19-5 in their last 24 games. And agree on Atkinson - he has done a fantastic job this season.
Getting Danny Green as a throw-in was such a steal. All he does is play great perimeter defense, knock down threes and has a history of playing well in the playoffs. Guys like that should not be that easy to get.
I've been on the Marks/Atkinson bandwagon for a while. Your post is money and then look at the draft. Levert, Allen and Kurucs. There's a great article out there about how they have been tracking Kurucs since he was 16. He was buried in the Euro League (44 minutes total last season) but when Marks and the scouts looked at his game they saw that it would translate well to the NBA style.
Agreed.
Not to mention that it leaves Milwaukee one fewer adjustment option if Lopez can't hold up in space in the playoffs.
Why's he agitating for this now (I know, the trade deadline)? But still, he's on a really good Bucks team that could end up in the finals. If I were him, I'd wait for the offseason. Another thing: he's really not that good, from what I've seen of him. I'm not sure he's going to flourish anywhere else. He shoots threes well against the Celtics for some odd reason, but he's only .333 3 pt. shooting on the year, 2/10ths of a percentage point below league average.
Would he get minutes over Baynes or Horford? Or Theis? Just doesn't make sense from a roster construction standpoint either, unless you buy Wannamaker getting key rotation minutes.
Of course. I don't see him leaving as my base case but if he has a change of heart, Brooklyn ticks a lot of boxes for the guy. Close to "home", good talent and well coached. Its more plausible to me than a reunion with LeBron.
Maker isn't going to get many minutes in Milwaukee the remainder of the year and when he does his role will be limited so getting to The Finals while sitting on the bench isn't going to enhance his value which is the only thing his agent should be concerned with at this stage. His agent is doing the right thing to get him out of a place he really has no right to be on a contender as his rookie contract winds down. Maker needs to be moved to a lottery team to get opportunities to put up numbers and have a chance to grow his game enough for teams to be optimistic on his future as he hits FA.
Listening to Boston sports talk radio likely pushes one further away from what is going on.
With that Pelican starting unit going up against the starting 5 they have faced I would expect all of their starters to be in the negative. The +/- insanity is taking on a whole new extreme of ignoring context imho.
This article says that JH has been good at least at the rim: "In addition to his 1.8 blocks per 36 minutes, Okafor is currently the Pelicans best defender at the rim as opponents have combined to shoot 47.4% at the hoop against him. That’s a much stronger figure than Gobert’s 56.7 FG% allowed at the rim as well as Jordan’s 58.9%. In fact, among all players who have appeared in a minimum of 25 games, no one has recorded a stronger field goals defended at the rim percentage through this point of the season."
I'm on record saying I wanted the Celtics to take a flyer on him (no acquisition cost). He's still young and he can clearly score. In the right situation, I think he could be a rotation player. With that said, the questions with Okafor are mostly defense related and I don't think he's answered any of those questions in 4 games. If he can develop on that end of the court, he goes from being like Enes Kanter to being like Clint Capela. He has the size, length and athleticism to be at least an average defender but the effort hasn't been there in the past. He has been decent at blocking shots but maybe to his detriment. Okafor looks to be in the shape of his life right now though so maybe he's finally motivated.
I know he qualifies using the minimum of 25 games, but that seems very disingenuous since he's only played a total of 368 minutes. Gobert is at 1585, Jordan 1498.
I was just looking around the league and saw this
I would totally take a flier on Bender because I don’t believe Phoenix is a great place for a young player to develop. I think with the right situation a coach can unlock an NBA player from a guy with his size and skillset.
You do realize that we aren’t in rebuilding mode right? If Bender gets a shot elsewhere it will be on a lottery team who can essentially try him out with some bench minutes without having to worry about the results of the game.
Well I’m not a GM of an NBA team so when I said “I’d take a flier on Bender” it was indicating that if I was in a hypothetical scenario where I was the GM of an NBA team, I would take a flier on Bender.
Ah gotcha. This makes more sense. I’m sure he’ll get another shot even if this is all he does just from a GM wanting to see him in a non-Phoenix environment with all other GM’s monitoring that new situation.
No Oladipo for Indy (sigh), but still: the Celtics should feel really good about themselves watching that beatdown. Cousins was so good tonight it was almost shocking to watch. There was a 3-4 minute stretch at the start of the 4th quarter — the stretch where Klay and the offensive scrubs usually cough up the lead — where all they did was dump it into him into the block and he got deep position so easily it was either an easy layup, free throws, or an easy pass to cutter for a layup every time.
Or just call it 5 with former All-Star / Team USA / Finals MVP Iguodala in Draymond's place. He turned 35 tonight, but (knocking wood) is looking as good as I've seen him as a Warrior. Best plus-minus of any bench player in the NBA, best assist-to-turnover ratio of any non-little player in the NBA, statistically the best defender of James Harden in the NBA.
I watched the Cs-Dubs game without a game thread, and came on here expecting to find the mood pretty upbeat, in that we had played ok against a firing-on-all-cylinders GSW team, and clearly still had a lot of room for improvement. I was...wrong.
