201–210 of 266 posts
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> most teams can find these archetypes and build rosters that get you to the playoffs Not really, it's still 16/30 (I don't like playoff formats btw, so American).
My country of Smugistan solved playoff problem years ago. Very simple: every Smugball team makes playoffs. If Americans and Europeans weren't so far behind Smugistanian education system, they would have figured it out too.
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So I agree that more complexity is not better and there’s a real risk of alienating fans with complicated schemes. But chess has made real inroads by providing good commentators and analysis. You can’t make teams play dumber but you can teach fans to be smarter. As for missing, the video I linked debunks that. 3 pointers are replacing long 2 pointers which also had a low percentage. And in turn, the game has become l…
Thinking Basketball is great. The people who complain about the 3s in basketball probably didn’t watch the NBA in the older days. Horrible defense and far less skill — and that’s the era I grew up and loved. I have two major complaints about the game nowadays: (1) intentional fouling to get an advantage. It’s the only major sport where fouling can often work to your advantage. (2) The block call is so inconsistent it…
nitpick: This happens in soccer as well. Oftentimes it's late in the game and you see the opponent has a counterattack that has a high probability of scoring. In that case, it's better for you to tactically foul them by taking them down before they reach your box and take the yellow card.
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In my opinion, the real problem with the NBA is that we no longer get the marquee matchups in the Finals that we used to during the 90s and 00s, mainly because the season is too long. An 82-game grind isn’t sustainable - it practically guarantees that stars like Giannis, Luka, or Jokic (or their key teammates) will get injured to the playoffs or not at all. The fact that we’ve never seen Embiid vs. Giannis in the ECF…
The real problem is the players don’t give a sh*t about the fans any more. You need no better example of that than the All star game tomorrow. In the 90’s it was an amazing, competitive game between the best players in the league. Now…the players can’t even be bothered to jog up and down the court. Load management: players claim their bodies are delicate and can’t play too many games. Why would I want to buy tickets…
This article presents a readable overview of today’s NBA trends, but IMO is too absolute in its judgment. Basketball is not a solved sport. There is still innovation, for example with OKC’s historically good defense that relies on playing 5 smaller but faster players. There are still good all-around players. There are still people that hit a lot of mid range shots. We have trends going the other way, sure, but they h…
You don't even have to look far for an example. The Denver Nuggets won a championship a year and a half ago while nearly attempting the fewest 3s in the league.
> In the past, the team built its roster around a big name like Shaq. Most of the offense were from the center. This has now changed...
Is the author not aware of Giannis, Jokic, Embiid, (Wembanyama... soon)? The winners of the last 6 MVP awards? If there were enough talented bigs to go around, every team in the league would be building around them because it works really, really well.
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Most sports pretty much have a playoff system to a greater or lesser degree. That said, basketball has pretty much always been one of the major US sports that can rely on a fairly small number of really good players and the rest don't matter nearly as much. Stars (pitchers, QBs, receivers, etc.) matter elsewhere but probably not individually as much as they do in basketball.
the most popular sport on the planet - soccer - doesn't have playoffs anywhere except USA
The German Bundesliga has a playoff to see which of the 16th team in tier 1 or the 3rd team in tier 2 goes into tier 1 next year
The English Championship (tier 2) has a tournament of four teams (placed 3rd-6th) to determine who goes up into the Premier League. The final of this is known as the richest game in football, worth £120m+ to the winner.
It could also be argued that the new UEFA Champions League format is a US-style playoff system. Maybe the old format too now I think of it.
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He is right. The highest volume shooting teams play 5 out which leads to easy layups as well.
And help defense exists to counter it. Meanwhile Denver won it all with some of the lowest volume of threes in the league.
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That's not a huge difference. 3% is like an average of 3 extra misses, which is probably not even that noticeable with variance. 3 pointers are not replacing 2 pointers with equal percentages, but they are creating opportunities for higher percentage 2 pointers. > Crowding is not necessarily bad. A contested shot is interesting; an uncontested shot, not so much. Even uncontested dunks are less interesting than contes…
> That's not a huge difference. 3% is like an average of 3 extra misses More like 5 extra misses per game. And we're getting more uncontested misses today. > a big man backing down his man for like 20 seconds and throwing up a clanker that gets rebounded into another 20 second post possession. Realistically that's what a lot of offense was like back in the day. But this clearly wasn't happening 64% of the time. The i…
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So I agree that more complexity is not better and there’s a real risk of alienating fans with complicated schemes. But chess has made real inroads by providing good commentators and analysis. You can’t make teams play dumber but you can teach fans to be smarter. As for missing, the video I linked debunks that. 3 pointers are replacing long 2 pointers which also had a low percentage. And in turn, the game has become l…
Thinking Basketball is great. The people who complain about the 3s in basketball probably didn’t watch the NBA in the older days. Horrible defense and far less skill — and that’s the era I grew up and loved. I have two major complaints about the game nowadays: (1) intentional fouling to get an advantage. It’s the only major sport where fouling can often work to your advantage. (2) The block call is so inconsistent it…
There are possessions where the defense has the sole objective of ignoring everything other than fouling as fast as possible, which feels boring and can stretch 30 seconds of in game clock time to 5+ minutes of back to back stoppage. I get that it might be the mathematical best play because it forces the winning team to take free throws and then turn the ball over without taking any clock time, but they could architect the rules to avoid it.
I totally agree with the block call being a coin flip.... I'd extend it to almost every other call. NBA reffing seems like it absolutely sucks for such a large scale professional league. Basketball is a fast paced game so I know they can't catch everything, but when you're watching on TV you see so many things that are so inconsistently called. Those calls end up changing the outcome of the game when one team has 20 more ft chances than the other.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my opinion, the real problem with the NBA is that we no longer get the marquee matchups in the Finals that we used to during the 90s and 00s, mainly because the season is too long. An 82-game grind isn’t sustainable - it practically guarantees that stars like Giannis, Luka, or Jokic (or their key teammates) will get injured to the playoffs or not at all. The fact that we’ve never seen Embiid vs. Giannis in the ECF…
It's weird because almost all of the levels below the NBA are better games than the NBA. Nobody really goes out of their way to follow AAA baseball teams, but college basketball and even some high schools are great games. The pet theory is that the NBA is a RNG for gambling now the game isn't really the game. TV is near death, so gambling is the only source of revenue that can possibly replace the big TV deal.