When I heard that D’antoni was going to coach the Lakers, I immediately tweeted “Looks like 7-sec-or-less will be 14-sec-or-less. Lakers old!” and " 'Run ‘n Gun’ is now ‘totter and lob’." (I am such a wit.)
Neither of my two followers (my wife and daughter) knew what I was talking about. Hence this thread.
David Stern retiring, the Lakers in coaching disarray, the Harden trade, and the Knicks with the best record in the league - and the season just started.
Spurs are my hometown team, I see them in the second round of the playoffs, but they can’t get past the fact that Duncan’s best years are behind him. I will say this about the Spurs - they have mastered tanking, having done it twice, picking up David Robinson and Tim Duncan in the process. I don’t follow college ball that much, so I don’t know who is on the horizon, but the Spurs front office needs to brush up on the strategy that has worked so well for them in the past.
Though this is the regular season thread, my final projected final two rounds in the playoffs have the Heat beating the Celtics for the East, Clippers* beating Lakers in West, and the Heat beating the Clippers for their second championship in a row.
*Yeah, Thunder are an easy pick. But fuck 'em for trading Harden - you shouldn’t make a move that stupid and still make it into the conference finals.
Anyway, imho, Popovich should never be fined for making personnel decisions, especially when his “depleted” team comes within 5 of beating the champs.
Lakers are looking lost. Not really feeling sorry for them, though. Over 10% of the season is done and the Grizzlies, Heat, Thunder, Spurs, and Knicks/Nets are the teams with the strongest early leads. I don’t really see the Knicks lasting the entire season though…
Anybody else want to contribute something other than a page-view to this discussion?
People are giving Popp a lot of crap about his benchings yesterday, but I don’t have a problem with it. If the schedule were a bit more sane, he wouldn’t have to do stuff like this. But he has his head in the right place, winning at the end is the goal, and when you have an older team like Poppovich does it makes sense to rest your guys when you have 6 games in 9 nights.
Anyway, David Stern just announced a $250k fine to the Spurs for resting their star players after an extended road trip (most games on the road in a month in franchise history.) This is completely bullshit, imho - the league has better things to do than second-guess coaching decisions.
I’ve always respected Stern - he is one of the two greatest sports commissioners in US history (Rozelle being the other, of course) - but he is overreaching on this one.
I’m just laughing about the fine. Stern’s reasoning is totally incoherent, the Spurs’ subs still played the Heat very close, there’s really no way for the NBA to do anything about this, and the Spurs are owned by a man with a net worth of $80 million, so the fine seems irrelevant. The reason for the fine is the fact that Popovich showed up the NBA- and that schedule really is brutal. Between November 7th and 29th, the Spurs had a 6-day road trip (four games) and a 10-day (6 game) road trip featuring four games in 5 nights.
