NBA 2020-21 reg season 1st half thread

That kind of points to the impossibility of comparing across eras. Marbury was definitely ball dominant, but he averaged around 8 assists/game almost every season of his career, right up until the final Knicks phase. He couldn't shoot though, and I kind of doubt he would've learned to be a significantly better shooter in the modern game. Trae as that player, but with the shooting capacity he already has, is pretty damn good. Remains to be seen whether it can translate to team success. I think he's a good enough passer that he can rebalance his arsenal enough for that elusive winning formula, in the right context. Will be fun to watch either way, though, and doubly so if he can hover close enough to Luka to generate barstool arguments and think pieces about the draft day trade for years to come.

xp similar to what J0rdan said. J0rdan, love your bball insights and much respect for your take on the game

atm trae is more or less singlehandedly making watching hawks games fun for the first time since like 2014

xp ha thanks :) i love chatting ball w/ my guys

just looked up trae's player projection page on 538

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2021-nba-player-projections/trae-young/

performance of the 10 most comparable players

1. chris paul
2. stephon marbury
3. russell westbrook
4. devin booker
5. kyrie irving
6. gilbert arenas

this seems entirely reasonable to me as a range of outcomes. devin booker showing up is interesting for better or worse

having watched most of the guy's games, the chris paul comparison is the only one that fits. he has superb court vision which i would not attribute to the rest of that group. i'm not arguing that his teams will outperform any of those other players (or even that he'll have a better career than a few of those guys), just that stylistically, he's much different

J0rdan, love your bball insights and much respect for your take on the game

― Lavator Shemmelpennick, Tuesday, December 29, 2020 2:37 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

please do not encourage the chris paul slander -_-

CP3 is controversial. Not his all-star status, but just where to place him in an era of fabulous guards.

noticed cp3s status amongst contrarian minded people even those who arent really huge basketball fan has reached god level, a natural byproduct of him being generally underrated

cp3 is at least the 3rd greatest PG of all time maybe 2nd so yeah

as the original cp3 fan i feel pretty comfortable saying chris paul is a lot like john stockton, both of them are wildly overachieving little guys who play extremely sound basketball and make their teammates better, but both are limited in comparison to the greatest players of all time by their inability to score points at an elite level, for instance if i had to win a playoff game i would take steph over cp3 every time, and i would take isiah thomas too, but also being the best at any particular position isnt meaningful

simmons and russillo did a book of basketball episode on him recently...simmons’ take was truly deranged, basically a standard twitter egg perspective, russillo is a stan and also generally is a much better thinker about basketball so his was much more informed

2nd or third is probably right, depends how the rest of curry’s career shapes out. (maybe third or fourth, I admit my sense of isiah’s place is very incomplete.) comparing those two is fascinating because it’s a comparison between a guy who always plays well and never wins and a guy who usually underperforms yet wins anyway

tangentially i do wonder what guys like marbury or arenas would’ve looked like if they got to play in the spacing era as opposed to the last gasp of the packed inside the arch, no movement era

arenas was really ahead of his time. he would have cooked in today's game.

the guy who wouldve been just unstoppable is iverson

I think Marbury had personal issues that would have always derailed him

CP3 has such a brain-boggling highlight reel though, so many plays that just seem impossible

Iverson would have averaged 10 assists per game as a shooting guard in today’s game

I’ve always been so confused by the zoomer/millennial stat nerds who think iverson sucked but love Westbrook

there are stats nerds who love westbrook?

stands to reason as he makes a lot of stats

stands to reason as he makes a lot of stats

steph vs cp3 is an interesting comparison... kind of a peak vs longevity argument even putting aside the respective playoff histories. don’t think cp ever reached the heights of even steph’s pre KD MVP/championship season. cp is more of a “pure” PG & his game is prob more consistent/adaptable... if you put him on the KD warriors i’m sure he wins a title. i just think steph’s long distance shooting & how that opens up his entire game puts him above cp as a player for me

the one time paul was paired with an truly elite bucket getter, james harden, he came very close to getting a ring even tho the team on the whole was pretty flawed

hot take alert but imo steph will never regain his prior form and will come to be seen as unable to perform without a super supporting cast

thats prob where he paul been best as a second option star, but i mean thats the thing, the first option guys you just put next to whoever

blake was a really good scorer but couldnt just do it on his own whenever he wanted

if I were a Rockets fan I don't know if I'd ever get over that game 7

hot take alert but imo steph will never regain his prior form and will come to be seen as unable to perform without a super supporting cast

― micah, Tuesday, December 29, 2020 5:49 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this may end up being a popular idea but its obvs not true, just check out the dubs first champ team, not any sort of superteam

there were three all-stars and none of them won finals mvp, they became a super team that year

im sorry but thats just silly

the super team was the friends they made along the way

there’s a version of steph’s career where KD stays in OKC and cp3 gets to houston and there’s some epic battles to get out of the west just to face those excellent cavs teams. steph certainly wins fewer titles that way but maybe wins one in a way that garners him more respect ultimately.

i don’t think steph will ever be remembered as some great champion but his legacy as a pivotal figure in the history of basketball is pretty cemented at this point imo

i don't think they were a superteam pre KD, just a perfectly assembled regular team

jordan-pippen-rodman wasn't a superteam either

the guy who wouldve been just unstoppable is iverson

― lag∞n, Tuesday, December 29, 2020 5:35 PM (forty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

He's my favorite, but I wonder. He wasn't a great 3P shooter by today's standards, but he spent more time on his back in the paint than any player ever and now that's getting called every time and he could shoot FT's reasonably well.

when evaluating steph and cp3, i look at whose game changed the way hoops are played on every team from the pros down to high school.

iverson would have had a lot more room for drives with today's spacing. fewer 6'11 stiffs hanging out near the lane.

dipos made a couple nice plays tonight looks like he might be getting heathy

When iverson started slowing down the jumper got better. His mechanics were good. I think with a lot of guys who are insanely fast they mess up their shooting because you just can’t shoot with that kind of suddenness. And he probably was the quickest, fastest guy ever.

also chucking was consider ok back then there wasnt a lot of pressure to not shoot 30%

I think for sure that steph’s peak was higher than paul’s peak, but it’s closer than most people think — everyone forgets how great paul was in the 08 and 09 seasons. he doesn’t have that knee injury forcing him to change his game pretty radically and who knows what kind of player he ends up being. longevity it’s simply not close and unless steph plays well for another 10 years it won’t be. paul is setting the new standard for PGs into their mid-30s and beyond

it’s hardly worth rehashing the playoff debates but paul simply has some of the best numbers ever and has been — to this point — a better playoff player than curry on a minute to minute basis. it simply is not his fault that blake griffin missed something like 30% of the clippers playoff games during his peak. he played hurt and missed a small number of games of his own which is not his “fault” but you can argue the best ability is availability which is fairer. and I mean just imagine what his playoff record would be if he played in the east lol

Embiid is 1 for 5 from 3! This team is done.

raps outhustling the sixers rn

and then they blew it

Yeah they really blew this game

may i just say that theres a feed down the side of the espn nba scoreboard thats broken and this guys face has been sitting on top of it for at least a week

https://i.imgur.com/09nn8dT.png

Raps might have their own problems.

feel like there arent a lot of great teams in the nba right now

bucks just set the NBA record for threes in a game (28) two days after missing 31 threes in a 20 point loss to the knicks

the clippers should great, the lakers won last year with two starting quality players but have moderately better guys now, the nugs have a lot of guys but are they the right guys, heat are cool but dont quite have the star power, bucks idk...