He also said Jokic and Shai are the same level of defenders which is definitely interesting

I mean if rookies are regular players who can be signed and count against the salary cap I feel like that’d be pretty good for small market teams

He’s right, it wouldn’t. It would hurt incompetent franchises, but that has nothing to do with market size.

If you don’t believe me, ask yourself why the teams in large markets struggle to attract stars (Philly & Dallas, Chicago, Nets, even the Lakers, who have signed exactly one big FA since Shaq).

That 100% would hurt small market teams. It also probably end up like a La Liga or a Serie A… where only 1 or two teams are ever in competition 

There are ways you could tweak it so it hurts small markets less but yeah I’m sure even if you scaled the rookie salary slot with how poorly the team performed last year there would still be guys that would take ~8 mil from LA vs ~13 mil from Memphis or something.

He’s right, given the salary cap, every team can only allocate a certain percentage of payroll to the incoming rookie class, hypothetically, if the Knicks only offer AJ Dybantsa the mid level while the pelicans offer him the max, where do you think he’s going?

Large markets won’t be able to clear enough cap space every season to continue signing the best rookies.

The NFL didn’t use to have a draft and they implemented it for that very reason. Plus it gave rookies way too much leverage to hold out or only sign with big market or winning teams

It will hurt them definitely, but depending how it’s done smart market teams wouldn’t be hit that hard

Wemby was psyched to go to small market spurs (who excel at talent development) instead of big market houston.

He was saying this stuff on Lebatard back when he was still with the Pistons. Basically saying get rid of the player max and establish a hard cap for teams. Basically saying if you want to pay a player like Jokic 90 million a year you can but you also need to roster a team after that. The problem with it is aside from the top 50-60 players getting paid significantly more than what they would normally be paid. Role players would be on significantly worse contracts than normal in order for it to work in this theory.

I actually agree. But they shouldn’t be “free” agents. They should be beholden to the highest bidder like in a fantasy football auction draft.

He was off today… How players should work harder as they are not ready for 82 games

in Europe coaches seem to have the opposite mindset lol

This is one was viral a while back

Probably my favorite coach response of all time, its in Lithuanian, but the english captions are perfectly translated, I checked.

Its his job!

I suppose Robbie’s wife wasn’t 11 timezones from him and he likely was able to be with his newborn a few hours after his game.

Well he sounds like a terrible person. But then again men back in the day weren’t as caring to their wives as they are now. So that mindset was probably acceptable.

The real underlying issue that they are trying to mask is the season is way too long, and the all-nba/MVP voting is a byproduct of an objectively dysfunctional media apparatus.

Adam Silver’s “highlight league” but also wants players to play every game even though he doesn’t want fans to be able to watch every game. Load management was dumb, but forcing players to play and get injured more is worse.

Adam Silver has been a terrible commissioner that is doing lasting damage to the NBA

It rewards players for staying healthy and playing in as many games as possible. I think that’s a good thing.

The point is that Luka did not play in every game this year that he could’ve. He sat out some games where he wasn’t injured. If he had played in those games then he would’ve met the 65 game mark.

We are punishing them because players decided to sit for the lols for years.

These are the consequences. Dumb rules because millionaire athletes couldnt be bothered to play a game for millions.

People are also overlooking the fact that in order for the exceptional status to be granted, the third party will look at other games they missed to see if they could have played (per the CBA). There’s at least one game I saw where his official designation was injury management. So I’d say if they find even one other instance where he wasn’t completely unable to play, he shouldn’t receive exceptional status. He probably shouldn’t anyway tbh

No, the system rewards players who play more games and its working!

It’s not a punishment, it’s just not qualifying. A punishment would be them not getting paid while injured

I would assume the number is from the average amount of back to backs + a few other games. I don’t think the idea is to punish someone with a grade 2 hamstring injury that sits them out for 20 games

Well the alternative is punishing players who are not injured or play through minor injuries.

If stats are going to be the heaviest metric used for determining MVP, then why should Played A only have to maintain a 30PPG average over say 60 games while Player B averaged 28PPG or 29PPG over 82 games? How is it fair to assume Player A keeps up that pace? The same argument can be made for all stats.

Also to be an MVP you have to be available. What’s more valuable to a team? Player A giving an “A+ performance” for 60 games and a no-show the other 22? Or Player B who gives a “A or A- performance” for all 82 games?

I get it, they may have been injured but they are still missing time.

Also it’s not as iff all injuries are equal some are completely unavoidable, some are probably avoidable if the player took better care of their bodies and some are likely completely made-up because the player doesn’t want to play for whatever reason. We have no way of proving what type of injury it is, so they should all just be viewed as missed time, whether it was the players fault or not, missed time is missed time and it should absolutely impact your award considerations.

It doesn’t matter why they sit out. Valid reason or not, a missed game is a missed game. Games played should matter for these awards. They’re still getting paid the same regardless

I don’t think any official release said the rule was to punish players with ‘fake injuries’, that sounds like some fan theory

punish? lol

It’s the same as the technicals. Like ok fine you went after a player because he supposedly said something about your family. But that’s why you get 15+ or whatever it is before you are suspended.

You don’t fail a class because you missed one assignment because the dog ate it, you failed it because of the other 12 you half-assed

I think he’s making a fair point. The 65 game rule is meant to deter players from sitting out games they are healthy enough to play in. Luka has sat out games he was healthy enough to play in, but wants the games where he went to see his kid be born to be the one’s that the NBA takes into consideration, and not the ones he seemingly voluntarily sat out.

Cade has a similar issue. Legitimate injury, but if he had played every game he could have prior to the injury, he would be hitting the 65 game mark.

Rather than trying to dismantle the rule, players should be learning from this. Don’t assume you will hit the required games even with the rest you want to take. Play every game you can so if an injury happens, you’re more likely to be safe.

I mean he made a good point, Luka has missed other games for other reasons. Games where he may or may not have been able to just go out there and play just to stay eligible. It’s a bit disingenuous to say that the games he missed for the baby are the sole factor leading to his ineligibility.

And once you make one exception, you open the can of worms for everyone else wanting exceptions made for them too. Where does it stop? How do you keep the decisions from being arbitrary? It probably is best to just stick with what the rule is for now and see about changing it next year.

65 games = 79.2% of the season

are we seriously defending missing more then 20% of the games

For real. Allowed to miss damn near a quarter of the season and we got people complaining that its not fair.

Every MVP in the history of the award has played at least 65 games, or 79.26% of games (for shortened seasons) except Bill Walton in 1978, and the Blazers had the best record in the league that season and it was highly contested where George Gervin finished a close 2nd.

Seriously.

Agreed

These guys wanna just play 10 games and get all the accolades to match up with past eras where guys played 80 games regularly

In the early 2010s yeah not anymore

Which is kind of his point

Exceptional circumstances is if the league found Milwaukee was holding it giannis for no reason or if a team was holding someone out to avoid paying bonuses.

Not this.

But it isn’t a hard cutoff if they specifically provided a way for exceptions to bypass it.

It’s not a hard cut off through.

There isn’t a hard cutoff, aka a cutoff with 0 exceptions.

There is an exemption clause. Play 62 games and 20 minutes per game. Luka cleared both.

Oh and this weird other stipulation of playing 85% of games at the time of injury. He is at 83%. We can all agree that’s a really strange and probably entirely unnecessary extra stipulation. If a player plays enough games and minutes that should be enough to qualify if there is an exemption rule.

And he was suspended one game for his own actions after getting a tech rescinded already. It’s on Luka.

That seems to be how the NBA laid out the rule, but it just seems like such a gray area to me. Maybe someone here can explain it further, but how do we define an extenuating circumstance? As van Gundy said, everyone’s missed a game for personal reasons. Birth of a child seems to me like it should warrant at least one excused game, but then that feels like a slippery slope. Where do you draw the line?

The point of the 65 game rule to me should be to have a hard cutoff. It can and should be tweaked for future season, such as making it 65 games played or x minutes played, but when you start trying to label certain games as excused absences I think it gets messy

What about 2nd? Or 3rd?

Do you really think Sengun or Scottie Barnes deserves an All NBA spot more than Luka or Cade?

Yeah millionaires will make less money blah blah, but if these awards aren’t tied with how much they can make, they wouldn’t have cared as much.

If “life or death” is your litmus test for whether an NBA topic is worth discussing, you might as well not discuss the NBA. We are talking about basketball. Well all survive whatever decisions or outcomes happen. Lol

What do you mean “stop readjusting”?  If they readjusted now, it would be the first readjustment, right?

They are, you need to play at least 20 minutes a game. The logic is they rather have players play more games than minutes.

Obviously. No one’s asking the NBA to violate their own rules. That’s not what we’re discussing at all.

The rule that they made includes the ability to obtain an exception for missing games due to extraordinary circumstances. This discussion is about whether flying to Europe for your child’s birth is extraordinary circumstances.

The NBA isn’t exactly known for enforcing their own rules.

See: traveling, carries, hand checking, illegal screens, Aspiration tree services, etc

17* had one removed by the league before picking up his 16th again a couple games later. 

I wish my job considered those things and paid me millions of dollars whether I was at work or not.

The 85% thing is explicitly there so that a player who cannot hit the 65 game threshold, can’t then just fake a season ending injury at 62 games played. It sucks for Luka, but we all know that it would be abused otherwise. 

For all the fan discourse and grumbling online about this, the players signed off on this rule. It was a part of the most recent CBA negotiations, and multiple lawyers(from both sides) reviewed, negotiated and revamped the specifics to get to where it is today. If the players didn’t want this rule in place, they should have fought harder against it, but they didn’t. And all they got back from the owners was weed being taken off the banned substance list. 

If he wanted All NBA so bad all he had to do was not get that technical suspension. Seems like you purposely left that out.

Didn’t he get hurt?