Arena The NBA Thread

Rhetorical question 1 : Is there a more trashy team than the Grizzlies in the NBA?
Rhetorical question 2 : Is there anyone more trash than Dillon Brooks in the NBA?

 

Rhetorical answer 1: The Warriors
Rhetorical answer 2: Steph Curry

 

Low quality edgy response, and so far from reality.

There's a reason why Curry is considered one of the most likeable dudes in the NBA from the majority of people and players. Brooks on the other hand....

 

I don't care. Your comments are so biased that they're worthless. The trashiest team and player, according to you, is whoever just handed the Warriors an L. Every team the Warriors play is the villain. The refs are always against you. It's pure homerism.

Your team has Draymond Green. You shouldn't even be talking.

 

Nah, if that were the case you would have seen me post 33 times complaining about teams being trashy.
Try again. Priceless to call me biased, coming from you :")

Nope. Only the Suns, the Grizzlies and historically any team that has had LeBron in their roster.

Nope, I have literally called out the referees in the game against the Utah Jazz in this topic, because they almost gave the Warriors a non-deserving win. Another nice cherrypicking on your part thouh.

Last time I checked, I do not own a single Golden State Warriors share. They're not "my team", I don't have a team. The teams I like depend on their roster and how beautiful the game they play is. And that goes to every sport. Some times I like watching Barcelona, other times I like watching Juventus. Don't project your mentality to me.

The Grizzlies and their entire circus this year are clowns. I didn't need last night to actually laugh at them, they have provided us with ridiculous statements and actions all year. But according to you, the fact that I like the Warriors disallows me from criticizing the same team everyone else is laughing at, including lots of people in this topic. Again, talk to me about bias.

 

Oh. Well.

That just cleared everything up.

 

You have no awareness. Only the Suns, Grizzlies, and any team with LeBron? YOU MEAN THE WARRIORS' RIVALS? To you, Warriors' rivals = villains. That's not how it actually works, though. That's homerism, to automatically see a rival as the villain.

You were whining about Klay Thompson getting trash talked, calling him the nicest guy ever, when Klay Thompson has multiple examples of him needlessly trash talking guys. The Warriors have provided plenty of ridiculous statements. You only don't notice because you simp for them. You only noticed Memphis' ridiculous statement because it involved snubbing the Warriors. You have rabbit ears for them. You hear every slight. You have several posts this season alone complaining about the refs screwing the Warriors. You have several biased posts defending Draymond when he didn't deserve it, even conjuring up hallucinations about other players' actions. A simple thread search reveals this.

You do a lot of simping for a team you don't own a share in. You've been doing it for years at this point. They're your team. Own it, instead of trying to play the unconvincing sports centrist.

 

Actually as someone who watches just about any broadcast on a given night with League Pass the Grizzlies have a great broadcast team and fan/stadium experience. Memphis seems like a good organization that's handling a tough situation the best they can .

 

You’re not taking this season well, mate.

 

I hope you’ll be watching live on Sunday; forget the Oscars, the action will be at STAPLES. Who ends up going to which could be interesting.

 

This is hilarious. You literally ignored everything I said, simply because it doesn't suit your narrative. And then you proceeded to literally tell me what I do, what I feel, and what I think. Absolutely delusional.

I didn't need yesterday to form an opinion about Memphis. They have caused trouble in the league so many times, including the incident with Shannon Sharpe, Ja Morant trying to pretend he's a thug, and so many other instances.

Simping for a team? Wow..... that's just the only way your brain functions I guess. The Warriors have many other rivals in the West, including the Mavericks, the Clippers, the Blazers and the Nuggets. And yet, you will only hear praise from me for Jokic, Lillard, Luka and their organizations. You simply choose to ignore it, again, because it doesn't fit your completely false narrative. In your brain, I must be hating on every team that is rivals with the Warriors. Keep on dreaming dude. It's easier to invent biased and simping fans than to actually have a conversation.

Nah, I am not too invested this year, since there is no way the Warriors are repeating. I am rooting for Giannis and the Bucks.

 

this is definitely hilarious, you're right about that

 

Change of topic:

Kendrick Perkins is loony for implying that there is a collective racial bias for MVP voting to explain why Jokic is likely to win. I disagree with that point completely…

However…

I will say that the same scrutiny that was applied to Lebron or Giannis where MVP voters quickly got fatigued doesn’t seem to apply to Jokic. Nor is there an expectation for the Nuggets to win, which is weird because if you’re the best team with the MVP, one would think you’d be the favorite to win it all. They’re A favorite to come out of the west, so that may be people agreeing that Jokic is dominant OR because the West is a complete pick’em outside of the top 2 seeds.

I’ll say this: MVP is a regular season year-by-year award, but we’ve seen voters openly withhold voting for other players until they win. If Jokic doesn’t win this year and is somehow MVP again next year, we’re setting a very strange precedent with him: he’d be a 3-4 time MVP with no rings and, to date, not even a finals appearance.

 

I think Jokic was set up to lose this year due to fatigue. I dismissed him before the season started. He wasn't getting any MVP talk early in the season. I think people were looking to Luka (he was getting a huge push), KD, maybe Embiid, and AD when he was dominating at one point early in the season before he got injured. I think the thing that's put Jokic over is the triple double stat line, which is insane for a center. He wasn't getting MVP talk before that (his first month averaging a triple double was December, and his season stat line didn't go over until February IIRC), and I think he would be suffering from fatigue if he wasn't in the chase for a season long triple double at this point. The triple double is a trick you only get credit for once, though. No one gave a **** when Russ did it for the second time.

It helps Jokic that the Mavs haven't been able to get far above 500, that Ja has lost his mind, that Book got injured and then they picked up KD, that Brooklyn imploded with KD injured, that Steph got injured and the Warriors have struggled to clear 500, that LeBron and AD have both been injured and the Lakers have been a losing team all year, and that the Sixers got off to a relatively slow start. All these things have piled up to eliminate a lot of Jokic's competition.

 

Agreed but then there’s Giannis. I think his team has the best record and he’s averaging almost 10 more points, more rebounds, and he’s a better defensive player, by far, than Jokic.

I think Giannis has reached the Lebron level where it’s clear he’s the best player in the league, but he won’t win MVP every year.

 

Giannis is an odd case this year. Seems like every time he gets some momentum, he gets banged up and misses games. He's out again now. I do agree that it's clear he's the best player in the NBA at this point. Too many other contenders for that crown have been injured.

I happened to catch Perk's comments on racism in MVP voting. I didn't agree with him, either. I don't think many do. I know Shaq also takes exception to Nash winning in 05, he thought he deserved it, and he finished a very close second. I don't think anyone thought Nash was the best player in the NBA or even close. The Nash Suns were just a sensation, a breath of fresh air following what people saw as a slow, ugly, low scoring era of basketball. Similar to how people feel like the Warriors changed the NBA.

A thing to remember in 06 is that Stoudemire went down and played three games. People thought the Suns would slip, and they did, but they still finished third in the West, with the league's second best offense. The offense didn't miss a beat, thanks to Nash. There was also no clear cut rival, with four guys basically splitting 57 1st place votes evenly, the exact number Nash got. Chauncey Billups of all people got the fourth most 1st place votes, and finished 5th overall. LeBron finished 2nd in just his third year in the league.

Perk argued for Kobe. In 06, they were at 500 on March 19. They were 40-37 on April 7. They won the last five games to get in as a 7 seed. The West just wasn't that strong that year. They slipped in at the end, perhaps after some people had already cast their votes. He led the NBA in points because he could put up as many shots as he wanted with no one around him. You can argue that dragging the team to the playoffs should be in his favor, and that's a good argument, but that's not how people saw it then, especially since it was his fault that he didn't have any help. He blew up his own team. People saw it as putting up stats on a mediocre team, like so many others have done. He still got the second most 1st place votes that year.

Nowitzki won in 07, and I don't even see anyone to put over him. The Lakers won 42 games with the same cast that won 45 the year before, and Kobe's stats slipped significantly. They went 9-15 down the stretch. You're not going to win an MVP like that. Dallas won a ridiculous 67 games and Dirk's metrics were fantastic. Dirk's running mates, Josh Howard and Jason Terry, weren't exactly Hall of Famers, either.

 

Giannis wins his second ring this year looks like.

 

well now i know you're really not a warriors fan. no one liked us to win going into the playoffs last year either. we could click at the right time again. all the pieces are still there, especially if gp2 can get healthy and we can figure out some stuff on defense. at least these are things that we tell ourselves as fans. rooting for whoever happens to be good is a weird way to approach sports, at least to me, but to each their own.

 

that's probably even more so this year, what with the western conference being so close and all

 

don't use this thread for petty personal attacks, thx

/heels

 

I think the big difference between Giannis fatigue in the MVP voting and Jokic fatigue in the MVP voting is the narrative around playoff losses.

Voters - wrongly, IMO - punished Giannis in the MVP voting for his team's lack of success and underperforming in the playoffs. "How can this guy be a 3x MVP if he can't get his team over the hump in the playoffs" was the narrative around why you wouldn't vote for Giannis. It was an absolutely idiotic narrative, both in looking at things that happened in previous seasons to determine this year's MVP and in looking at postseason results to consider criteria for a regular season award. But that was the narrative.

For Jokic, though, the narrative has been "this guy hasn't had help around him, we can't fault him for the playoff losses". And so the story for Jokic to get to third MVP was about overcoming voter fatigue by showing he had another gear when playing with healthy start teammates. And he's done exactly that. So while I think he entered the season with a mountain to climb in order to get the right narrative to be able to overcome voter fatigue, I think he's still done just that. And, i think there's still going to be the voter fatigue factor working against him, and if he does win, it's going to be by a slim margin.

The real tragedy here though is that we're not talking about Jokic being the first three-time MVP since Lebron. Voter fatigue really messed up when it came to him.