NBA 23/24:season

It's all speculation so far but -

• Terry Stotts suddenly walking away from the Bucks as an assistant at the start of the year. Rumours of spat with Griffin. Stotts is close with Dame after ten years coaching him but also friends off the court. Not impying it was Dame that got Griffin sacked, it could only have come from Giannis. But not a good look to fall out with the close assistant of your brand new point guard
• As Hole in the Wall mentioned, Giannis body language with Griffin very early in the season. Also rumours Giannis changed a play that Griffin called.
• The weirdest part of this whole thing is that Doc Rivers has been acting as a consultant to Griffin for some time!

Luka with a crazy night ! Probably recency bias but seems to be tons more high scoring individual games theses days, obviously how the game is played and refereed is a big factor, not a huge fan of it to be honest, some of them seem very meh which is a weird thing to say

I'd argue it's terrible for the NBA as a whole as it just gives credence to the argument that the regular season is a bit of a joke and just a mess around with no real intensity.

Fun battle between LeBron and Curry there tonight! Some game in general, back and forth the whole way.

really good overview of how we got here. This season is a consequence of rule changes and the perfection of how to play within them; which were a consequence of the low tv ratings and interest levels of the prison ball of the early 2000s.

But it’s not as simple as being nostalgic for earlier eras and labelling everyone as “soft”. The rules will dictate what we see, the league needs to make a choice.

Again, I agree there is a problem here. But I do think we have to get beyond the narratives a bit to understand the right fix.

The NBA increased the minimum amount of games for All NBA selection and introduced the in season tournament, to try and address the issues with taking nights off and lack of effort early in the season. Stars are definitely playing more this year.

Obviously defense is less intense in regular season compared to playoffs, and some of this is effort. But a lot of it is coaching adjustments, fan environment and referee discretion aswell.

The BIG issue with the regular season imo is more the increasing parity in the league and lack of differentiation. If you chart regular season win percentages of recent seasons versus 20 or even 10 years ago, there are fewer games separating 3 - 10 in each conference. This is a symptom of teams being similarly constructed with the same play style, allied to the local game to game variance of whether shots are falling or not.

That is to say part of what we are seeing is not necessarily lack of effort, but an increasing difficulty of all but a handful of teams to meaningfully separate. And this robs the regular season of more distilled and compelling narratives. Particularly in the West this year, we have a big blob of teams who could feasibly win a playoff series battling across 5th - 12th. It’s really hard to care in this context on a game to game level imo.

Real flat track bully feel to Embiid in general, when you consider him deciding to play for USA in the Olympics aswell.

Add on all his embarrassing flops leading to his inflated points with freethrows, my most least liked player in the whole of the NBA, mvp my hole.

Wemby putting ridiculous footage on tape this year:

https://x.com/worldwidewob/status/1752148534219145635?s=46&t=oJEBWzdtp7tPw9gBG2Q_oQ

https://twitter.com/DavidPingalore/status/1753182060364386308 would break the internet if true. This guy seems to have a lot of credibility as well.

Hes apparently broken every move of James to date.

Christ knows who or how any team could actually pull off a trade.

https://x.com/kingjames/status/1753480948392325520?s=46&t=oJEBWzdtp7tPw9gBG2Q_oQ

I just think this thread is on the wrong side of this one. Forcing players to stretch to play 65 games so they can be All NBA is inevitably going to increase injuries. Like it or lump it, but if the season is 82 games long each individual game doesn’t matter in isolation. Particularly for good teams and particularly late in the regular season.

It’s not even logical anyway. 60 games of Embiid is more valuable than 75 games of Sabonis, and more deserving of All NBA status. Fans and traditionalists in the media who know it’s a popular position with fans endlessly harp on about players missing games but they aren’t going to win here. The right solution is less games, but the NBA won’t do that for obvious financial reasons.

I fully expect the 65 game cutoff to be dropped next year. We want stars rested and healthy for the playoffs more than we want them playing back to backs on a Tuesday in February, in the end.

Jokic has never played less than 69 games in his entire NBA career, LeBron fror the first 16 years of his career only played less than 65 games twice, (obviously since turning 35 years old he hasn't met that the last few years). Mikal Bridges hasn't missed an NBA game since being drafted and managed 83 last year.

Expecting players to actually make it to the court to be considered for awards isn't revolutionary.

Then the "elite" stars need to shut up whining about being made play, and actually play at an elite level.

The article shows that not playing has generally not got rewarded anyway. So the "more deserving" shtick is moot. They can keep not playing if they want just dont whine about players that do play being rewarded for actually playing.