Carter Pearson: John, my boy. Happy New Year. May your 2020 exceed your and everyone else’s expectations. 2019 was a wild ride, but I’m honestly pretty glad it’s over.
Here’s hoping our first post in 2021 happens and we are not all engulfed in Australian fire and the Russians let us keep our email accounts after the election. Good times ahead!
I wrote a short poem about it, in the style of the New Yorker’s Greeting Friends which makes me laugh a lot and cry a little each year:
Greeting (Basketball) Friends!
Speaking of 2020, this is a pretty major year for some longtime contenders in the league, as well as some folks who have arrived earlier than expected. I’m really intrigued by what the Blazers, Thunder, Heat and Mavs have in store for this season.
We can delve into some teams and stories one by one, but who and what and why is interesting to you as we move into this Year of our Lord 2020?
J.D. Crabtree: Carter,
Do not dwell on the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.
– J.R. Smith
2020 is our year, by the way, if I’m looking at the math correctly. We can’t control much of what is happening in the Eastern Hemisphere, but we can control our thoughts in the Eastern Conference. We also have an astronomical amount of control on our content and direction as a leading basketball think-tank.
I’m interested in those sleeper teams, but my mind is intoxicated with that sweet, sweet Lakers supremacy. Knock his style of play or off-court personality if you want, but the man tries very hard every game to win and donates millions of dollars to underprivileged communities every year. Stop being ticky-tacky folks. Simply imagine what people would say about you with the same magnitude of scrutiny.
I’m interest in L.A., at the moment. The Lakers look like the favorite, and the Clippers are hitting a chemistry rough patch. And boy, does Kawhi bring a certain amount of dram for someone that claims to want to just shoot hoops (there’s a side note here on these type of players subtly creating more drama when they only want to “just play the game I love” e.g. Durant).
It will be nowhere close to the tide-shifting tempest which was the 2019 free agency market, but am sensing fun midseason moves in 2020. Andre Drummond and Kevin Love moving to contenders should not be back page news – we learned that with Marc Gasol’s impact.
Bogdan Bogdanovic. Kuzma. CP3. Redick. Marcus Morris. Maybe even some blockbusters with KAT or DeRozan.
It could be fun. No, it will be fun.
And my lord what a poem Cooks.
CP: Thanks, JD. I’m not sure that is a J.R. Smith quote, but since we are not a scientifically or fact-based publication, I will not fact-check you.
Being obsessed with the Los Angeles teams feels very Weezer of you. In this case – the Lake Show is Beverly Hills and the Clippers are Buddy Holly.
I agree that the LeBron hate is overblown, and my take on him 100% of the time is that he is the most talented basketball player ever, and is the second-best NBA player of all time. Everything that you mentioned regarding charity and the community is great. The world is undoubtedly a better place because he exists. He is also exceedingly corny. His is a pretty petty team mate. And he has a fetish for team mates who were very good in 2012.
I think his insistence on not managing his load is going to doom the Lakers in the playoffs. The Clippers are resting guys, the Bucks are resting guys. The rest situation feels a lot like the Tour de France in 1999. Perhaps it is not palatable to do steroids, but if, like, everyone else is doing courses of ephedrine 6 weeks before the race, maybe you should too.
(Rest in peace, David Stern. He would have never let an article with the words “LeBron” and “ephedrine” appear anywhere on the internet.)
The Clippers are going to be fine. I’m not predicting anyone else wins until Kawhi doesn’t win. He came at the Warriors and did not miss.
I’m going the other way on mid-season trades. I think we are in for a dry season. Everyone either has too many huge contracts or not enough assets to make a deal happen. Example: the Celtics would love to get a center (Steven Adams? Al Horford back? Tristan Thompson?). But, the only medium sized contract they have to make this happen is Marcus Smart. They can’t trade the heart of their team, and all the other guys are either too expensive or important (Kemba, Jaylen, Tatum, Heyward) or too cheap or bad (Timelord, Romeo Langford, etc.). The situation is the same for the Lakers and Sixers.
On the player front, I don’t see where a trade comes from either.
CP3? The Thunder are too good to make a trade and already have up to 15 (!) first round picks at their disposal between now and 2026. They aren’t trading CP3 for the number 26 pick next year.
KAT? He is in Year 1 of a supermax deal (5/$190). Even if he requests a trade, Gersson Rosas (the Wolves GM) specifically came to Minny from Houston to build a team around him. He can just tell KAT to go home for a year to cool off. He’ll still have 3 years left on his deal when he gets back.
DeRozan? Lol. He stinks. I’d rather have Redick.
But, I’m sure this is wrong because I am often wrong and the NBA is insane.
Now, back to my most intriguing teams. I think I’ll table Luka for now, because I want to do something bigger on him in a later post. (working title: “The Best Teenagers in NBA History”)
Let’s go with the Heat. First, the Heat are really fucking fun to watch. Tell me – have you availed yourself of much Miami Heat basketball this season? If not, you really should.
Here’s their rotation (starters in bold): Jimmy Buckets, Bam, Justise Winslow, Kendrick Nunn, Tyler Herro, Goran Dragic, Duncan Robinson, Derrick Jones, Kelly Olynyk, Meyers Leonard.
That is such a strange team. And Winslow is likely to return to the starting line-up as the nominal point guard/power forward.
The starters run Butler/Bam pick and rolls, a ton of motion, and spot up threes from tall, gaunt white men. Duncan Robinson went to Exeter for high school and Williams College before transferring to Michigan! He now starts for the third seed in the East. He averages 12 a game on 47/44/92 shooting splits. This is like flipping through League Pass and seeing Lewis Affronti running off a pin-down screen from Andre Drummond.
Kendrick Nunn was plucked off the Warriors G-League team and is now averaging 15 a game. His advanced stats suggest his success is a slight mirage, but he’s a real NBA player who can handle, make 3s, and not get torched on defense. That’s valuable.
And the bench, ooh, that bench. You’ve got your second highest paid player, Dragić, keeping the trains moving, Derrick Jones doing stuff like this, Olynyk filling the tall, gaunt white man quota.
Which brings me to Tyler Herro. JJ Bigdick. Apparently his real nicknames are “Boy Wonder” and “Buckets”. Which, sure, whatever. This man does get buckets, and he is quite young. The best thing, and perhaps this should not be surprising from a man who wore a suit that I believe was designed by Trilly Pulitzer to the NBA Draft, is how fearless he is. You could say the same thing about another small, young shooting guard from UK as well, but Herro is actually good. He has some issues to iron out. He is in the mid-range too much (20% of his shots) and doesn’t shoot well enough from there (39%). He needs to improve his decision making (barely 1:1 Assist:TO) and defense (negative DBPM and DRT).
But, to use a Bill Simmons test – he could play in a Finals game and not get run off the court.
Mainly, I can tell the Heat are fun because notoriously ornery Jimmy Buckets, who is their best player, had this exchange with a reporter earlier this year.
So, that was a lot. Anything you vehemently disagree with? Violently agree with? Are just kinda tepid on?
P.S. – lol that it looks like OKC and CP3 will beat the Rockets tonight.
P.P.S. – double lol that apparently these are two good college basketball players. Is Chase Budinger back?
JD: Ha! You mentioned college basketball! That means I get to ramble about it.
You know I gravitate towards this strange version of a college Nirvana, and this year is a perfect year for the NCAAB purist. Six teams have already been atop of the AP. Blue bloods are losing to no ones. And there’s no Zion to steal all the coverage.
Sharing a Top 25 KenPom the day I’m writing this:
We are shaping up for a beauty of a season, if basketball fans can look beyond vanity metrics and media. March Madness will always reign supreme in regards to postseason structure. And everyone will be reminded why when this year’s 68-team, single-elimination tournament provides national chaos for a month.
On to the NBA, and on to your LeBron comment.
Question, is it better to load manage earlier in the season or later? I know the answer is a healthy balance throughout but an interesting theory I have is that LeBron could starting managing his load once its clear they are a playoff lock. He is currently maxing out games to show that this Lakers team can beat anyone, if they want to, so these questions won’t consume NBA media later on in the season. My point is that this first half of the season they are close to proving you don’t f*** with the Lakers at full strength.
This Lakers stint cannot be the lone black eye on his resume. He needs to win everywhere to be the greatest winner in history. LeBron is also willing to die on the court. I trust that he will provide enough gusto since they are load managing Anthony Davis, who is good.
Also Dwight Howard hit a three the other night.
The East is weird, man. I have a hard time believing in any team, even the ones out of Milwaukee. Since I just watched another SEC team dominate the college football landscape I’m going to use weak analogy due to recency bias. The Western Conference is the SEC, and the Eastern Conference are the rest of the Power 5 conference. The Eastern Conference is definitely playing a high level of basketball, it is the NBA, but they are just bred differently in the West. Even more so now with LeBron and Kawhi out in L.A.
So my wild and spicy take on the East is that the 2-8 seeds are underwhelming and have no real chance. And their beacon of Larry O’ Brien hope, the Bucks, will collapse to whatever Western elite comes out of the true pack. Yes, and we all know what must be said next:
Trevor Lawrence = Giannis Antetokounmpo
*gasps*
Sorry for tranquilizing your growing Heat enthusiasm, I don’t have enough room in my heart to open up to any team battling the Pacers for a playoff position. I learned my lesson with Philly last year.
You may be right on trades. OK, I will alter my take to their being at least one trade by a contender that makes a Gasol-ish splash. And if you remember Gasol specs that’s quite the splash. The NBA is too fluid in 2020, someone will do something to mimic the micro-run the Raptors proved is possible.
My final 2020 thought will be commenting on Carmelo for a second. It’ll be quick.
With the rise of social media, mostly NBA Twitter, that now accompanies passionate and controversial fanbases, the masses have the ability to morph millions of small, possibly ill-informed, takes into one massive monstrous take. It’s the Nickelback or Nicolas Cage effect. But in sports this effect causes the pendulum to swing in the negativity direction due to it’s win/loss framework.
After Carmelo’s failed stints at OKC and Houston, which were designed to prove he still had championship attributes once the Knicks chapter closed, he became a walking meme. An easy target for the common fan to roast. Lots of ball-hogging and team-killing digs. I’m sure these constant reminders weren’t ideal for someone who was having trouble landing on a roster again.
Even if the Trailblazers miss the playoffs, the collective NBA community should applaud that one of the best scorers in the 21st century received enough behind-the-scenes support and opportunity to not be violently sunsetted. He’s playing decent basketball again, and he’s earned that phrase.
Anything else that should be on our 2020 minds?
CP: I think you hit everything on the head. And just in time for the biggest date on the NBA calendar: January 22nd. He is risen.
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