I hope my team doesnt sign that guy to a max contract this summer. He looks like he could easily slow down some in 5 years.
Originally Posted by Tyde
It is crunch time in 4th Q and Philadelphia is running a lineup with 4 unathletic white guys. Did the NBA just go back 60 years?
Smart is shooting better than everyone on Philly down the stretch. Not to say he is shooting good, but they are all so shook and shooting bad.
stevens is fucking god...
terry rozier is the perfect compliment to a tatum/brown/horford/kyrie/Gordon...
Nice to see Boston winning. Didn’t want any part of this Sixers team in ECF. Stevens is a warlock, so I’ll still be nervous, but I don’t like the way Cleveland matches up against Philly at all.
Happy for Rozier. He was born in my town, but his old man was a banger and got sent to prison and they were threatening to kill Rozier Jr when he was like 6, so his mom sent him to Cleveland. You know you had a shit childhood when they send you to Cleveland for safety purposes.
wow that's some sick shit on rozier...trying to think of a comp for him...like he's probably never gonna be an all-star, but he's too good to be considered a role player...
I think stevens will have a scheme in place to contain the lebronettes if boston gets there...think that's what he's doing against philly...let embiid get his, but fuck if he's gonna let Reddick go off for like 8 3s...
Boston definitely has a huge advantage in coaching and overall personnel but its been a few years since weve seen anything trump the lebron factor in the east.
Originally Posted by Tyde
We’ll see. The Cavs are worse and the Celtics are better than last year, but they still had to go 7 against the Bucks and it isn’t like Stevens wasn’t the coach last year when they were the 1 seed and lost at home 130-86. They’re going to be world beaters in a year or two, and Stevens is a genius, but Love always plays well against Boston and Lebron is Lebron.
I agree with you and varys the LeBron factor is huge, he's obviously gonna be leaps and bounds better than anybody on the court...
not saying the Cs would beat the cavs, but this team is a helluva lot better than the one they trotted out last year...they aren't relying on a 5'8 guard who plays negative D to be their go to guy (IMO this is the largest difference)...brown is a year more experienced and a helluva lot better than last year and they added rozier/tatum and horford seems to have found the fountain of youth in these playoffs...the Cs would be a helluva lot tougher out than last year...
EDIT: it would really surprise me if Cs/Cavs didn't go at least 6 this year...
I was listening to some podcast earlier this week. Probably the Ringer NBA show(which is quite poor), and they were talking about how the Celtics were kind of like the Spurs at this point where you don’t know if the players are good, or products of Stevens system. It’s a nice dilemma for Celtics fans as Stevens is coaching guys up to such a degree where if you need to move one, they’ll have a ton of trade value, but are likely to way underperform at the next destination. It’s kind of small sample size at this point, but I’m shocked at the performances he’s getting out of some of his players who don’t project to be this good, or this good quickly.
yeah Kenny was talking about that on inside the nba about how it's just next man up and the Celtics are still getting the same performance from the next guy as they did from the guy in front of him...id lean towards this being more coaching than player, but don't want to totally discredit the guys who are actually putting up the numbers...but then again what the hell did avery Bradley do for the pistons this year? didn't follow them/him at all, but didn't really hear talk of him and he was awesome for the Celtics who was supposed to command a 15M/year salary...
its gonna get to a point where the Celtics are gonna have to trade some of these pieces...I don't think they can afford kyrie/Gordon/tatum/brown/smart/rozier...I think danny is gonna flip some of those pieces and get a really nice haul for them...
i'm officially napping this out cause of sixer embarrassment
I think it's just in the Raptors' head at this point that they aren't ever going to beat Lebron in the postseason.
I really thought this year was going to be different.
The Cavs were more dysfunctional than ever, and the Raptors just looked so incredibly solid for most of the first half of the season.
I rarely saw the Raptors have a bad game in the first half. Whey they lost, they kept it competitive. When they were the favorite, they decisively won, including on the road. They won a lot of games as the underdog. I just never saw them look bad. Rarely did I say, "Boy, the Raptors just didn't have it tonight", and that was something I hadn't seen in any other year of the franchise. Early in the season, I wanted to throw $1k on them at 16-1 to win the East (which I've mentioned countless times), but didn't because people on this forum mocked me for it.
During the second half, they weren't quite as consistent, and they did have some bad games, but not many. For the most part, I was still impressed, and thought that this team would be different. I thought that, at the very least, they had enough to beat the dysfunctional Cavs and the banged-up Celtics.
Apparently not.
Actually sucks for them that they got stuck facing Lebron in the 2nd round, as different conference standings could have seen them playing someone else this round, and maybe they would have gotten lucky and seen the Cavs lose this round to another team.
But I think it's a self-fulfilling prophecy at this point.
Maybe they'll finally win the East next year if the team remains intact and Lebron skips out west.
As someone who suffered through all the Ehlo years, this gave me a pretty big laugh. Commentary on those brutal 90s defenses.
https://twitter.com/twt/status/992507908394045441
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