I've long said: I don't think it makes sense to say that a player is worse in an absolute goodness sense of the word simply because he's played with coaches who didn't understand how to use him. Interestingly I've long said this with Nash, and Curry is essentially the New Nash (they aren't identical of course, but the connection has become pretty clear). Likely not that long ago Curry never has this zenith because teams don't realize how devastating of an effect he can have given his fragile physique and the basic fact that no one built around 3's like this.
So, a possibly delicious irony: What if the "context-specific" ghetto of Green is basically the same type of ghetto that guys like Nash or Curry would have had in earlier eras, and the certainty we have that Curry is the superior player is based on us being in a transitory period where one group of players is now understood but another group of player is only beginning to be understood?
Lots of good stuff here and I don't disagree, just want to note that I am under no illusion that a player like Draymond can't be as valuable as you insinuate here. Just that I think he currently isn't.
Fantastic post. Really excellent.
I'll add: I think Curry's resiliency is now proven and then some. The amount of defensive attention he got in that series was so, SO far off the charts. I can't think of another time when I've seen something like it - and I'm guessing that's for a reason, because there's never been a player as scary from so far away. That he STILL thrived individually under that pressure is just crazy. And of course Curry's always been willing to let his teammates take the wheel for a 4 on 3, and they are ready to do it.
I think that if you believe a player's impact is weak in terms of resiliency, that's absolutely a reason to knock them in a ranking like this. I would also agree that that's what many suspected about Korver - I was agnostic on it, won't say I called the issues - and they seem like they were shown right.
But while I consider Curry's resiliency far more proven than Green, and that is factoring in to my thought process here, it's not obvious to me that Green's impact isn't resilient. The thing is whenever we talk about this is that when a team tries to stop a particular guy, they allow other exploits. This is why it's so tricky to stop a passer on offense (and Green is one), and why "stopping" a defender is oftentimes tough to even define (a Mark Eaton can be exploited by playing more to the perimeter, but with someone whose defensive impact is based on versatility as much as anything else, it's not so easy).
This isn't the first time this stuff has come up. It was a storyline all season. The only reason why it wasn't bigger was because the Cavs went like 35-3 to end the season. Remember in the middle of the season when there were rumors that LeBron wanted Blatt out and have Mark Jackson as the coach?
Mutnt wrote:ESPN doesn't have great reporters, let alone analysts. And bringing SAS up in any basketball-related conversation as a means to reinforce a stance is asinine. I'm surprised he's actually not worse, conversing basketball with Skip Bayless for a living can't be good for your brain cells. An example of a respectable reporter and basketball mind is Zach Lowe, especially since the dude actually doesn't get caught up in ''he said, she said'' stories but rather focuses on how and why things unfold on the basketball court.
Take it easy, no need to be so aggressive.
Firstly, I already said I don't even believe the report 100% but I refuse to dismiss it. I also clarified that I have no respect for SAS as an analyst but as an insider he's credible whether or not we like it and he's said similar things.
As Spaceman pointed out, you are bringing up Zach Lowe and Lowe has said similar things on his podcasts recently.
My point was pretty much all credible reporters have talked about it in some capacity and Stein is also one of the better ones around.
Edit: This is what JLei said in the LeBron thread and I agree with him on this:
JLei wrote:SAS is a good reporter and serves as a mouth piece for many of the players. His basketball analysis is **** but when he says something about goings on in the league and especially if he's speaking for a player treat it as something to pay attention to.
That quote from SAS at the end of that First Take segment is pretty damning from someone in the organization when SAS asked about why Bron was ignoring Blatt in the huddle. "Bron is class personified, he's not trying to hurt anybody he knows Blatt has a family and career and all of that other stuff. It's just very very difficult to support someone who doesn't have a clue".
JordansBulls wrote:The Warriors are basically a good college team until they meet a team with bigs in the NBA.
Everyone has of course seen this by now but it’s very relevant here. This is not a good look for LeBron, and it’s hard not to see this as having a direct bearing on the team’s ultimate results. They don’t beat the Warriors either way, but this is outright malevolence. This is now snowballing quite a bit, could this impact anyone’s rankings?
First off, I'm wary of the whiplash counteraction against LeBron. One of the reasons I was so frustrated when I ran into people saying it was inevitable Cleveland would win was that I knew those were the same people who would blame LeBron after defeat. Fundamentally here, LeBron was not in a situation where anyone should expect him to win, and so full-criticism with out also giving praise is, well, more than a little dangerous potentially.
With that said, I don't really disagree with a lot of what he writes.
-LeBron has pretty clearly asserted that he's the boss, not his coach. -The Cavs pulled away from an advanced offensive scheme that the coach is known for...and only LeBron makes that happen, right? -With the Cavs ending up then in an ultra-caveman offense, does anyone really believe that Blatt came to LeBron and said that's how it had to be?
LeBron is a very smart basketball player by any normal standards, but I really do wonder what he wants in a coach, because if what he wanted was a sophisticated team-oriented scheme having already seen in Miami that it takes time to implement but then it worked quite well, I don't see how the Cavs gradually become more and more "LeBron does his thing and everyone else relies on him."
It's within the realm of possibility of course that LeBron does want a smart coach and he just doesn't buy into Blatt, but jeez, this isn't just any first year, this is the year when you definitely have Kevin Love who you traded a potential megastar for. How do you not make more of a point to get Love involved to the max? We don't know what goes on behind closed doors, and all of this may blow over in time, but I'm nervous for LeBron's future right now in a way that I haven't been before. Previously I saw him as an exceptionally tractable superstar, and not because he's docile like Duncan, but simply because he's so damn smart. I have a hard time seeing him like that now, and so if he gets the wrong thing in his mind, there will be no course correction from anyone else.
I'm going to add one more thing I heard, and then talk a little bit.
Ron Artest was on the radio and he was very, very critical of LeBron in that series. He said two key things:
1) That LeBron stopped doing all the little things that a team needs to work - hustling on defense, setting screens on offense, etc, and that when you do that your teammates tend to be the ones who look bad. Particularly when it means you're putting all your effort into putting up numbers yourself. In short, the one man team thing is essentially a choice a superstar can make, and it's not a good one for the team.
2) That while LeBron's slow-it-all-down offense let his team rest, it also meant that the defense got to rest too. People characterized the Warrior D as scrambling like mad to stop LeBron, but the reality was that they burned very little energy. Adding my own thoughts to that: That's a problem when the opposing team is looking to sprint to a bucket on the other end, and also a problem when the opposing superstar actually is forcing the Cav D to scramble and run like crazy. In essence, it means that it's not just a depth issue that resulted in the Cavs wearing down faster than the Warriors.
Now just going more on my own generally:
Obviously I haven't kept it to myself that I have concerns about how the LeBron offense worked. Again, I'm not in any way saying I'd drop LeBron in my list because of it, I think the Cavs lose no matter what they do, but I'm really questioning whether he should rise in my rankings on a number of levels. The simplest being that LeBron's big numbers didn't come while actually being that effective, so the defense was basically fine letting him do his think. The more complicated being that while the Cavs may well have been able to do nothing else as good after Irving went down, I wonder whether the Cavs should have been prepared to do something different, but weren't because of the push away from sophisticated offense earlier in the year.
In short: I wonder if LeBron really is preferring to play his version of hero-ball right now as opposed to the possibility of another scheme like they had in Miami, and I really question whether such preference can be at all justified from a long-term strategic viewpoint.
I'm not calling Stein a liar, I'm saying that he wrote a **** and pointless article and everyone is promoting it as some sort of gospel. Do I believe that LeBron and Blatt are 100% on the same page? No. That rarely happens anywhere. Do I believe that Blatt is permissive towards LeBron dictating the Cavs strategy even if it goes against what Blatt had in mind. Of course, it's natural to expect LeBron, as a veteran, the only guy with championship pedigree on the team and as the best player in the league to have a large influential voice in the huddle. Is this really news? No. LeBron was doing the same with Spoelstra. Sometimes he went with Spo's plan sometimes he as the leader or the team as a whole overruled it in favor of something else.
So what's the problem here? Unless you're thinking LeBron is hurting team atmosphere or Cleveland's chances to win, it's really just gossip. And I never give a damn about reports based on observations made by people on the outside looking in. The only people that know the relationship status between LeBron and Blatt are LeBron and Blatt (and the team/staff). And that's really the only two parties that matter and if Cleveland (that accounts for both LeBron and Blatt too) feels that the relation between the coach and the star player is detrimental to team success every party in the mix has ample ways of taking action. The thing is that I see this thing pop up every time a LeBron-led team loses. Then all these geniuses ala Stein jump out of the bushes and become experts at reading body language and people's feelings/thoughts.
Like, I've seen Curry not giving a lot of attention to Kerr's orders and just decide to go spam 3 pointers at any given point of the game. But you know what, it's okay as Kerr trusts the judgement of his star player because he was frequently rewarded in the past by Steph just blazing 12 straight points in short outbursts based on his feeling of the game and the Warriors just snowballed the game from there. Somehow, when it comes to LeBron doing similar things, it's a sin. Everything is a sin if LeBron does it.
Trivial PS: I thought Lowe wrote for Grantland. I haven't seen much of his work on ESPN, if any. He did some pregame prediction-based analysis during the Finals with Andande and Stein, which were like 4 minute videos of them just blabbering what they think it's gonna happen in the next game. Do you have to be a regular employee of ESPN to have them publish your article or do they just pay you to do one for them or something. The ESPN crew I know are guys like Andande, Arnovitz, Abbott, Stein, Palmer, Gutierrez, Windhorst, Wallace, Thorpe, Broussard... and none of them really helped expand my knowledge about the game. Most of them just report rumors or write generic stuff anyone who follows the NBA closely can tell you.
I don't want to get too far off-topic, but I do think Stein has more credibility than most ESPN talking heads. He's always one of the guys on the forefront of reporting trades/signings/draft stuff (yes, Woj is as well, and obviously people aren't as high on his articles than his reporting). Perhaps some of it is click-bait because the Finals just ended, but the takeaway for me is that James and Blatt aren't on the same page.
In a perfect world, LeBron would buy in more next year (like with Spo), and he and the other two stars would get more acclimated with Blatt's system next year. I do wonder though, if maybe he's become conscious of his basketball mortality, and feels his time playing at this level is more limited than some of us believe (he knows his own body best). This summer, I'd like to see him rest, work on his jumper specifically (the handles are another issue, but that goes back a bit, and I don't know that there's an easy fix), and give Blatt' a chance.
On-topic, I don't think this can hurt LeBron this year. The offense was clicking for most of the second half of the year, and the team played quality defense in the playoffs to compensate for injured stars (Doc's Artest quotes are interesting...pace-control reduces possessions and increases variance, but you're allowing a defense on an already very deep team to rest even more; I think regardless, the series was going to finish with essentially three decisive GSW wins, so it's not a huge deal for me, but interesting to hear Artest's take). Now, if next year, Cleveland is healthy and underachieves, and this thing with Blatt gets bad, and becomes say, a Shaq-Kobe level distraction (without a GOAT playoff run), then I think I'd have to dock James substantially.
Right now I'm leaning:
1) Curry - Good deal of lift to what I think will be viewed as an ATG team, ridiculous matchup problem. Clear-cut #1 IMO. 2) LeBron - I think his defense was better most of the season than it was last year, and it was even better in the playoffs. Offense looked terrific after the trades/break. Jumper completely shot, and I might drop him below Harden. 3) Harden - Great season, mastered the corner 3 (as a shooter and playmaker), and great offensively overall (and improved on the other end). Second half of the year three teams really took off (CLE after trades, SAS with Leonard, GSW continuing to destroy the league as they had all season)...but even so, LeBron's lack of a jumper might be the difference here. 4) Paul - Terrific season, great first round, but missing two games in the Houston series (even if the team got a split without him) has to drop him to the bottom of the 2-4 tier. 5) Davis - I don't want to read too much into EvanZ's NPI numbers, but he's really climbing up there. Unless Kawhi looks ridiculous in J.E.'s multi-year set (he did say he'd update after the playoffs, but I'm not sure if he's going to do so prior to the voting period), I don't mind bumping him out of the top 5, because I do feel greater offensive primacy detracted from his defense.
Now that's the difference between first and last place.
Mutnt wrote: Trivial PS: I thought Lowe wrote for Grantland. I haven't seen much of his work on ESPN, if any. He did some pregame prediction-based analysis during the Finals with Andande and Stein, which were like 4 minute videos of them just blabbering what they think it's gonna happen in the next game. Do you have to be a regular employee of ESPN to have them publish your article or do they just pay you to do one for them or something. The ESPN crew I know are guys like Andande, Arnovitz, Abbott, Stein, Palmer, Gutierrez, Windhorst, Wallace, Thorpe, Broussard... and none of them really helped expand my knowledge about the game. Most of them just report rumors or write generic stuff anyone who follows the NBA closely can tell you.
Grantland is owned and operated by ESPN and answers to their shareholders. Its why Bill Simmons and Jalen Rose can produce content for both sites. It's treated as basically a Simmons side project, to promote journalism that didn't have to answer to the tradition ad-revenue model. Grantland brings in nowhere near enough revenue to afford the talent they employ, but ESPN funds them due to basically idealism. They did a similar thing when they bought FiveThirtyEight.
Simmons poached Lowe from SI when Grantland was starting. He's an ESPN employee, which is why he appears on TrueHoop and why his podcasts guests can include guys like JVG, Strauss, Haberstroh etc.
Also just a general note: if you think ESPN truly has no good writers, you're just reading the wrong guys.
“I’m not the fastest guy on the court, but I can dictate when the race begins.”
yeah there is a lot wrong with ESPN as there tends to be with entities with no legit competition, but to tar everyone who works there with the same brush reads really unfair and frankly uninformed.
I actually listened to Stein on local radio(Dallas-based guy) and he stands behind his story. Much of it is from what he witnessed first-hand while working the sidelines so he's certainly not just piggy-backing off Windhorst. None of us know the full accurate story, but its not like this should have been really breaking news to anyone. Lebron has made it obvious during games we could all see that he wasn't even willing to go through the motions of pretending to respect his head coach publicly.
I just don't see how blaming the messenger is correct in this case.
ThunderBolt wrote:I’m going to let some of you in on a little secret I learned on realgm. If you don’t like a thread, not only do you not have to comment but you don’t even have to open it and read it. You’re welcome.
I completely disagree with the Draymond Green topic.
The Warriors played like an all-time team this season. They were on the level of the Bulls. They played better than any of the Magic Lakers, Bird Celtics, Duncan Spurs, etc. How do you explain that? One way is to say that Curry played just as good if not better than Peak Bird or Magic. Does anyone here really believe that? I doubt it. That means the supporting cast for GSW had a decent edge against the Lakers or Celtics. Someone has to receive credit for that greatness. Klay Thompson is good, but no one thinks he was 86 McHale level. I think its fair to say that Thompson had similar impact to Robert Parish. Maybe slightly better. That would Draymond Green deserves significant credit for their success unless you believe that the Warriors 4-12 cast is so much better than the rest that it would explain the difference. Considering that the Celtics had Ainge, Johnson, Walton, they had a decent cast. I think the Warriors 4-12 was better, but was it good enough to explain the gap for players 1-3?
Based on that, I think Green slice of the pizza was just as big as McHale's in 86. I don't think that is a stretch because Green was by the best perimeter defender in the league this season by a decent margin. He had a very good case for DPOY. For example, here is a comparison between Green and Kawhi on defense.
Mutnt wrote:ESPN doesn't have great reporters, let alone analysts. And bringing SAS up in any basketball-related conversation as a means to reinforce a stance is asinine. I'm surprised he's actually not worse, conversing basketball with Skip Bayless for a living can't be good for your brain cells. An example of a respectable reporter and basketball mind is Zach Lowe, especially since the dude actually doesn't get caught up in ''he said, she said'' stories but rather focuses on how and why things unfold on the basketball court.
Sorry, but you just don't seem to be familiar with marc stein at all. He's a legitimate journalist who knows the NBA well, and rarely writes negative accusatory articles. I'm inclined to take what he says seriously here. He doesn't fall in line with your typical ESPN writer / analyst.
Doctor MJ wrote:In short: I wonder if LeBron really is preferring to play his version of hero-ball right now as opposed to the possibility of another scheme like they had in Miami, and I really question whether such preference can be at all justified from a long-term strategic viewpoint.
Of course he could be lying, but LeBron actually said himself in the game 6 post game presser that he didn't enjoy playing that way. That's just what had to be done.
Doctor MJ wrote:In short: I wonder if LeBron really is preferring to play his version of hero-ball right now as opposed to the possibility of another scheme like they had in Miami, and I really question whether such preference can be at all justified from a long-term strategic viewpoint.
Of course he could be lying, but LeBron actually said himself in the game 6 post game presser that he didn't enjoy playing that way. That's just what had to be done.
I have no doubt that he sees the way he played during the finals as something that would be unwise on a team with more talent, what I'm saying is that while Irving & Love were there articles have come out saying he was pushing away from Blatt's schemes to stuff that was more simplistic.
And let me be clear: The simpler stuff worked BETTER, so it's pretty understandable a superstar thinking that's the way to go. The thing is though that you typically can't expect 3 superstars to all be well utilized by a simple scheme, and Love clearly didn't have a year that anyone thinks is as good as hoped. To me it would have made more sense to work through those issues in the more sophisticated scheme this year, and the fact that didn't happen makes me think that LeBron - who clearly had a huge say in the direction things went - doesn't see the value in it.
