253 Comments

Kyle Anderson is the adult in the room.

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Just watched the replay of bogdonavich’s miss. Wow that was a brick.

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"Draymond Green forcing the Warriors to invest in some headgear" 🤣 | Shaqtin' A Fool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B1Jh16_Ha0

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Apr 29, 2022·edited Apr 30, 2022

Funny, but I would appreciate it if he would stop hitting guys in the head. A basketball could give someone a concussion....

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I guess Warriors will start their series either Sunday or Tuesday.

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An ignominious end to a fraudulent team. The Warriors would have beaten them in the playoffs last season which probably would have blown them up a year earlier, but now it's done.

Will be interesting to see the consequences and where Gobert goes.

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Apr 29, 2022·edited Apr 29, 2022

Not really feeling the intrigue about Gobert or where he winds up at. He’s not a playoff-viable big man in this day and age. He has not and will never move the needle in a positive direction for a team with aspirations of a championship. Especially not with his huge contract.

The Jazz will be interesting to see in terms of who they end up letting go. I doubt Mitchell goes, unless he specifically forces his way out. Guys like Bogdanovic and Mike Conley might be good pieces for a contender somewhere. Even Royce O’Neale and “Joey English” might be good gets for the right team.

The problem for the Jazz is that they never got a two-way star player on the wing. Their roster construction really needed that, since none of their guards can guard the perimeter much. And because Gobert is hopeless as a perimeter defender. But that’s life in the NBA. Not every team has the minerals to be a legit title contender when the rubber meets the road come spring.

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Ingles got traded, right? He (was) a Blazer...

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It sucks that Ingles got an ACL injury because I was thinking he'd join the Warriors this summer and become the Iguodala successor in terms of bench wing facilitator (worse defender, better shooter). Perhaps it could still happen but I think the injury made it very unlikely.

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Fraudulent?

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We're going on 4-5 years straight of a crop of analytically driven internet basketball analysts/fans saying the Jazz were title contenders. If you just look at regular season results it made sense. Over and over, some form of..."They just don't get enough respect! These numbers are not fake."

If you watched them lose in the playoffs every year it was hard to buy in. They were never competitive against a contending team and now have accumulated some pretty awful losses against non contending teams. It wasn't just a matchup thing. They lost to guard driven teams, wing driven teams and center driven teams.

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Apr 29, 2022·edited Apr 29, 2022

Analytics in pretty much all sports generally has a really huge blind spot when it comes to factoring in the difference between regular season strategy and tournament/postseason strategy.

The analysts love to attribute it to “randomness” and “luck”, and love to call it a “crapshoot”. But their reasoning in and of itself tends to show a fundamental lack of understanding of the differences in approach/strategy that teams employ in regular season situations(where there is always another game) versus postseason/tournament situations(where there is literally no tomorrow in many cases). In a nutshell, teams are more than willing to do things in postseason/tournament games that they never would in regular season games (such as play stars like Lebron or Steph 40+ minutes a night in basketball, or go to the bullpen in the early innings in baseball), and are also unwilling to try things in a postseason/postseason than they might in a regular season game (such as play rookies 25-30 mins a night in basketball, or let back of the rotation starting pitchers pitch through trouble to save the bullpen in baseball). Strategies that maximize the chances to win each and every game over the short term aren’t viable or used in the regular season (such as playing short rotations in basketball or the quick hook for pitchers in baseball), and strategies meant for long-term benefit (such as playing rookies/G-League guys in basketball or using your back of the rotation pitchers to soak up innings in baseball) tend to have no place in postseason/tournament settings.

In a word, there are lots of cases where analytics darlings succeed wildly in a regular season format where most games are generally low-stakes affairs, yet fail in a postseason/tournament environment where games are almost all high-stakes affairs. And usually it’s not down to luck or randomness; it’s down to the fact that teams literally don’t play those games in the same way.

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I agree. There's sort of a self-serving logic that since it wasn't predicted by their models, and is "random" that it discounts what actually happens on the field in the most important games in any sport.

That said, basketball is generally the most predictable sport. Even accounting for everything you've said. I think it'd be hard to find a team that's under-performed over a longer period.

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I dunno, it's a fun word to use.

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usually the regular season champs , couldn’t even accomplish that this year

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And maybe Mitchell.

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And Snyder?

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Have to think he’s done there.

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Was rooting for the Mavs - didn’t want the Suns to get extra rest.

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Oh Jaaazzzz -- you got some 'splainin' to do

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Apr 29, 2022·edited Apr 29, 2022

What is there to explain. "We're the Utah Jazz, y'all know who we are."

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Don’t know why people are overlooking the Jazz, been doing it all season. Oh wait…

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Bogdanovic misses the go-ahead 3, and the Mavericks beat the Jazz 98-96. Mavericks defeat the Jazz in 6 games and will face the Suns in the 2nd round.

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I guess Bogdanovic is a choker for the rest of his career, right? That’s how it works?

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Bogdonovich wide open for the lead with a three and…

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Conley botched their last play to take the lead with a travel. Yikes!

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Fuck it, rooting for these Jazz frauds to hit a shot and take this to OT or win the game. More entertainment in a series I largely don't care about.

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utah choked so hard. i can’t even imagine steph traveling like that to get eliminated

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A “French flush” lol

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The stream for Dal/Utah keeps repeating so I am not sure if the game has ended, but for some reason it feels like Luka and Bogdanovic have hit about 25 threes combined. My feed says there is 8 mins left. Pretty exciting game to watch though...

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Not over yet, but headed towards a random ending.

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Don’t get mad y’all But I think I’d take Luka Donkic over Jordan Poole on this team even if he wasn’t the perfect fit

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I mean... yea you'd kinda have to

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Luka is a possible top 20 all time kind of talent… so, yeah?

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