NBA 2019-20 thread.

I don’t. The NBA is a work. /bluefont

 

Playoff basketball is fun. Wherever.

 

Either Dallas is really good or LA isn’t that good.

I think it’s the former. Shit, their second best player gets tossed and their best player fouls out and it’s 1-1.

 

YES

That and my morning coffee has me all fired up to get...into the next room and begin working from home.

 

Another plus of this season is these playoff series going every other day.
In the past few years, first rounds would stretch for three weekends. A ridiculously slow pace. I

 

Paul George is overrated, too. Never won a damn thing.

 

Hell yes. Loving the quadruple headers. Combine this with NHL playoffs and this soon to be employed sports fan is enjoying while he can.

 

A lot of 'experts' loved the Clippers heading into the playoffs. Heck, they might win the whole thing, but they've been disjointed all year, with injuries, load management, bubble absences. Have never really been complete. Patrick Beverly out last night.

It has to be disconcerting to them that Dallas has blitzed them both games to start.

 

Killing me here. "I".....?

 

Cross-posting myself from the ole Covid19 thread...

This article by 538 is mostly about the WNBA, but it has an NBA nugget buried in it too. Namely - WNBA "home" teams are 41-25 in the bubble so far, and NBA teams finished 49-39, which seems... odd. The WNBA winning percentage for home teams is 62.1 percent, whereas in a normal year its 60.8 percent. Not a huge difference, but with the bubble, my assumption would have been that the home team advantage would have gone *down*. From the article, the only "advantages" home teams get are to choose the uniform color, select the bench and pick music, and Western Conference teams get to have later start times, even though they've all been in the bubble for a month.

One hypothesis in the article is dubbed the Diana Taurasi Effect, because she's 13-1 in ROAD playoff elimination games. Namely, that the lack of a crowd means the *visiting* teams aren't as fired up as they would normally be. I think that would be a good explanation for the advantage in playoff games, because the home team would be better, but it doesn't really explain regular season results. (And, for all of this - The sample size is probably too small to draw definitive conclusions. The NBA numbers could simply be some odd clustering, because they played so few games, for example.)