You don’t understand bro [insert young role player] is untouchable

I will defend this though, the point of being a fan is to believe in your guys! if you are watching a young player do fun things and show flashes and think “eh, his EPM has been terrible though” you have lost the plot

We have fans on the subreddit saying there’s no need for Jalen Duren because Dylan Cardwell is 90% of him

This Josh primo guy is a great kid. He will surely pan out. Luka samanic is going to he great! Malaki branham is a legit 3 level scorer!!

All their guys*

Agreed. I remember Hornets fans saying that Nick Smith Jr. and Tre Mann were untouchable assets.

True but CMB legit though fr…

This is definitely a thing in baseball too. The trade deadline is coming up and guys are talking like the 20 year old in AA is already a sure-fire thing to be the next Pujols.

What this sub does with guys on the Warriors and Lakers is what every team sub does with their rookies. The pattern seems to be:

1. Rookie struggles at first, which is expected

2. Rookie gets on a bit of a hot streak, which is interpreted as that player “figuring it out”

3. Rookie goes back to looking like a rookie, fans conclude the player has regressed and/or is being held back by the coach/system/etc.

Tyler Kolek is the greatest player of all time

Yeah. Because the young guys are usually judged on their peak potential rather than the player they will be/are.

Except the Warriors, never seen a team reddit bring down a solid bench player like we have with Podz

THT is the Anthony Randolph of Bruno Caboclos.

Beaubois truthers 👀

I’ve seen Pistons fans saying we should trade Ausar because we have Ron Holland anyway

Additionally - your really good role players would make a difference if you had 1 or 2 superstars, but they are not a collectively great team among themselves. You can’t win a championship off a bunch of 15-22 ppg guys.

yea ill admit i fall victim to this too. its so easy to get blinded by the theory of a player reaching their potential even though that rarely ever happens.

The next 5 years are Johni Broome’s

I used to think Risacher was the better 1st overall pick between him and Wemby but I no longer do as of this week

Our Fan base is convinced Ron “3mpg in the playoffs” Holland isn’t going to be a bust because he occasionally flashes and plays hard.

I was legit convinced of the Kuzma and Tatum comparisons before.

Young player scores 20PPG on bad team on bad efficiency= future all star. And then they rarely ever turn the corner and end up being microwave scorers or ball dominant dudes who wash out of the league

There are pistons fans who said Ron Holland is untouchable in trades because he’s young and his potential is so high.

So true…especially right now. Summer league is not the NBA

Except Roddy Beaubois. He’s just a few years away from becoming a problem!

Also their draft pick value. People are constantly down to trade their 20/5/5 guy for a first round pick that at best will turn into a 20/5/5 guy in 6 years.

There was a guy in our sub ranting about how the Knicks were doomed if Mike Brown didn’t give Tyler Kolek minutes over Brunson. This was after game 3 of the NBA Finals.

I like Kolek! But our crazier fans think he’s Steve Nash and Mo Diawara is Pascal Siakham. Wild idea but we probably don’t need to predict 1% outcomes for garbage time guys, it’s OK to just say “hey I think there’s some talent here” and then see what happens but…

Also, that teams full of “scrubs” or one random role player shooting really well against your team is a reflection of luck, not of your team’s poor defense. It’s the excuse I hear from Lakers fans every time they lose a game, but at some point, there has to be a pattern.

I hate that winning your conference in the pros isn’t really viewed as a big deal. It should be a badge of honor.

I mean, you’ve been competing against this group of teams in your conference for 99% of the year. Making it to the Finals means you beat all of them, but somehow just because you lose in the Finals, nobody wants to give you credit.

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This is why I hate when people say that the KD-Warriors/Lebron Heat/insert whatever short term superteam “ruined the league.” Like, if your enjoyment of the league and the sport is strictly through the lens of who has a chance of winning the championship then you don’t really enjoy watching basketball.

And as a corollary, that when the refs don’t get everything right (which we watch in slo mo 5 times in a row), that they are terrible at their jobs / colluding against certain teams / players / whatever

I think it’s a sacrifice we know we have to take though; if we get caught analyizing every play for every potential foul we’ll also get bogged down and games will take forever, there’s a sacrifice we make of flow vs. accuracy and that’s something else we have to accept

Saw a comment in one of the posts about the new Blazers owner that Silver was a terrible commissioner for allowing the team to be sold to this guy, which is a stunning misunderstanding of how the league approves a transfer of membership.

This always makes me crack up. The amount of fans who actually know nothing is way too high.

Including fans who don’t know the rule book.

My favorite is people on this sub blaming Silver for El Cheapo buying the Trail Blazers. They say Solver should have known El Cheapo is cheap and prevented him from buying the team.

Yes like to get Luka to LA

I don’t know about you guys, but I remember very clearly the day when Zion was drafted in 2019. I usually don’t talk much about rookies because I have seen too many that disappointed, but that day, I immediately texted my best buddy. Buddy, Zion is gonna be the next Charles Barkley, the Barkley we never got to witness (our age was such that by the time we watched basketball, Barkley was past his prime). It’s gonna be muscle in poetry and the league will never be the same again. It’s time to be psyched my good friend. The streets would be filled with people wearing Zion jerseys soon, so let’s go get one together.

I don’t know how you feel Zion, but I still believe in you.

lol he looked like an absolute beast last season. I watched a ton of pelicans games. He was dominating his minutes.

Looked all nba level.

And also, you can love basketball and not only the NBA : I love watching international teams and College teams…. NBA games become really interesting when there’s something at stake, which, if you consider the 82 game season, waters down a LOT of intensity for more than 50% of the games…

This is the absolutely best take! Just enjoy basketball for the sake of basketball and the fact that it’s fun! All these narratives and arguments get exhausting and sometimes feel like people care more about them than the actual sport itself.

That’s just maturity. Most people are so stuck in tribalism they can’t truly appreciate the game. I posted a comment the other day that someone didn’t like, so they immediately took a swipe at the Lakers as if attacking the Lakers was supposed to be some personal attack on me. I couldn’t care less.

Someone should explain this to Nick Nurse.

jordan’s career was the perfect storm, a lot went right for him

probably the luckiest player ever

It’s always weird when people try to make this a Jordan-specific criticism that somehow doesn’t apply to anyone who has played their full careers in the 30-team era.

The only way that argument could work is if those expansion teams were siphoning talent away from Jordan’s stiffest competition through means that modern teams couldn’t do (expansion draft basically) but that didn’t happen at all. If anything the Bulls lost the best player involved (BJ Armstrong) through the expansion draft. The expansion teams didn’t disrupt the contenders at all until they started building organically through the draft a few years later.

Expansion can inflate individual stats and regular season win totals, but it doesn’t make it easier to win a championship.

And the fact Jordan and Pippen were the only players from the first threepeat to be part of the second threepeat very much undermines the idea that they had a static “loaded roster.”

Three of their four highest minute players from the team that “almost reached the ECF” were off the team by the time the second threepeat started.

I’m surprised I don’t see more people talking about this because I’ve always definitely believed it was a big factor.

Also zone defense! Jordan himself admitted he probably wouldn’t have had the career he did if zone defense had been legal during his championship runs.

People talk about “bad rotations” and “no adjustments” as if they’d know how to manage a rotation or what to adjust and when.

Nah you see. Coaches, especially 1st/2nd year coaches are finished products from the start. If they make a certain mistake early on, that means for the rest of their career, it will never improve because only players get to improve on their mistakes, so young coaches who make mistakes should be fired as the one full year proves that they don’t have what it takes to win.

Coach Pop was always perfect from the start, never mind that he almost got fired early in his spurs coaching career and the fact that his game plan back then was basically “throw the ball to #21 in the post and get out the way”, or that his teams back then were almost always a playoff tested core.

Mitch Johnson, on the other hand, can’t even win the finals in his first full year with a young inexperienced squad on their first playoff run. What a bum

Guys, obviously not playing Keon Ellis and your team going from 48 wins all the way down to 46 is a fireable offense. I’m pretty sure any coach that does this will never be hired again and will definitely never lead a team to a championship.

The refs have come out themselves and said there is bias. They outright said they call fouls for certain players and other players not based on reputation. Other players like Steven Adams have come out and agreed, even if light heartedly. Also, we literally had that whole scandal where the refs were not calling the game fairly and one of the guys who was known to be part of that is literally still a ref. Not sure why that gets pushed to the side 

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Frozen envelope!

How would be very simple. They just collude with the company that runs the ball machine to use weighted balls and create desired outcomes.

The real problem would be how the fuck you keep something like that from leaking immediately the second you even suggest it to them.

I don’t think you understood the ask

I think this is a common belief… I don’t think it’s true, but I also think if they want to put it to rest, they will televise it. Of course, if people actually saw it in motion, they’d flip their shit if there ever were a technical error.

My Boston friends go nuts any time someone on the broadcast team shows any amount of excitement for an opposing team. It’s so annoying.

Mike Breen told a story where a fan came up to him and asked “Why do you hate the Knicks?”. People have no idea what the commentators job actually is.

Same thing happens in basketball when it comes to the playoffs.

You watch 90% of your games with your local crew so by the time you get to the playoffs and get the national guys doing your games a game called equal sounds biased since the other team is getting 50% coverage instead of 25% now

Weirdly, Shaq’s offensive numbers were better in the ‘96 series when they got swept.

But the Bulls were definitely weak inside that season.

this is a good one

Or that he’s not a rapist

A big issue is there’s still a lot of oldheads that were around when the refs were actually rigging games back a few decades ago. They then spread it to younger fans despite the fact there hasn’t been any real reffing controversy since then. Scott Foster eventually retiring might help too

Would honestly be interesting to have some refs wear meta glasses in the preseason and have the game be uploaded to watch from their perspective. Maybe even have them do a breakdown commentary of where they were looking and what they were looking for on the play to justify the call. Would clean up a lot of this debate pretty quickly.

people accept he’s a great player, they just don’t like how he foul baits and flops

cue incoming thunder fans gaslighting everyone that what they see on their screen isn’t true 

People ain’t gonna like this one

That’s not true. Sports mean more than that, yes it’s a business but sports leagues last for decades and even 100s of years, the owners come and go but the connection a city or people have with a sports team is pure still.

That’s like saying no movie, song, or book etc can mean anything to you because someone made money off of it.

I have a friend, really good guy, who complained several times about ‘it’s just going to be the Cavs and Warriors again’ as if that were so boring. Just the other day he was complaining that this new no dynasties era is boring because you don’t get the rivalries like we used to. I don’t have the heart to tell him.

Yeah, it’s a lot harder to build lasting narratives and villains and storylines and connections to rivalries when the good teams are basically forced to sell off their home grown/drafted players every 2-3 years

Instead we get an in season rematch, with half the starters not playing. 

Horrible take in my opinion. Parity is actually what creates the drama/storylines bruh. Because multiple teams have a chance to actually go all the way. You can’t have compelling “drama” when you all know who’s gonna win the chip before the playoffs even begin. I feel the only people that dislike parity are the ones that want to overly fanboy over one specific player. So you want one player to win over and over again in order to know who’s bandwagon you’re supposed to jump on lmao.

I think being in Canada is just as much of a deterrent as being a cold city. It’s just more hassle than living in a cold city in the US if you’re not Canadian or a foreign player