2015-16 NBA Thread (feat. the Wives)

Is LeBron's block the greatest single defensive play in the history of the league? Havlicek (against the 76ers) and Bird (against the Pistons) are two I can think of off the top of my head, but considering the moment, considering how Iguodala should have gone in for an easy two and the lead with less than two minutes to play, this has be No. 1, no?

 

It happened yesterday. No doubt it's the greatest.

 

We live in a very Great Age of Greatness.

Exclamation point.

Consider yourself very greatly lucky, because at no time ever in the wholegreat course of human history have great things ever been quite so very reliably great, and remarkably, heroically epic and very awesomelygreat, and greatly, remarkably awesome and quite so heroically epically remarkable as they are at this very great moment in time.

I know this because I read about sports.

MacGregor: Has sports ever been greater? Not according to descriptions

 

Ugh. I agree with MacGregor.

 

The block was an great hustle and athletic play. But chase down blocks where another defender (in this case JR Smith!) forces the shooter to adjust the ball and slow their momentum are not that uncommon.

 

In fairness to Skip, he was merely repeating what Cavs owner Dan Gilbert was saying at the time ...

 

Thoughts on Steve Kerr? I like the guy personally, but the dude inherited a team that was something like 39-4 and had the league's first unanimous MVP. He was vastly out coached in the conference finals and then the finals, and this is the coach of the year?

 

I think that it might be possible to write some sort of graduate school-level thesis about the scene on the review stand that occurred as the trophies were being handed out.

Granted, I know nothing about the Cleveland Cavaliers ownership or front office, but I couldn't help but think that almost the entire contents of some sort of a douchewagon had been unloaded on the right side of the stage.

It seemed to me that the players, the most important part of the championship, were bumped into the background while the money folks and their overly self-entitled offspring tried to stick their grubby fingers into the limelight for as lone as they could.

Yes, that's the way that most of these professional team trophy presentations go down. But, for some reason, last night's gloatfest stuck me as even more irritating.

Tell me that I'm wrong.

 

What a reductive way to look at it. There's a perfectly logical and sane way to look at a series, acknowledge a champion and then look at the rich mosaic of what made it happen. That mosaic includes all the affirmative things: LeBron playing at another level on defense, Irving raising his game, Lue pulling out some masterful adjustments, Kevin Love doing just enough. But on the other side, there are other factors that are part of the story: Curry not really playing like himself since he got hurt, GSW having to play a pair of in-over-their-heads centers because of injury, the oddball occurrence of very good shooters missing gobs of very open shots. I suppose one could trace all that to weakness of character, strategy and fortitude, but that seems reductive (again) and cheap. I mean, one team beat an opponent with 16 more wins, I'm to assume the Cavs made all that up rather than their level of play meeting in the middle across the series? (Looking back, it's interesting a not-all-there Warriors team put the Cavs on the ropes, and then the Cavs reached back like they did)

I can consider all that, and not use it to take a damn thing away from the Cavs. All championship runs are multifaceted stories. And in the storytelling business, it seems silly to declare some of them off-limits. Shoot, one shot falls, another doesn't and we can't talk about a whole other set of things?

One thing someone mentioned that I found interesting, does this accelerate the deemphasis of the regular season? The NBA's best have already been trending that way. Golden State eschewed that to chase the record, and that went for naught. We're also now at a point where the best regular season records in the the major sports have not produced a title (the second-best in NHL history didn't either), which is kinda a fun fact.

 

You're not totally wrong, but let's not pretend that anybody but No. 23 is the best player in the NBA, MVP voting be damned.