The Official NBA Regular Season 07-08 Thread

[tuq]

Yeah I just looked at Kobe's playoff stats and now I can see why they are effed:

In his first two seasons encompassing 20 playoff games, he averaged ~8.5 PPG. In his third and fourth playoff seasons encompassing 30 playoff games, he averaged ~20.5 PPG. So that's 50 playoff games right there averaging ~15.7 PPG over his first four years.

Since then he has played in 81 more playoff games, averaging ~28 PPG. Thus the whole thing about him averaging 23 PPG in the playoffs is a misleading statistic.

[Victor]

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it was his 4th yr in the league and he had been playing with scrubs. as a rookie he had a fckn crackhead as coach. i mean real life, literal, crackhead.

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Who, John Lucas? Wasn't that like 25 years ago? What am I missing here?

Also, Victor rants are awesome.

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my argument was with the "lebron had never won anything" statement.

at that point he had been in the league for 3 years and was 21. cavs won like 20 games before he got there. missed the playoffs by 1 game his first 2 yrs. WON a playoff series his 3rd year.

his first coach was a crackhead. i dont even know how to describe silas. never had any talent, other than ilgauskas who breaks down at the 50 game mark ever year.

so ya, he never won a title after 3 yrs with little support and atrocious coaches. what a sucker.

[anatta]

I gave it up for lbj over Pistons and said I'd prefer to build around him > Kobe, though take Kobe in a must win series with scrub teammates.

When Lebron came in, I said bigger Jordan with Magic court vision, blew my mind. But nobody posts up the great ones. Maybe Nash. You don't even post up John Stockton. That's the mind right there. "you look into Larry Bird's eyes you see the mind of an assassin." - Dominique Wilkins.

Free throw shooting, is all right there. Every great player perimeter player is money at the line. They have too much pride to go up there and shoot 60-70%. They make you pay. They love it that you feel helpless with them at the stripe. Relish it.

[sethypooh21]

Lebronikova refers to the way he seems to mail it in, like, I dunno, last night. It's been mentioned already, but on exact same fastbreak plays, Melo put Bron on his ass, whereas Bron was content to just let Melo go dunk (though Devin Brown outhustled him to give the foul). I'm not really sure I blame him, given how bad his teammates and (especially) coach are, but everything else being somewhat equal, Kobe's all the time competitiveness gives him a clear edge. And I [censored] HATE Kobe.

[tuq]

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his first coach was a crackhead. i dont even know how to describe silas. never had any talent, other than ilgauskas who breaks down at the 50 game mark ever year.

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Oh so it was a racist comment. Black = crack. I see. Silas never had problems with drugs that I recall. But wasn't John Lucas somehow tied into the Cavaliers? I thought I remember that, and of course his drug history was pretty well documented back in the day.

[FlyWf]

This is another example of people seizing on the highest profile result and completely ignoring all the rest of the data(cf. all the SEC nutriding in NCAAF). It's really sad, and that's not hyperbole because I know most of you guys are reasonably intelligent people who are serious fans. You're better than this.

The Cavs got swept in the Finals, but they went 19-9 against the West in the regular season. ZOMG HOW COULD THAT BE I'M PRETTY SURE MARIOTTI TOLD ME THE EAST WAS A MINOR LEAGUE AND ALSO LEBRON IS GAY!!!!!!!!

Also, shooting wise Lebron's statistics compare quite favorably to Kobe at the same age and from observation it seems like Lebron's problems are consistency of form and shot selection, which are both fixable(and the first one Lebron seems to admit having the problem with offseason shooting practices and the like).

Kobe has an incredibly pretty shot when it's going in, but he has shot a lower percentage from the field than LBJ for his career. The big edge for Kobe is that he doesn't take nearly as much time off(again a coaching issue) and the even more direct coaching issue, he doesn't have Mike Brown drawing up "Kobe, what we're going to do is have you dribble 35 feet away from the basket. Then we'll send a big guy to set a halfassed screen 30 feet away from the basket. ???. Points. Got it? Break!" as the only offensive play in the playbook.

[tuq]

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The Cavs got swept in the Finals, but they went 19-9 against the West in the regular season. ZOMG HOW COULD THAT BE I'M PRETTY SURE MARIOTTI TOLD ME THE EAST WAS A MINOR LEAGUE AND ALSO LEBRON IS GAY!!!!!!!!

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Well, this stat IS pretty irrelevant until you disclose how they did against GOOD teams in the west. At 19-9 overall they probably did pretty well, but as it stands that statistic includes games against some really terrible teams like the Clippers, Blazers, Sonics, and Grizzlies.

[Victor]

tuq, lucas coached lebron. lucas is a confirmed crackhead. not meant to be racist.

[FlyWf]

Everyone does poorly against good teams and well against bad teams. Kobe, for example, gets to play a goodly portion of his schedule against the Clippers, Blazers, Sonics, and Grizzlies. The stat is absolutely relevant and breaking it down further is sophistry trying to find a small sample that supports your point.

The Cavs swept the regular season series against the Spurs as I imagine you know, they didn't get "exposed" in the playoffs like we had no idea the Eastern conference was worse or the Cavs were specifically worse than the Spurs.

Both of the games in Cleveland were very close, I don't think we hear the same nonsense if the Cavs lose in 6, and if your evaluation of the relative strength of two players(much less two conferences) changes on a 6 point swing over 4 games you're probably a moron.

[tuq]

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Everyone does poorly against good teams and well against bad teams. Kobe, for example, gets to play a goodly portion of his schedule against the Clippers, Blazers, Sonics, and Grizzlies.

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Why? Why is their record against crappy teams from the west any more relevant than their record against crappy teams from the east?

Here, I looked it up for you:

DAL: 0-2
PHX: 0-2
SAS: 2-0
HOU: 1-1
UTA: 1-1
DEN: 0-2

So their record was 4-8 against teams that had any realistic shot of representing the West in the Finals. What's more, the two Spurs wins came in the second game of the season and on January 2nd, both well before the Spurs' second half surge.

I get that teams aren't going to fare as well against good teams. Obviously. But how they do against good teams is far more relevant than how they do against crappy ones.

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The stat is absolutely relevant and breaking it down further is sophistry trying to find a small sample that supports your point.

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IMMEDIATELY following this, you wrote:

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The Cavs swept the regular season series against the Spurs

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So it's OK for you to use a TWO GAME SAMPLE but it's not OK for me to cite the much larger sample size that is how they fared against WC contenders?

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Both of the games in Cleveland were very close, I don't think we hear the same nonsense if the Cavs lose in 6, and if your evaluation of the relative strength of two players(much less two conferences) changes on a 6 point swing over 4 games you're probably a moron.

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I don't have much of an opinion on the finals because I knew that 1) they were going to suck and be boring and 2) the Spurs were going to win. I didn't even remember those two games being that close, but they evidently were.