in these, the waning days of stern: 2013-2014 NBA regular season thread (part 1)

Brian Mahoney ‏@briancmahoney 2m

Damning quote of the night, from Jason Kidd about the Nets: "I think it's getting very close to just accepting losing."

@ScottCacciola: "Pray for us," Raymond Felton said. "I'm serious."

YESSS THAT FELTON QUOTE

YESSSSSSSS

Hope someone finds vid of that, really want to savor "I'm serious" in a/v.

lol kidd is such a loser

Kidd still sharpest dressed NBA coach, has to count for something.

what are lebron's odds to win the mvp this year? 1:1?

lmao felton cheer up bud

if okc finfishes w a much better record than the heat and durant has a monster season maybe they will want to give it to him idk

dont look at this picture it will make you cry https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BcOJPbtCAAAACTe.jpg

...blood

POOR PAU

ouch

game winning free throws for super cool tonight

if beas put the heat over the top for another title i will lol into eternity

hey you know who hes having a better season than derick rose

hahaha

Even more astounding now that Rose somehow snagged an MVP since the start of LeBron's run in 2008.

Klay!

Nugs have already lost 2X home games as all of last season/

big win for the dubs imo, they've been bad against the west's playoff seated teams (like 2-9 before tonight iirc) and they havent really shown they can win when the splash bruvs both have bad games.

Christmas day game vs the Clips is must watch tv tho. Great rivalry.

u know, Sleep Train Arena is just not working for me as a basketball playing place name

wd prefer as a list of instructions for ball players.
sleep. train. arena. then food maybe. sleep again. go train again. go to a different arena.

sleep training arena for the fans more like folks the kings are just horrible

that Felton quote should be the board descrip for reals tho

the rudy gay effect xp

The McLemore pick hasn't worked out at all

Bradley Beal didn't look that great at first either but this is pretty extreme

Will probably just start another thread about this "stuff" so fun rolling reg season threads don't get bogged down with sad Debate Club vibe. Succinctly, I guess I'd say that team chemistry is an amalgam of interpersonal intelligence of the players and coaching staff and their ability to interact with each other in an effective manner that supplements whatever other talents they bring to the table.

In the context of Lance and the great start he's been off to this season, I'd say that "good chemistry" is what gives Vogel the confidence to leave Lance in the game after back-to-back turnovers and let him play through Bad Lance stretches when you'd expect a coach to pull him instead. Or that Lance's passing game has blossomed this year in part due to passing up decent looks in order to give other players better looks and maybe understanding that he's more valuable to the team with 10pts/10asts rather than 16pts/6asts. Not to mention he looks 100X more jazzed on the court this season when he's dropping a few crazy dimes each game.

But like, "this nebulous region called intangibles" is nebulous because they're mostly non-quantifiable, and, even if you believe they're real and not just "people telling themselves all sorts of stories about how things work," they still coexist with really obvious stuff like shooting, handle, XOs, etc. That's what I mean by a bad-faith reading-- if your counter-argument is lol kobe/shaq won and hated each other / Jordan won and he's psychotic / etc., then you're just massively missing the point. ie, even if this stuff exists, there are a bunch of other factors at play that might be way more important.

― Call me Shitmael (CompuPost), Monday, December 23, 2013 12:50 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is probably all i'll say on the topic but i think some of the things you've said in your posts are reasonable, but i think maybe what's going on is a type of ecological fallacy -- chemistry probably exists but it's kind of more a "team" or culture thing than it is the sum of individuals. lance fits into the pacers system well, but it's not like he can move to another team and use his chemicals to improve just any team's chemistry. so chemistry to me seems like a team-level thing rather than an individual thing. what's probably more important is FIT -- teams that have a good complementary set of players that fit into their system probably tend to win more games, teams that win probably tend to like each other more, which gets interpreted as chemistry, etc etc

McLemore not off to the hottest start but he's a rookie who is instantly playing like 23-30 minutes a game and already looks like a passable NBA player, which is a net positive for now. Plus he's doing this on the Kings. Always tough to accurately gauge rookies since dudes who end up being amazing players might need at least a season to really transition. Like McLemore will be fine; way more worried that Bennett is serious flameout material. Would probably be a big ego blow for Cavs to D League him for a while, but honestly seems like the best decision atm.

xp Heh, not gonna wade back into this but yeah, that makes total sense to me / approaches what I was trying to get at. When people talk about players being good fits, usually it has to do with complementary styles of play (like Aimless' pg and defender-rubber), which is almost a truism when it comes to team-building. I guess w/ Lance, it's less that his skill set happened to complement other players well; rather, it's that Lance, hypothetically, wouldn't have become the player he is now w/o a shitton of smart interpersonal maneuvering to help get him there.

Unrelated to that, it's just really cool to see an end-of-bench player and think damn, this person has something nobody else has, would be a shame if he could never put it all together. Cool that Lance entered the league as a one-dimensional scorer and, a few years later, his skill set probably goes passer > defender > rebounder > scorer.

Finally reading that Lowe piece ... using a team's combined record over multiple seasons is probably the sanest idea I've heard, although two seasons makes more sense than three.

Timmy with the handles
http://d3j5vwomefv46c.cloudfront.net/photos/thumb/829314134.gif

nice

lol the first three christmas games have been rendered irrelevant by injuries and reality cant we just have the heat play the thunder why not

i dunno personally i'm interested in seeing if the nets can manage to beat a team that can't score at all and am even more interested in watching the thunder slaughter the knicks

the west coast games are gonna be amazing tho

pray 4 the knicks

man, I was thinking I could at least get some cheap knicks tickets out of this misfortune, but stubhub is still ridiculous

i know, right? damn you knicks fans. hell, even Nets tickets are still too expensive

man, I was thinking I could at least get some cheap knicks tickets out of this misfortune, but stubhub is still ridiculous

― signed, J.P. Morgan CEO (Hurting 2), Tuesday, December 24, 2013 11:59 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i know, right? damn you knicks fans. hell, even Nets tickets are still too expensive

― Nhex, Tuesday, December 24, 2013 12:02 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This. Still holding out hope that one of them will for sure be out of playoff contention during the 2nd half of the season and some supercheap tix will pop up on CList. Only problem is that I really want to find something near the front rows and those tickets are impossible to find for any reasonable price, no matter how sucky Nets/Knicks are. I've even started browsing Sixers prices.

The absolute cheapest ticket you can get right now is like $40 for shittiest seats in the house to see them play the bobcats. Any decent team (other than the Blazers for some reason) and you pay like $90+

maybe if they stay sucky for long enough, prices will start to come down

nets tix are actually a comparative bargain, from what I see

didn't the knicks sell out the garden even in the isiah days? those tickets never fluctuate

if you really wanted to go to a knicks game just vulture stubhub on a weeknight vs a non-marquee team, the tickets usually go down pretty close to game time

cant we just have the heat play the thunder why not

if you're looking for a finals preview you'd ask for pacers -- thunder.

youll be able to get some ok tix at the end of the season, still over priced but w/e, really the path of least resistance is to hit up friends, acquaintances, strangers who have corporate tickets, thats the thing that keeps them so expensive even more in new york than other places cause of all the capitalism and whatnot, the entire lower bowl is owned m/l by companies who really could really care less whether the knicks are good or not

didn't the knicks sell out the garden even in the isiah days? those tickets never fluctuate

― le goon (J0rdan S.), Tuesday, December 24, 2013 12:21 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, it seems like "knicks tickets" has had the ring of "precious item" for years