Predicto

Are you out of your mind? It looked like a crappy Slovenian high school gym Wiz picked a good time to play the Warriors. The Dubs are out of sync on defense, fouling all the time, and this is messing with their transition game. Wiz have a good chance tonight.

The dominoes keep falling. Good.

I wasn't talking about Trump, or even about hardcore Trump followers. I'm talking about the mainstream media, and I'm talking about you and me. We get manipulated and distracted and too. I'm talking about how the GOP can be so obviously cartoonishly evil these days, and yet millions of Americans think "both sides are corrupt and both sides are to blame." You see it all the time on this board. Every single one of us falls for this game.

The GOP and conservative media learned a while back how to manipulate the news cycle. If you move the goalposts enough and complicate the discussion as much possible and throw around enough allegations and do enough "just asking questions" and search for one statement you can take out of context, you can make ANYTHING look like a scandal at least for a while. And you coordinate your message, every day. The mainstream media may lean liberal, but unlike the conservative media, the mainstream media is entirely reactive and completely uncoordinated, and terrified of being accused of bias. So they will buy in to every potential "scandal" and just ask questions and breathlessly report vague accusations until they get distracted to the next new thing. The trick to the game is to always be on the offensive, always move forward to a new "scandal," never stick around for each of your past scandals get sorted into the big nothing burgers that they almost always are. The public never remembers the final outcomes. They remember the accusations, the questions, the aura of misconduct, the Crooked Hillary namecalling. Be sure to say that "Congress is investigating" rather than "one shamelessly partisan GOP committee chairman is making another repetitive investigation that will go nowhere." Not only does it keep the Democrats reeling, but it distracts the media and the public from the crap that the GOP and conservatives actually are doing every day. twa is our resident master of the game. I admire his skill.

there was a twilight zone episode about this

Is your dad me? I have caught at least 20 snakes over the years, including several rattlesnakes that I had to remove from our campsites. Never bothers me a bit. Spiders are different. They are the concentrated essence of everything that is evil.

Mr. Cash Considerations is looking like a pretty good player. I'm sure all the Bulls fans are pleased with that highlight.

"See? Empirical proof that both sides are equally bad and violent." Sincerely, hordes of pearl clutching white self-proclaimed moderates who "don't see color"

Spiff you might be right about Walton. I guess I have him in under the Gale Sayers principle - there was a (short) period of time where Walton was the best player in the NBA, even better than Kareem. It didn't last long, but it was there.

I'm sorry, but Debuscherre was not one of the 50 all time best players. He was the 3rd or even 4th best player on those Knicks teams. Neither was Cowens. He was a hustle player who was barely a top 5 center when he played. His MVP award in 1973 clearly should have gone to Kareem, but the old white sportswriters were pissed at Kareem because he changed his name and got all Muslim and uppity. And any argument that Jason Kidd was not top 50 is just crazy.

I agree with almost all of that list. However, I would keep Drexler and drop Reggie Miller. And I would (probably) keep Bill Walton and drop Paul Pierce. I might even keep Dolph Schayes and drop Iverson (Iverson is almost as overrated as Pistol Pete Maravich).. LKB is right about James Worthy. He was the third wheel on a dynasty. Magic made him what he was.

KAT is far better than Lopez or Whiteside. So is Gobert.

Embiid does have amazing talent. He also very well could be the next Greg Oden and play 88 games total in his career. I am not convinced that Simmons or Fultz are nearly as talented as you assume that they are. Weren't you the guy who kept telling me a few years ago that Alex Len was destined to be the next Hakeem?

CP3 tried one of his patented flops late in the game - it was so blatant that it injured a referee lol

This just in - James Harden is really good, the Houston bench is really legit, and the Warriors just are not the Warriors in crunch time if Draymond isn't in there. I'm so glad basketball is finally back.

They might have gotten there if they hand't dealt Chris Webber and Mitch Richmond away for a couple of bags of magic beans. You rarely see a young 55 win team get totally blown up by management like that one was.

27 games might get you the 8th spot in the East

Wiggins averages 20 because he was penciled into the lineup every day as the volume scorer on a mediocre team, and allowed to put up as many shots as he wants. Didn't matter if he shoots below league average (he does), didn't matter if he created for others on (he doesn't), didn't matter if he played no defense and didn't crash the boards (he doesn't do that either). Wiggins may be a star someday, but right now he isn't even a good starter level player, much less a star. Now KAT - that's another story entirely. He's already a star and is only going to get better.

The inside game will come back. What's not coming back is the old school slow as molasses inside game of relatively clumsy gigantic players who only were effective posting up because the illegal defense rules of the past meant they didn't have to worry about surprise double teams, or people cheating in the passing lane. Most of the big guys in the past, even the skilled ones, were mechanical, with carefully scripted moves that only worked because they only had a defender on the inside, between them and the basket. And you need to have a variety of places you can score from now, because teams today scout tendencies much more scientifically and if you are predictable, guys like Kawhi are going to strip the ball five times in a row. The inside game is still there, you just have to be more versatile to take advantage of it.

Why do people on here constantly ask why no one spoke up before? It's the same reason as it was with Roger Ailes. People wanted to continue to work in the industry. They didn't want to face a powerful figure who could kill their career, sue them into oblivion, etc. Even if they came forward and were vindicated, they ran a serious risk of being viewed as a whiner, a "difficult person to work with." Sexual harassers usually get away with it for years because they pick on people who are less powerful than they are. It has always been that way. Especially in Hollywood - Jack Warner, Sam Goldwyn, Louis B Mayer, Howard Hughes - all of them were sexual harassers, and all of them got away with it.

you new around here?

The lack of SNL jokes about Harvey Weinstein isn't because he is a Liberal... it is that 99 percent of the audience has no idea who Harvey Weinstein is and the jokes would fall flat. Bill OReilly was a major media face on TV. Roger Ailes WAS FoxNews. They got roasted because everyone know who they were. The liberal media had no trouble making jokes about Bill Clinton, Anthony Weiner, Bill Cosby, anyone who the audience would know. All of the conservatives screaming about media bias and conservative persecution first had to go look Weinstein up on Wikipedia before they could add their own content and forward their angry posts on Facebook.

On top of that, in our currently polarized society, conservatives have decided than any gun control proposal is an attack on conservative values. It triggers the same voting response even from conservatives who don't belong to the NRA, don't own guns, and don't even want to own one. Liberals aren't nearly that cohesive (right now). We splinter and squabble with each other over every nuance, and then don't get out to vote because the candidate is not pure enough for us.