The Finals
- Thread starter Mr. S£im Citrus
- Start date
SLAB
Hall of Famer
I really wish Klay would have the chance to lead a team and not be in Stephen’s shadow.
I feel nothing for the Warriors. Glad they lost. Sucks for Klay and KD individually but I despise the Warriors and I’m a huge Boogie fan, but I wanted them to lose.....and lose they did.
Found it hilarious that Kerr and his staff didn’t have the wherewithal to remind his players they had no timeouts left when Draymond and 2 other players called timeout with 0.9 seconds left. Not that they could have done anything with theball but they got out coached by Nurse and his staff.
Found it hilarious that Kerr and his staff didn’t have the wherewithal to remind his players they had no timeouts left when Draymond and 2 other players called timeout with 0.9 seconds left. Not that they could have done anything with theball but they got out coached by Nurse and his staff.
Klay will easily go down as one of the best shooters of all time when he retires. Problem is, you can't just give him the ball with 12 seconds left on the clock and tell him to go to work. He's one of the best off the ball players in the game but he's not a guy that can go out there and get his own shot 1 on 1 or drive and command a double team and kick it out to a wide open shooter like Kawhi, James, Durant, Giannis etc can do. I think he's a very very rich mans JJ Redick. I don't think he's a #1 option at all and needs to be able to play on a team with multiple passers in order to be as effective as he has been. Up his usage and put the ball in his hands more and his efficiency will certainly go down.
The second thing is for whatever reason, the advanced stats that I look at the most seem to not favor him as a player at all. He's always touted for his defensive prowess but VORP and DRPM peg him as a poor defender overall. Defensive RPM and defensive box plus/minus have him pegged as one of the worst defending shooting guards in the game. He's actually ranked worse than Hield in both defensive categories. To me, he passes the eye test defensively and he obviously does for many others as well.
Problem is, I don't tune into the game and just zero on on Klay's defense the entire time. Every game he makes 2-3 high impact defensive plays that are impressive. I'm wondering if in between those high impact plays, if he's playing poor off ball defense and you just don't really notice it because you're following the ball? People use the excuse that he guards the opposing team's best wing the majority of nights but all the other best defenders in the league do the same their and their stats aren't as poor as his. There's something weird up with it. People on other boards are talking about it as well if you run a google search. I don't know what to believe either way but normally these stats have all the good players at the top and all the bad players at the bottom with a few weird ones sprinkled in. I don't know if some players just fool you with the eye test and aren't as effective as you think or if the stats are flawed for whatever reason when it comes to certain players.
This was a Finals series for the ages. One thing I don't think was mentioned was the officiating. Aside from a couple of calls/no calls I didn't quite agree with, the whole series was played by 10 guys and not 13. That in and of itself is something Adam Silver can be proud of.
The Effort Police
Starter
Something stinks in Golden State.
They had 4 guys injured during these playoffs, 3 of which re-injured themselves in some capacity. There's a whole plethora of drama regarding the KD injury saga, and DMC/Looney made such a quick recovery it bordered on a miracle.
TBH, this looks more than a little fishy.
They had 4 guys injured during these playoffs, 3 of which re-injured themselves in some capacity. There's a whole plethora of drama regarding the KD injury saga, and DMC/Looney made such a quick recovery it bordered on a miracle.
TBH, this looks more than a little fishy.
What are you getting at?
Please elaborate.
The Effort Police
Starter
That their medical staff may not be as good as one would expect a championship organization to be, and they rushed their players back.
Maybe, hard to tell one way or the other. Warriors will not be going to the championship next year - definitely fall back into the pack, even miss the playoffs if Cousins doesn't re-sign. You're gonna see just how good Green is.
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The only guy you could say they rushed back was Durant. Cousins recovered remarkably quickly and looked pretty good considering (and was getting better) so I don't think they rushed him back.
Klay's ACL tear had nothing to do with his hamstring injury. He looked completely fine in Game 4/5/ and Game 6 before he got hurt. It was a just a random injury to a guy driving hard to the basket with a lot of miles on his knees the last five years.
Why does everything have to be a blame game? Nobody is to blame. Sh** happens, simple as that.
Telemachus
Starter
I would also point out that KD got a second opinion from an outside doctor as well.
sono
Starter
The tide had turned, never thought the Raptors could win the title or even the ECF, well crap happens!
The next season's final is wide open for any team or even we might sneak in...
So, I've had a little more time to contemplate this, and I have a couple more explicative thoughts. In fact, I heard something earlier today that crystallized for me exactly why this whole notion of the "humble superstar" is completely bogus:
I mean, First of All™, I'll simply repeat that it's impossible for anyone to be as good at anything as Kawhi Leonard is at playing basketball, and also be humble. Im.Poss.I.Ble. You can't do it. Nobody can do it. If anything, humility is an active impediment to achieving that level of greatness. Like, I've heard it said before, in a snarky manner, but I happen to agree with it, anyway: show me someone who's humble, and I'll show you someone who's not actually good at anything. What I think people actually want is for athletes to not go out of their way to tell you how great they are, because, when someone who is not great hears someone who is great talk about how great they are, it tends to remind us about how great we are not. So sportsball fans want their athletes to keep their thoughts about their own greatness to themselves, so as not to rub the fans' noses in their own relative lack of greatness. Which, I mean, mileage varies on how important that is to each fan, but that's not what humility is, either way.
And second of all, the way that people, in the aggregate, consume sports-as-entertainment tends to be 65 percent tribalism, and 35 percent wish fulfillment. We (and this is the part that helped crystallize my thoughts for me) like to live vicariously through these athletes, so we create a need for them to be "blank slates," so to speak, so that we can project our own personalities onto them. We don't want them to ever say anything about anything, unless it's just empty platitudes and inspirational clichés. And the better they are at sportsball, the more we need them to be blank slates. That's one of the reasons, aside from being Not!LeBron, why the "humble mumbler" Derrick Rose became so popular during his MVP season. At that point, he had revealed virtually nothing about his actual personality: the only two things we knew about him were that he was really good at basketball, and he was loyal to his hometown, which made him the perfect avatar through which a sportsball fan could see themselves reflected. And it wasn't really until Rose started to reveal some of his actual personality that people started to turn on him.
Same with Kevin Durant: he got to dine out, for a long time, on being Not!LeBron, just by going out of his way to not reveal any of his personality. We only like for athletes to show personality when their personalities are in line with our own sensibilities. When an athlete's personality turns out to contravene whatever it is that we ride for, then we criticize their lack of humility, their character, in general, and whatever else. And whatever professional failures they have, we ascribe to whatever aspect of their personality that we don't like: if you argue with teammates, argue with coaches, argue with officials, and you don't win, then it's "You don't win, because you're a loser/malcontent/cancer/coach-killer/whiner/etc." But, if you do all of that stuff, and you do win, then you're just "competitive," or something.
And what happened in the Finals was a perfect confluence of the designated "humble" superstar "taking down" the un-humble superteam, because damned if our second-favorite thing in sports isn't seeing the not!humble being brought low, and "made" humble. My theory is that, on some guttural level, it feeds into all the bull**** we've been fed about the meek inheriting the earth, or whatever. I also think that there's something else at play, but that discussion is a little too close to the edge for this particular message board. But yeah, people need to believe that if they do everything "the right way" that, eventually, their ship will come in, and sports is a way of seeing that played out in real time, for a lot of us. But it only works if they can transpose their values and their beliefs onto the athletes, which they tend to find difficult if the athletes demonstrate anything resembling a personality.
Or, in other words, a "lack" of "humility."
AleksandarN
Starter
You can be humble and be great at the same time. It is not mutually exclusive. Being humble does not exclude you from being competitive. Lots of great athletes in history were humble yet great at what they did. You be confident of your abilities and be humble at the same time.
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Or, people just don't like people, athlete or not, who are d-bags. Somehow, most can agree to that without some sort of dictionary definition of what that entails.
Except, not really. Because I could say that I don't like people who are "d-bags," either. But I would also say that we are each working from wildly different standards for what makes someone a "d-bag." I don't accept your argument that there is a universally-accepted baseline for "d-bag" behavior.
If you think that it's possible to be both humble and great at the same time, then we either don't agree on what the standard for greatness is, or we don't agree on what the standard for humility is. Probably both, actually.
AleksandarN
Starter
I will give you an example of someone great and humble . His name is Wayne Gretzky.
Riiiiight. Wayne Gretzky. The guy who's so humble, that his nickname is literally "The Great One."
AleksandarN
Starter
Nickname given to him. You don’t know much about Wayne do you?
Kevin Durant rejected what would have been one of the greatest nicknames in the history of sports, because he decided that he'd rather be called "The Server," instead. Point being, just because someone "gives" you a nickname, doesn't mean you have to to take it. Let's not act like that reporter christened him "The Great One," and he was, like, "That's very flattering, but no thank you. I'll never live up to that! That nickname should be reserved for Gordie Howe!"
They called him that, and he ran with it. That don't sound humble, to me.
AleksandarN
Starter
Gretzky himself always said Gordie Howe was the greatest hockey player that has ever lived. You should read up on Wayne.
AleksandarN
Starter
Also here is him talking about his nickname. Given to him by a reporter when he was TEN years old. People talk about hype and pressure lebron came into to league . With Gretzky it was another level. How he stayed grounded is beyond me. A true ambassador to the sport.
http://www.danpatrick.com/2016/06/07/wayne-gretzky-talks-about-his-various-nicknames/
Yes, I, too, know how to read a Wikipedia entry. And my point stands. He didn't exactly reject the nickname. Like, you know, a humble person would.
AleksandarN
Starter
Again I am not talking Wikipedia. Seriously if you read more about him you would know he is indeed a humble person.
What's your point in all of this? You're so invested in constantly arguing just for the sake of arguing that your stance has now morphed from Kawhi isn't humble to Wayne Gretzky isn't either. How exactly are you going to win that argument?
Definition of 'humble' from Google: having or showing a modest or low estimate of one's own importance.
Relatively speaking in terms of great professional athletes, one can certainly make the case that Wayne Gretzky or Kawhi Leonard are modest in their estimate of their own importance. At least outwardly they are modest. That is all that we can judge from, what they outwardly project. What is going on in their own heads can be (and very well may be) different but we are not privy to that.
Remember it's all relative within the framework of professional athletics. When you see terms like "humble", "cocky", etc. applied to professional athletes those subjective terms I think are generally assumed to be taken within the context of professional sports.
I think most sports fans would generally agree that Larry Fitzgerald and Buster Posey are two of the most humble athletes in their respective sports. Likewise Kyle Busch and Antonio Brown are two of the least humble. How all 4 of those guys compare to the rest of the population and Mother Theresa, I don't know but who cares that's not what people are talking about when they talk about an athlete being humble.
I'm not "arguing for the sake of arguing." I'm right about this.
I don't accept your standard for "modest," without which, "Google's" definition of humble doesn't work. And you can accuse me of arguing for its own sake, if you want to, but you know what'll happen if you stop replying? So will I.
I don't accept your standard for "modest," without which, "Google's" definition of humble doesn't work. And you can accuse me of arguing for its own sake, if you want to, but you know what'll happen if you stop replying? So will I.
