Yeah - I knew that game was going to be trouble. The US had handled Serbia earlier but they were +24 when Jokic was off the floor and dead even when he was on, and I knew Serbia was going to play him heavy minutes in this game. And then Serbia came out and was ON FIRE from 3 in the first half. The US all tournament long has sort of taken the first quarter off and then woken up and cruised, but they got behind big in the 1st and then couldn't claw their way out before half as they had been. They had to lock in an play in the second half.
I honestly don't think the final game will be as close as that. I think the US team got it's wake up call with that semi, and will be a little more focused for the gold medal. Should be fun though.
Serbia/Germany for Bronze. Assuming Jokic cares about his teammates getting a medal - I think they should handle Germany.
Interesting that it could be USA/France for the gold in women's basketball too. That's assuming the US can handle Australia (that tips off in a minute or two I think)
The U.S. women are currently walking through Australia as I type this.
I genuinely thought the men were going to lose when they went down 12 for the final time yesterday. The KD 3 + fourth Jokic foul + Booker 3 changed the game.
I know folks thought Embiid was the hero yesterday, but I was hugely frustrated with him. He couldn't secure a defensive rebound to save his life in the last two minutes. It was LeBron's defense on Jokic that sealed the deal.
Booker, LeBron, Curry, Holiday, and KD were all huge when it mattered most. Seeing LeBron, KD, and Curry--the three best players since Jordan--lead Team U.S.A. was one of the coolest moments of my year. I don't think the gold medal match will be close. France's guards are bad.
The Olympic basketball was solid, I have to say.
I was sorry to see there seems to be an online swell of Serbian sentiment that the refs robbed Serbia in that semi-final and "gave" the game to the US, but the refs didn't make Curry's shots go in and make Serbia go cold from the field in the last 5 minutes.
The final was crazy - I thought it was shaping up to be a blow out and then all of a sudden it was a 3 point game in the 4th quarter. But then Curry once again unloaded a barrage of clutch 3's to seal the deal. There's a great transcript of the french TV commentary floating around that is hilarious to read " No... this devil Curry - he is sinking us!"
The women's final was even crazier and the US was fortunate to come out on top.
Both the men's and women's teams are going to have to reload for the tournament in 4 years time - these other countries are coming.
Pat Riley is making a mistake by not extending Jimmy Butler. He's shown no clear signs of decline and is clearly still a top 20 player. That one stat that captures greatness better than any other single stat is player efficiency rating, and Butler is tenth in the league in PER. The rest of the top 10 in order are Jokic, Giannis, Shai, Davis, Wemby, Towns, Doncic, Daniel Gafford (there's usually at least one or two outlier PER leaders), Tatum, and then Butler.
There are 30 teams, and each one can easily afford two max players. That means that if you're a top 50 to 60 player then you may easily get the max if conditions are right. Butler is DEFINITELY in the top 50...so what's Riley doing? Not extending the one guy who seemingly was created in a laboratory to be a prototype Pat Riley ultra-tough, gritty player seems insane. Whether or not any of us would want to be in the same room as Butler is a different story, but his teammates have generally supported him aside from the times when he's unhappy with his situation and wants a trade such as was the case back in Minnesota when he trashed Towns and Wiggins in a practice that the media covered extensively.
And now he's publicly asked to be traded, and the team responded by suspending him for seven games. This should have never gotten to this point...what are you DOING, Riley? 🤨
Butler's already 35 so I can't say I blame the Heat. LeBron's an outlier. Superstars don't typically age like that.
The second apron has also changed roster building in the NBA. Riley wants flexibility going forward, and I think that makes sense. Miami has always been a top-tier NBA destination. I could see them drawing Giannis this summer.
????
These big trades tend to devolve into groupthink. Folks pick a side, and then everyone begins dogpiling on the less-popular option. But man, what the hell are the Mavs doing?
You cannot trade a top-three player in the league. Especially one that, by all accounts, planned to sign a long-term extension. You cannot trade that player for a lesser player who is six years older. And you especially cannot make that trade without shopping them around first.
I'm not sure if it was mandated by ownership or if Nico Harrison got too big for his britches. In any case, what a fuckup. If I was a Mavs fan, I'd seriously consider no longer being a Mavs fan. Trading a generational talent who'd be with the franchise for another decade? I've never seen anything like it.
????
These big trades tend to devolve into groupthink. Folks pick a side, and then everyone begins dogpiling on the less-popular option. But man, what the hell are the Mavs doing?
You cannot trade a top-three player in the league. Especially one that, by all accounts, planned to sign a long-term extension. You cannot trade that player for a lesser player who is six years older. And you especially cannot make that trade without shopping them around first.
I'm not sure if it was mandated by ownership or if Nico Harrison got too big for his britches. In any case, what a fuckup. If I was a Mavs fan, I'd seriously consider no longer being a Mavs fan. Trading a generational talent who'd be with the franchise for another decade? I've never seen anything like it.
Mavs fan checking in. I am gutted. I was already having serious reservations about continuing to support this team when they were bought by Miriam Adelson. Yeah I know most pro sports teams owners are billionaire scum, but Cuban was as good as you could hope for and she is one of the worst. Now we lose Luka?
I do believe I am done with this team.
It's baffling not only to us fans, but to every pundit, every player, and every other executive other than Rob Polenka and Nico Harrison.
It's anyone's guess at this stage as to why Luka just became the first superstar in NBA history to be traded without that player specifically asking to be traded. There are really only two guesses I have, and the first one doesn't make much sense:
- Luka definitely has never been in the type of shape you need to be in to avoid injury in the modern NBA. It's possible the team doctors helped make this happen. Supposedly he's between 265 and 270 right now, and not enough of that is muscle or genetic body mass as is the case with a guy like Guerschon Yabusele who is also around 6' 7" and 265 but is jacked and has a huge skeletal frame. The guy is still a top 5 player though, so I really don't think this is what forced the trade.
- This is my better guess--I've never liked Doncic, and there's evidence the people around him don't either. I ADORE his game; it's his personality I dislike. Rick Carlisle is one of the best coaches in the NBA, and he got forced out by Doncic because they butted heads. Carlisle is a yeller and a grumpy guy who likes to have input into play calling, and Doncic didn't like any of that. He's a great coach though, but they couldn't get along. I don't necessarily even blame Doncic for it--but I mostly do. It's valid for coaches to have input into calling plays, but it's also common for superstar point guards to be left to be free to call their own plays whenever they want. The Mavs got rid of Rajon Rondo for this exact reason--Rondo wanted priority on play-calling, but Carlisle wouldn't stand for that. If Carlisle was the same way with Doncic then I get why they got rid of Carlisle.
The better example is Porzingis. Porzingis is a rare talent who has been injured far too often, but that wasn't the case during most of his time with Doncic. They simply didn't get along, so Dallas traded the lesser talent in Porzingis. But he's 7' 3", a really great defender, and a great offensive player, and he's an integral part of why the Celtics are the best team in the world when healthy. I saw Porzingis asked in an interview why he and Doncic didn't get along, and he was surprisingly candid. He didn't get specific, but what he said was he thought it had something to do with the two of them growing up in Euroleague around the same time as two teenage phenoms. He said there was lingering resentment from that. He did NOT say who resented who, but Porzingis has never had a problem with any other player, so my guess is Doncic simply didn't like Porzingis because Doncic frequently seems moody and mercurial. He absolutely never distributed the ball to him in the spots Porzingis excels in, i.e. the wings or the post, and it baffled me the the entire time they played together why he froze Porzingis out so frequently on offense.
Doncic has always seemed like a prima donna to me. Maybe it's even worse than that and he was getting increasingly moody or insistent on dictating the way the Mavs were managed with management and team owners; only the Mavs know that for sure. He's really exhausting to watch in his interactions with officials. LeBron has been criticized throughout his career for being a crybaby about bad calls, but Doncic elevated being a crybaby to a level I've never seen before. He complains on EVERY. SINGLE. CALL. Sometimes he's right, but more often he's clearly just trying to game them. I hate watching that shit.
The reporting indicates the Mavs were sick of his poor defense and conditioning. They made the finals with Luka playing the defense he plays and coming in a little heavy. Maybe he fixes his conditioning down the line. Maybe he tries harder on defense when he gets sick of flaming out of the playoffs. He's only 25. Those are horrendous, unforgivable excuses for trading one of the three best players in the NBA. As a GM, you work to attain those players. You never give them away. It's so commonsensical that I can't believe I have to say it.
This will go down as one of the worst trades in NBA history, if not the worst. Davis probably has two years left at this level (well below Doncic) and Luka has at least a decade. Dallas isn't getting out of the second round with Davis and Kyrie as their stars.
The fact that he's going to the NBA's signature franchise will raise red flags among conspiracy theorists, but I think this is an old-school incompetence trade. I thought that era was mostly over. The Adelsons obviously aren't the brightest folks in the world, but the fact that they allowed this instead of firing Harrison on the spot means they're stupider than I thought.
This will go down as one of the worst trades in NBA history, if not the worst.
Let's assume the Mavericks know something about Doncic that everyone else doesn't and that you now have to figure out a move that maximizes his value while still giving you the chance to be the contender you already are since you were just in the Finals, although there was certainly some injury and matchup luck that helped you get there last year. What's the trade?
The problem with trading superstars is you virtually never get a superstar back. What's the last example of that happening? I can't remember a single one since I started watching the NBA in 1987. I also know of a lot of the superstar moves before I started watching like Kareem, Wilt, Walton, McAdoo, etc, and I can't think of a single one from then either. I certainly don't know every trade in NBA history so I could easily be wrong about this; if anyone can think of a comparable superstar for superstar trade then please do share. The vast majority of the time superstars get traded for a nice pile of mediocre assets, and it's almost always to a below-average team that has no comparable stars to give back. Nobody wants to risk screwing up team chemistry and taking on a player another team wants to get rid of by swapping stars. So we really can't criticize this trade without knowing why they wanted him gone, and without also naming the star and team they should have traded for instead.
Let's say it was personality, and that Doncic is the prima donna I've always thought he was. What team is going to want to deal with that? Anybody you try to trade to is definitely going to ask you why you're trading them. What do you say?
With all of that in mind think of a team that Luka could go to that could manage that personality yet still give you a star back. I can think of exactly one--to play with LeBron. That guy is uniquely qualified in all of the NBA to put a guy in his place who thinks he's too good to listen to anyone else. This would all be the reason they chose the Lakers and didn't talk to anyone else. Where else were they going to get a star while dumping the one they couldn't manage after trying it for five years? LeBron WILL be the alpha on this new Lakers, and Luka WILL defer to him more than any other player. LeBron is the only guy in the league who has had a similar path to Luka when both players were at the same age since both guys were teenage phenoms with international fame. There's a case for saying Joker or Giannis are like that, but both of those guys were late bloomers who are more passive than LeBron and neither the Nuggets or the Bucks have any comparable star to give back to the Mavs--not to mention the fact that there's a 99.9% chance neither team would have ever swapped their star for one the Mavs were trying to dump. Joker and Giannis aren't confrontational; they're lead-by-example guys. So is Durant which is why his matching with Kyrie and Harden and their ego issues didn't work. That doesn't mean I think LeBron won't defer to Luka; he's done that throughout his career. I'm also guessing he's going to let Luka be the primary ball handler and playmaker, but we'll see. My guess is they will share playmaking, but that LeBron will defer since he's getting so close to the end of his career. But if Luka tries to give LeBron or anyone else on the Lakers too much attitude he won't be able to do it for long before he got LeBron in his face telling him to cut that shit out. And LeBron is uniquely qualified in both mind and with that huge body to make Luka defer to him.
This was not a clear choice for the Lakers to make since it's unclear that Luka and LeBron can share the ball, but we have recent history for when that's possible in Chris Paul getting traded to a Rockets team where Harden handled the ball more than any other player in history up to that point with D'Antoni and both guys managing to make that work. I mean the Lakers definitely got the stronger end of the trade, but what was the better one if the Mavs were beyond their limit with managing Doncic's ego? And which other team knew they had a chip like LeBron who is one of the best three players in history who is in better shape than any other player in the history of the league to convince Luka he can't keep guzzling beer and eating McDonald's whenever he wants without also consistently working out at an elite level like LeBron has since he was in middle school?
Apparently Rob Pelinka has been talking to Nico Harrison for weeks and working him like a speedbag. He convinced Harrison not to talk to another team. The Mavericks convinced themselves that they could win a title with Anthony Davis. It's front office malpractice. A player like Doncic has never been available before. He's probably the second-best player in basketball and he hasn't even hit his prime yet. To trade him without advertising the fact that he was available is a firable offense. Harrison should never work in basketball again. Who knows what kinds of offers they may have gotten? They didn't even get both of the Lakers' tradable first-round picks.
You asked what better player they could've gotten. How about Giannis? He's two years younger than Davis. He's better than Davis. He's almost certainly leaving Milwaukee. The Bucks would've had to at least consider trading him for Doncic. We'll never know because Harrison didn't ask.
The best defense is the Mavs are worried Doncic will be another Embiid or Zion. I don't agree with that assessment because Doncic is a better offensive player than either of them. He already plays an old-man game. A lack of speed or athleticism shouldn't impact him that much.
We'll find out soon. I have a strong feeling this goes down as the worst trade in league history. Even if it doesn't, there's no defense for not opening bidding on the league's second-best player.
I get what TSI's saying, for sure.... but I also feel what EC has to say about Doncic from a personality and attitude standpoint.
I live in Sacramento and was here when Luka threw a very public fit and threatened to stay in Europe if the Kings drafted him. He bullied the Kings into picking a useless bag of garbage Marvin Bagley instead of him when it was clear Luka would have transformed the Kings at the time. It was such a trash pick then and everyone knew it but the Kings didnt want the bad press of Luka staying in Europe and refusing to come so they caved.
I've never been a Luka guy since that moment. Even though I'm a Warriors fan, the utter disrespect for the team here showed me who he was.
The Kings trading away DeAron Fox now is also such a classic Sacramento move. The team here is never going to be any good.
You asked what better player they could've gotten. How about Giannis?
No team in NBA history has ever traded their superstar unless that superstar was demanding a trade or was diminished by injury, i.e. they were no longer a superstar. Why would we have reason to believe that the Bucks would do what no team prior to this Mavs team had ever done? I could write a few paragraphs about what a humble guy Giannis is and how I've heard Jrue Holiday describe just how extreme a conditioning fanatic he is--but I won't, because it's a moot point. The Bucks aren't trading Giannis until Giannis forces them to do it.
We should also acknowledge we really do not know why the Mavs felt compelled to trade Luka, and it's always a mistake to oversimplify a complex situation by assuming incompetence without specific evidence of that person being incompetent. You always consider that as an option, but picking it as the first guess is almost always a mistake people make because it makes everything easy to explain. The educated guesses floating around are decent, but none of us know.
There are a few pundits claiming they've talked to Nico Harrison but can't divulge the details, and those pundits also claim they now get it but can't say much about why they understand why the trade happened. I'm skeptical ANY pundit has any real inside info, but meh, I'm sure it will leak eventually. This story is too juicy to stay quiet, but who knows, maybe they kept the security tight and Polenka and Harrison only talked to each other, Anthony Davis since he had already agreed to waive his 15% no-trade bonus requiring the team to inform him in advance of any trade, and LeBron because they had no choice since he and Davis both are represented by Rich Paul and there's no way they could trade Davis without Paul and LeBron knowing. If they really did limit the talks and reasoning to those five people it's likely we'll never know since none of those guys are likely to have incentive to leak the trade reasoning.
The Kings trading away DeAron Fox now is also such a classic Sacramento move.
Did they have a choice? Fox told them he wasn't going to sign with them again. Whether or not that happened because it's yet another example of Sacramento being Sacramento yet again is a separate question, but by the time of his trade to the Spurs they had no choice. They did REALLY well to get LaVine back on that deal, and it might very well be an upgrade. The big winner in that trade appears to be San Antonio--how did they manage to not give up either Vasell or Castle in that deal? They seemed to lose the least assets of any of those three teams involved in the trade. We could dive into the pros and cons of LaVine and he's certainly been a questionable asset over the years, but he's still really, really good. More than anything the trade value of both he and Fox are really similar so I'm not sure Sacramento did that badly given the situation they were in when Fox pushed them to trade him.
I recall that Doncic comment about how he didn't want to play in Sacramento, but I don't remember if he ever explained why--do you recall? I just tried to search for it but couldn't find the details. Vlade Divac later said he didn't draft Doncic because De'Aaron Fox told Divac he didn't think Doncic was a good fit since they were both point guards; I read that to mean Fox wanted to be the primary playmaker and he knew Doncic would take that job from him. But I was never sure that Divac didn't have other personal reasons to not draft Doncic.
I have NEVER fully understood the ethnic strife of Eastern Europe. Different groups of people there dislike and/or hate each other for reasons I barely half-understand, and I know Divac is Serbian while Doncic is Slovenian. Did they both have personal reasons to be skeptical of each other--or even worse? I can't keep track of that stuff and really don't understand it. Various Eastern European stars from the past like Divac, Kukoc, Dino Radja, Petrovic, etc have carried national beefs to the NBA with them and held it against each other. I think there's a 30 for 30 on those Eastern European stars that covered some of the beefs I saw years ago that I've forgotten virtually all of the details of. We also know Doncic didn't like the Latvian Porzingis from Euroleague interactions they had, and I have NO idea if that was 100% basketball beef or more than that. So I never knew how to take the Kings skipping Doncic, but I had heard Doncic AND Divac make comments prior to the 2018 draft that made it fairly clear the Kings wouldn't or couldn't draft Doncic at the second spot they had.
The Luka trade could have easily been insight that the Mavs doctors had. Anyone recall Amare Stoudemire being signed to free agency by the Knicks a decade or so ago? For years Steve Kerr was an idiot to neophyte pundits and most fans because he wouldn't re-sign Amare to a max-length deal like Donnie Walsh managing the Knicks did. Kerr said nothing for years, but he later did say that the team doctors forecasted that Amare's knee would limit his play significantly in about three years, so that was the max length they would give him a max deal for. The Knicks went the full max contract length and stole him.
Guess when Amare's knee gave out? About three years later right around when the Suns medical staff projected it might. So who's the idiot--Steve Kerr for listening to the doctors, or Donnie Walsh for taking a gamble? During the first year Knicks fans thought the fool was Kerr, but in retrospect Donnie Walsh gets the blame for extending the Knicks streak of mediocrity. Maybe that one or two years of hope was worth it though.
Another medical star trade was Isaiah Thomas, i.e. the 5' 8" version that Ainge traded to the Cavs for Kyrie. Ainge fleeced the Cavs on that deal because his team doctors told him his hip would never fully recover, and it didn't.
People outside of organizations usually don't know when a star has a permanent injury that will inhibit their play. Everyone knows about Embiid now--sorta. I don't think we really DO know, but certainly everyone thinks they know. Morey is a fool because he signed Embiid to a three-year contract this past summer. Is he? Fans think they know better than Morey, but they absolutely, positively do not know what they think they know. We all know he's a risk, but only the Sixers know the actual extent of that risk.
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