stashing assets for the 2023 nba offseason

imo the celtics shooting is fine theyve got a ton of guys who hoist at a dece percentage, i think the thing with just spamming threes melting down in big game crunch time and even jaylen browns supposed bad left hand has much more to do with a deficit of playmaking, when you have high usage guys who just arent real natural dime droppers its not as good as if they were lol, tatum has made a lot of progress but its still prob the weakest part of his game and then youve got jaylen who is just genuinely bad at that sort of thing, so they can have problems executing under heavy duress, weve seen a similar problem with kd in the playoffs who is an otherwise immaculate offensive player but you can double him and he just wont consistently punish it xp jordan

― lag∞n, Monday, October 2, 2023 5:19 PM (one hour ago)bookmarkflaglink

just like reads, court vision, celtics main guys arent the best at it

― lag∞n, Monday, October 2, 2023 5:30 PM (one hour ago)

i think jrue will 1000% help them reduce the number of 4th quarter playoff possessions where it looks like tatum and brown were just zapped by the men in black mind eraser. if jrue is the one shooting at the end it may not be the best but he can at least make a functional offensive basketball play that might lead to a good shot for someone else in those moments. it's possible this fact alone pushes boston over the top -- you could argue he did this exact thing for the bucks

the shooting thing reminds me of a conversation we all had last year about the sixers, where i said that their role player shooting just wasn't good enough, and i was told that their shooting was more than good enough and to look at tobias' and melton's three pt percentages. i think in the playoffs you really noticed them being one good shooter short. boston's current core guys all have decent percentages, but idk if you can have the whole team built out of 35-37% three point shooters. that's what tatum and brown have been the last two years, so it puts pressure on the other three guys to shoot closer to 40% than 35%. but there is no elite shooter in the rotation unless zinger comes out playing at the apex of what he can do. jrue has shot well in the regular season but we know the playoffs have been different.

to me when you look at them vs denver and milwaukee, i think boston is at a shooting disadvantage at the moment. boston was also at a shooting disadvantage when they lost to golden state, and last year against the heat there ended up being a big disparity too. both denver and milwaukee at minimum have elite on ball shooting (murray and lillard) that boston only gets irregularly from tatum (though often in big games). again i do think boston can be still good enough to overcome it, but past recent champions have had at least some clear elite shooting on their roster and i don't see that (on paper) w/ boston currently.

relatedly to me one of the biggest questions is whether middleton is back to being an elite three point off shooter. if not then milwaukee has some of the same issues. but if he's back to being a 40%+ three point shooter to go w/ dame, boston just isn't able to match that

I can't quite articulate it but Ayton is such a Timberwolves draft pick

i mean obvs some guys are better at shooting than others but a lot of it is looks too, boston had brogdon leading the league in 3pt% after a few years in the low 30s, middleton has played his entire career with giannis destroying the paint, is middleton a good 3pt shooter idk hard to say, were phillys 3pt shooters good enough? harden wasnt lol

hauser is a 42% career 3pt shooter and pritchard is at 40% fwiw

there are actually very few nba players who are consistant 40%+ shooters, its hard theres a lot of factors a lot of variance, duncan robinson 3pt% last 4 years 45, 41, 37, 32, and then you want to talk about variance over an individual playoff series my lord, youre basically playing the lottery

many xps, that devin vassell ext is a little higher than i thought (i figured he'd be closer to 125 than 145 which over 5 years is not huge) but im glad they got him locked in. hes going to be a huge complement to wemby as a perimeter two-way player.

jrue was 45% on catch and shoots last year; white, horford, and porzingis were above league average as well, they're going to be ok on those i think.

windhorst mentioned that despite jrue's playoff shooting struggles he's still a 3:1 asst:to ratio guy in the playoffs and should be able to help them settle down in late playoff offensive possessions. that would be a really big contribution by itself.

imo jrue being asked to be a second option on a playoff team was too much for him, likewise in new orleans he he had to do a lot, this role on boston where hes a fourth scoring option with some point guard duties will be a much better fit, cause he can attack the basket and make plays he can shoot but maybe not just with a whole elite defense tracking him, also not while getting owned by jimmy butler on the other end lol

uh

LeBron on Rui: “We’ve worked out together pretty much all summer … I see a lot in him. … I call him my Daniel-san and I’m Mr. Miyagi”

— Dave McMenamin (@mcten) October 2, 2023

my point about the shooting is less whether the celtics guys will make or miss them (the variance of it all) & more about the gravity aspect of not having elite shooting on the floor. (sorry in advance for the number of times i say gravity.) in the playoffs, when a defense has to decide what shots it will stomach giving up, teams are going to be incentivized to sag off jrue & white when tatum and brown have the ball. it's not to say those guys can't or won't burn that defense by making the shots, just that i think the spacing will be more cramped in those situations than people might be picturing now. duncan robinson's three point shooting percentages have fluctuated, but last playoffs showed that he still has elite gravity on the floor, and once he started making some shots the heat routinely got crucial offense in every single round by exploiting that. i'm not saying the celtics need literally that -- i.e. running offense through sam hauser back cuts -- just that to me this boston core doesn't present opportunities to use gravity to its advantage.

porzingis feels like the big key for this reason... if you really have to guard him out beyond the three point line the spacing gets a lot better. but if we're in game 5 or 6 of the second round and porzingis is shooting 29% from three, and their scariest shooting threat above the break is derrick white -- it's just one weakness i potentially see in what is obviously one of the top line ups in the NBA.(in regular season games when teams aren't putting in playoff level defensive gameplans i assume the offense will be top 3 in the league.) milwaukee is gonna have issues w/ dribble penetration, denver's rotation is really thin ... i'm not picking on boston. i just haven't seen anyone bring up the possibility that they will need more shooting

also went back and looked at jaylen brown's game log from last year's playoffs and he shot, 51% from three vs the hawks, 43% from three vs the sixers, and then busted up his hand and shot 16% from three vs the heat. so that's compelling.

iirc heat celtics was the alltime shooting variance series in playoff history by some measure

i mean you have to guard the celtics shooters youre not happy leaving any of them, generally in the nba giving up open threes is considered one of the worst things, obvs if you have a knock down guy out there you worry more, tho prob in reality its more like if something is working for a team ie theyre hitting shots then you worry more, the idea of gravity like most things in basketball is down stream of more fundamental things like scheme and team basketball, there is i think an exception to that tho which is guys who can create their own threes off the dribble and hit them at a high rate, these guys are rare and highly valuable your dames and your murrays and of course the one guy whos way better than all of them your steph curry, but ordinary catch and shoot guys idk is there really such a huge fundamental difference between a guy who shoots 40% and one who shoot 35 maybe but its very contextual

yeah, jordan i think to some extent you’re describing things i would categorize more as concerns around scheme than concerns around ability, and what they desperately need is to find some other ways to score. porzingis getting some easy run against second units or jrue being more stable as a ballhandler than their current guys is a bigger deal to me than overall shooting ability as far as things that will affect their fortunes, as is getting marcus, who was generally not a good catch and shoot guy, off the team.

shake milton had a nice first quarter against in the mavs, nice to see

i forgot dallas got grant williams, he just hit a couple threes in a row

good pick up for them they can use the help

he was the exact player they needed

or kind of player anyway

btw cant believe nba tv is still doing that thing that when their bottom chyron is active they squish the picture

That's to make NBA players more relatable.

lol

hahaa

(lagoon otm tho)

https://www.neverhungover.club/p/the-casuals-wont-be-addressed

As a heuristic of Ball Don’t Stop’s media criticism, “casual culture” is uncharacteristically perceptive within the specific context of the NBA coverage landscape. The NBA has become, moreso than any other professional American sports organization, the internet’s league, fodder for legions of painfully enthusiastic bloggers and soyfacing League Pass watchers to comment endlessly. NBA Twitter, and its constant, breathless celebration of #ThisLeague, simultaneously enhances the experience of watching basketball and also threatens to supersede actual basketball as the center of the NBA’s attention economy. At its worst, the social mediatization of basketball discussion renders the actual basketball mere pretense for the glossolalia of metatextual discussion that basketball supports. Following the NBA means following player personalities, dramas, eccentricities, mental health crises, sexual assault scandals, geopolitical dustups, Chinese propaganda tours, cryptocurrency grifting, strip club still lives, vaccination statuses, Instagram likes, Twitter bios, viewership numbers, stories about stories. The biggest meme of the offseason has been that the best player in the world does not actually like basketball, the biggest conversation during the NBA Finals was whether enough people were actually discussing the NBA Finals on their own terms. The analysis has, like the snake eying its tail, turned inward; the conversation threatens to engulf the spectacle.

dog days…can’t remember how I found this article at this point but I thought it was a good discussion

it's not wrong from what i am able to read (the writer's style makes my skin crawl) but this is happening to all the sports, the nba is a thought leader for reasons that are fairly obvious

(the writer's style makes my skin crawl)

otm

looking past that aspect, this is just another tedious trend-watching thinkpiece which, when you dig down to its foundation, is indistinguishable from the trend it purports to describe and is tailored to attract the same audience it has defined. is this important? no, and who the fuck cares? it's just the more of the same frothy blather.

lad

Well ok Anthony Edwards. pic.twitter.com/zdFwfVwR4W

— Steve Jones Jr. (@stevejones20) October 7, 2023

seems good

we’re gonna have to add another basketball felony to the charges against tim connelly this year when one of the best perimeter players in the league is forced to play the majority of his minutes with two centers on the floor

they gotta trade kat

really should just do whatever is necessary to build around ant

like trading one center is cool do you know whats cooler trading two centers

lol

https://i.imgur.com/3LJJbRb.png

*blue is player option

they should trade kat before his new contract kicks in

wonder if Rudy will pick that option up

So far, it looks like the Timberwolves look like they are going to win every game this season

Oof two looks likes, I'm pretty hung over from seeing GZA last nite

We definitely need to take a look at our foreign policy moving forward!!!

— kuz (@kylekuzma) October 8, 2023

the guy’s not wrong!!

kuz 4 prez

Kuz OTM

c holmgren and v wembanyama playing ball atm

i am watching it

wemby gets blown by and still blocks it, he's incredible

honestly i just laugh watching him, like he just shouldnt exist according to like physics and math

new kind of guy

i used to make guys like wemby in 2k and give 'em sick stats be like "lol like there could be a guy like that ha ha"

lil behind here but wemby just headbutted chet out the box lol