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***2021-2022 NBA Season Thread***


RonArtest15

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9 hours ago, Destino said:

Absurd combinations of stats is practically an NBA tradition.  They dig up absurd stats like that on a weekly basis.  Things like "He's the first player with 23+ points, 7+assists, 9rebounds, and eat 2 hot dogs at half time on a Wednesday night game... and he's only 20 years old!"  🤣

 

It's a sports tradition, homie.  They do the same **** in baseball.  

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23 hours ago, stevemcqueen1 said:

 

Same thing with Harden and Wall.  People bag in them being overweight, but they're pretty clean around the middle.  The jersey just hangs weird on them.  They have heavy musculature in the chest and neck and arms that makes them look different from typical slender NBA athletes.  When your shoulders are that wide and your arms are that long, if you've got thick joints, you can carry a ton of good weight in your upper body without getting a sloppy belly or getting slow.  That's why these guys have such an easy time getting into the paint and scoring through contact.

 

My daughter went to Harden's basketball camp a few years ago. And to his credit, he was there for every minute of it and was running drills with the kids. He would also do something insanely athletic every 15 or 20 minutes just to keep their interest.

 

Point being, NBA players in real life are difficult to process. You look at Harden on the court, and he seems like an average-sized dude who seems slightly out of shape next to everyone else. You stand next him by a water fountain and he is one of the largest human beings you have ever encountered, seems as wide as he is tall, and even through a t-shirt seems like a fitness model.

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23 hours ago, stevemcqueen1 said:

 

Some people just gain weight and develop musculature more easily than others.  Must be something about the way they metabolize food.  Building muscle (without having to use steroids Doc) is probably just really easy for Zion, whereas the rest of us would have to eat like ten thousand good calories a day and lift and run all of the time we're not eating in order to keep up with a proportional amount of growth.  And even then we probably don't have the frame to carry the weight like him.  The young man is just gifted.  That's why I think he's a comic book character.

 

By the way, the path to NBA greatness now seems to go through the Olympic team. With Kobe's death, all the stories are coming out about how Lebron, Wade, and their peers spent a summer with Kobe with realized what they had to do in practice/training. Zion will get his summer with Lebron, and if he's smart, he will show up to the next training camp in the best shape of his life.

 

Zion has rolled out of bed and been twice as good as everyone he has ever played with his entire life. Even at Duke. That's probably still the case to some degree in New Orleans. But the cool thing about the modern NBA is that all these guys know each other and practice together in the off-season. He'll get his Oympic team experience. He'll get his summer in LA with Kawhi, And he'll learn hopefully.

 

I honestly think that the NBA culture has evolved to a point where the Derrick Colemans of the world really don't exist any longer. Even someone as great as Barkley....you wonder...what would his career have been like if he spent a summer playing pickup against Bird and Magic instead of, I dunno, eating pork rinds and watching Mama's Family.

 

And I think all these guys are aware of this. You know Lebron James has spent every moment of the last 12 years or so pondering his "legacy." He absolutely is picturing a moment when he hands the Finals MVP trophy to Zion in 2030, and Zion says, "That summer in Tokyo with this man is really what made all of this possible" while Lebron does the whole "Pass on what you have learned, young man" routine.

Edited by Lombardi's_kid_brother
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On 1/27/2020 at 10:48 AM, Lombardi's_kid_brother said:

I honestly think that the NBA culture has evolved to a point where the Derrick Colemans of the world really don't exist any longer. Even someone as great as Barkley....you wonder...what would his career have been like if he spent a summer playing pickup against Bird and Magic instead of, I dunno, eating pork rinds and watching Mama's Family.

 

It's become very fraternal.  And I think it's been good for the players.  They're having longer careers and becoming very empowered and it has probably increased revenues league-wide.  Sharing the folkways of NBA success.  It's changed the nature of the competition too, but I'm not one who needs the nastiness of the old-head competition to enjoy the games.

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20 hours ago, stevemcqueen1 said:

 

It's become very fraternal.  And I think it's been good for the players.  They're having longer careers and becoming very empowered and it has probably increased revenues league-wide.  Sharing the folkways of NBA success.  It's changed the nature of the competition too, but I'm not one who needs the nastiness of the old-head competition to enjoy the games.

 

I forget where I heard it, but someone pointed out that this is no longer just among active players. Kobe was not involved at all with the Lakers and went several years without going to games until his daughter apparently expressed an interest in it. But it seems like every player in the league had had a conversation with him in the last three years. In the old days, Magic and Bird had to become coaches or executives after they retired to maintain an influence. Now, it seems like there are dozens if not hundreds of informal advisors all over the place driving the culture.

 

My theory is that this is why the NBA in the 90s got weird for a while. Bird, Magic, Jordan etc grew the game and made everyone rich. And then the Colemans, Webers, and all the 18 year olds came into this Candyland where teams still only had two or three assistants and the old guard was not interested in mentoring anyone. I imagine any young player who reached out to surly competitive psychos like Bird, Jordan, or Isiah were either told to F off or had some weird psychological game played on them. Magic was the one guy who sorta set the template, but he's Magic so he always wanted to give his advice on camera somewhere and possibly have it sponsored.

 

I think Lebron probably carves out an hour a day simply to text "Keep Working" to 50 different guys, probably going into the high school ranks at this point.

 

And this is why you can never really stop Super Teams and stuff like that. If you and I had played against each other in AAU, had been seated in the green room together on draft night, texted three times a day, and trained with each other in the summer. Eventually, one of us is going to say, "Hey....we should team up and take over the league."

 

 

 

 

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'98 All star game on NBA TV right now. Good ****ing God. Minus a couple of names I haven't recognized, everyone on the court is a legend to me as a 90s kid.

 

And what a difference compared to modern all star games. These dudes are going at each other hard. MJ & a young Kobe pup squaring off. Shaq and Mutombo battling in the paint.

 

This **** looks like a prison pickup game compared to today's All star games.

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I love this story and I'm completely on the side of the Memphis players calling out Iggy. It's not a good look for Iggy and Steph Curry needs to stay out of this. Nothing good can come from him chiming in. 

 

 

Edited by Hersh
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