All NBA thread

[Zakk Wylde]

Steph on another level right now. Dude is insane.

Speaking of fantasy.... Durant at #4 is a massive win.

 

[diegodcg]

I've been a Utah Jazz fan since the days of Stockton and Malone.

This year's team is not very exciting to watch at all, but defensively it's one of the best teams in the league - and here I am in the hope that might be enough to make to the playoffs!

Rudy Gobert is my current favorite player by the way:

 

[PepeSilvia]

I've been a Utah Jazz fan since the days of Stockton and Malone.

This year's team is not very exciting to watch at all, but defensively it's one of the best teams in the league - and here I am in the hope that might be enough to make to the playoffs!

Rudy Gobert is my current favorite player by the way:

Picked Gordon Hayward in the third round for my fantasy team, certainly hoping for a bit more from him!

 

[DaTBird187]

Not NBA, but Ben Simmons with a ridiculous stat line today.

43pts, 14 Reb, 7 Ast, 5 Stl, 3 Blks

 

[PepeSilvia]

I had the fifth of eight with a snake draft, in a points league (like it far more than roto and H2H). Reasonably happy with how it went.

5. LBJ
12. Lillard
21. Hayward
28. Drummond
37. Millsap
44. Batum
53. Kemba Walker
60. Towns
69. 'Kieff Morris
76. Elfrid Payton
85. Robin Lopez
92. Redick
101. Nurkic (who I placed in my IR, and picked up Otto Porter).

After seven rounds I'll have the only undefeated team in our league!

Current roster is:
Drummond
Draymond Green
Millsap
LeBron
Lillard
Batum
Walker
KAT
Ibaka
Jarrett Jack
Jordan Clarkson
and two free slots for any daily pick ups.

 

[n4nirvana]

Steph ... freaking ... Curry

Can't help but think he is having an MJ cultural type of impact on the game at the moment

 

[LFC2010]

Kobe Bryant finishes with 60pts in his final ever NBA game. Freak.
will go down as one of the greatest ever individual performances in the NBA.

 

[Garibaldi Red]

Kobe Bryant finishes with 60pts in his final ever NBA game. Freak.
will go down as one of the greatest ever individual performances in the NBA.

Absolutely massive finish. He did get fed by his team mates but still huge.

 

[LFC2010]

and in other news, the warriors beat the bulls all time season wins record ending the season 73-9.

 

[Adz2332]

Kobe Bryant finishes with 60pts in his final ever NBA game. Freak.
will go down as one of the greatest ever individual performances in the NBA.

did you watch the game? no one else had over 10 field goal attempts and he had 50 :/

My problem with kobe all season long is his selfishness. could have been a mentor and helped out the young guys coming through. But no he had to find his shot, even when he was only shooting under 30%

Its always been about Kobe all through his career, so its fitting that its all about Kobe up until the very end.......

 

[LFC2010]

did you watch the game? no one else had over 10 field goal attempts and he had 50 :/

My problem with kobe all season long is his selfishness. could have been a mentor and helped out the young guys coming through. But no he had to find his shot, even when he was only shooting under 30%

Its always been about Kobe all through his career, so its fitting that its all about Kobe up until the very end.......

I've already seen stats and saw he had 50 shot attempts. I'd like to say i've never been a fan of him myself, but when someone plays 20 seasons for the same franchise they deserve my respect especially in a comp where loyalty means squat to most players these days.

 

[Adz2332]

There no doubt about it super player. but its always been about Kobe first, second winning, his team mates third

 

[Burningleviathan]

This season has been a joke. He should have stepped away but we had to have a Kobe farewell tour. so utterly ridiculous.

Congrats to Golden State. I'll have to honour of watching them four times in the next week as they clean up my Rox in the first round of the playoffs.

 

[Adz2332]

awesome rockets man here to!

 

[StrappingTape]

Golden state shits me getting the record the rules are so different now. The West finals will be interesting anyone could knock out a fav except Memphis who are injury ****ed

 

[RussellEbertHandball]

Kobe what a way to go out!

 

[RussellEbertHandball]

I stuck this in Janus' Tac Trailer thread but this really belongs here. Last Saturday's Weekend Oz they had a great article from fellow Murdoch paper The Wall Street Journal about the rise of the Golden State Warriors since the new owners came on board in 2010. The went from cellar dwellers to winning the NBA last year, being the best offensive team, no one got close, and a couple of nights ago they won their 72nd game in the season to go to a 72-9 record v Jordan's 1995-96 Bulls record season at 72-10. Edit Golden State Warriors beat the Memphis Grizzlies this arvo (Thursday 14th) and have finished the season 73-9 to beat the Bulls record.

How Golden State Warriors stepped outside the arc to change game

• BEN COHEN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL APRIL 9, 2016

On every NBA court, about 7.3m from the basket, there is a thin stripe of coloured paint. The flat-sided semi-circle it forms is the boundary between shots that count for two points and shots that are worth three. When the NBA added the lines in 1979, the players weren’t sure what to think. They sniffed and pawed at them like cats with a new toy. Only three per cent of the shots they put up that season were three-pointers.

Over the next three decades, that number crept higher. When it reached 22 per cent, the growth curve flattened. It seemed that the sport had found its optimal ratio. Then the Golden State Warriors came along and blew that assumption to pieces. The Warriors, the National Basketball Association’s defending champions, stand three wins from equalling the league record of 72 in the regular season, set in 1996 by Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls. Much of the credit belongs to star guard Stephen Curry, who is having, by almost every measure, one of the best seasons of any player in history.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/bus...e/news-story/e14cf241f354a54d25a51422237f3194

Silicon Valley takes over and analysing the data commences - producing a result is a style no one has yet figured out how to defeat.

But there is another tale to be told about the Warriors. It involves a group of executives with limited experience, led by a Silicon Valley financier, who bought a floundering franchise in 2010 and set out to fix it by raising a single question: What would happen if you built a basketball team by ignoring every orthodoxy of building a basketball team? The process took many twists and turns, and there were times when it nearly failed. But the dominance the Warriors have displayed this season can be traced back to one of the most unusual ideas embraced by the data-loving executives: the notion that the NBA’s three-point line was a market inefficiency hiding in plain sight.

This season the Warriors have sunk 1025 three-pointers, by far the most in NBA history. Not only has Curry taken more threes than any other player, he is making them at a rate of 45.6 per cent, higher than the NBA average for all shots. He has shattered his own record for most three-pointers in a season by 34 per cent. Moreover, distance seems to have no significant effect on his accuracy. Curry is a better shooter from 9-12m than the average NBA player is from 1-2m.

The result is a style no one has yet figured out how to defeat

.
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers are the biggest Venture Capital firm in Silicon Valley - have been for 40 years, so anyone from there was going to tinker.

“What’s really interesting is sometimes in venture capital and doing start-ups the whole world can be wrong,” said the team’s primary owner, Joe Lacob, a longtime partner at Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “No one really executed a game plan — a team-building architecture — around the three-pointer.”

In 2010, the Golden State Warriors hadn’t won an NBA title since 1975. They played in a dumpy arena beside an interstate and had made the playoffs just once in the last 15 years. The previous owner, Chris Cohan, was loathed by many loyal fans.

Still, competition to buy the team was fierce. To fend off the other finalist, Oracle Corp founder Larry Ellison, Lacob and entertainment mogul Peter Guber paid $US450 million ($597m), which was, at the time, the highest price for a team in NBA history.

The data analysis

It wasn’t long before Lacob, who is 60 years old, installed a basketball brains trust akin to a board at one of his companies. The team’s executives are always communicating — a group text message hums on their phones during games — and every decision brings vigorous debate. But from the beginning, the Warriors brass placed an unusually strong emphasis on numbers.

The data dive yielded many insights, but the Warriors eventually zeroed in on the three-point line. NBA players made roughly the same percentage of shots from 7m as they did from 7.3m. But because the three-point line ran between them, the values of those two shots were radically different. Shot attempts from 7m had an average value of 0.76 points, while 7.3m shots were worth 1.09.

This, the Warriors concluded, was an opportunity. By moving back just a few centimetres before shooting, a basketball player could improve his rate of return by 43 per cent.

Lacob wasn’t the only team owner in sports to delve into statistics — baseball has been doing it for years — and the Warriors weren’t the first NBA team to see the potential of the three-pointer. Starting in the 1990s, a string of teams with brutally effective defences had prompted teams like the Phoenix Suns and San Antonio Spurs to search for different ways to score, and that meant shooting more three-pointers. More recently, as the data improved, it became clear that teams weren’t taking nearly enough of them.

The difference between the Warriors and everyone else was what the team decided to do with this information.

For many years after James Naismith invented basketball in 1891, the prevailing view was that the most important area of the court was near the basket. From Wilt Chamberlain’s finger-rolls in the 1960s to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s sky hooks in the 1970s to Jordan’s soaring dunks in the 1990s, the NBA was the dominion of players who owned the rim.

But once the analysis was done - how do you fit it around the players you have and who do you go and recruit?

When the Warriors, under their previous owners, drafted Curry in 2009, he wasn’t a prototypical NBA superstar. Though his father, Dell, had played in the NBA, Stephen Curry was so lightly recruited out of high school that he had attended tiny Davidson College near his hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina. He only emerged as a tantalising NBA prospect after his team made an improbable run to the regional finals of the 2008 NCAA tournament.

Even after his first two seasons with Golden State, Curry wasn’t a sure thing. Still, as the team’s new executives settled on their plan to exploit the three-point line, they became convinced Curry would be their centrepiece.

The first test of their commitment came in the form of a controversial decision: trading the team’s leading scorer, Monta Ellis. Some believed Ellis was too similar to Curry and that he was costing him shots. Others thought it was crazy to banish the most popular player. At one point, just before the deal, Lacob tested the confidence of his basketball executives by telling them he was getting cold feet. They defended their plan and pulled the trigger.

The week after the 2012 trade, Lacob was booed by fans. The team finished that season with one of the NBA’s worst records. The Warriors already were building a team around Curry that would allow him to take more three-pointers. The most critical step had come in the 2011 draft when they selected guard Klay Thompson. He, too, was the son of an NBA player and an excellent shooter. At 200cm (6ft 7in) , he was 10cm taller than Curry.

The team believed Thompson’s shooting ability would make defences too frightened to leave him alone, and that would limit their ability to double-team Curry. But because he was tall, he could defend the other team’s best guard and shoot over defences without being blocked, which could help the Warriors compete against teams that hoped to use their size to contain Curry.

What made the move most attractive was its novelty. Most three-point-shooting teams had one superb shooter surrounded by a collection of supporting players. “Imagine if we could have two of those guys,” Kirk Lacob, the owner’s 27-year-old son and the team’s assistant general manager, recalled thinking at the time. “It’s once in a lifetime,” said Joe Lacob.

The day after Ellis was traded, Thompson was inserted into the starting line-up. After that, according to the general manager Bob Myers, when the team was drafting and signing players, the strategy shifted from wondering whether they could play with Curry to asking: “Who can play with Steph and Klay?”

But as they built the team from the analysis the tech milionaires reckon they have to sack the coach to find one that can take advantage of their game plan and get the players to implement it - ie a guy who shot a lot of 3 pointers.

By the time the 2014-15 season began, the Warriors had padded their roster with Australian Andrew Bogut, a 213cm (7ft) centre who protects the rim and shores up their defence; the position-defying Draymond Green, the steal of the 2012 draft; and rangy guards Andre Iguodala and Shaun Livingston, whom they acquired in free agency. “They complemented shooting, even though they’re not shooters,” Myers said.

The Warriors then had a chance to trade for one of the league’s premier players, Minnesota Timberwolves forward Kevin Love. The move would have been a no-brainer for most basketball people. But the Timberwolves wanted a player in return whose departure would have scuttled the Warriors’ master plan. “They kept asking for Klay, and we kept saying no,” Lacob said. “We weren’t going to trade Klay, and they weren’t going to do a deal without Klay.”

The team doubled down on its three-point plan by replacing coach Mark Jackson with Steve Kerr, a member of five NBA championship teams who had retired with a 45.4 per cent shooting rate on three-pointers, the highest in league history. It was his first NBA coaching job.

And they keep recruiting and playing 3 point shooters

That season, with all the pieces in place, the Warriors fielded five players between 190cm and 203cm who all were threats to shoot three-pointers. This “small-ball” line-up — widely known as the “death line-up” or, as Barack Obama called it, the “nuclear line-up” — helped the Warriors take 9 per cent more three-pointers as a team than the year before and make a higher percentage than anyone in the league.

This combination of frequency and efficiency had a fascinating effect on opponents. It forced them to spread out, extending their defence all the way to the three-point line instead of packing the paint, leaving the Warriors with lots of open space. Curry set a record for three-point shots and was named the league’s Most Valuable Player. Thompson made the All-Star team. The Warriors overcame the Cleveland Cavaliers to win their first NBA title in 40 years.

But the Silicon Valley boys and new coach kept tinkering.

The tinkering could have stopped there. The Warriors clearly had hit on a winning formula. But then they began thinking about an audacious idea that would make them even better.

The plan had started to take shape in 2013, during a playoff game against the Spurs, one of the NBA’s top teams. Curry was just then coming into his own, showing signs that he could be both dazzling and deadly. During one possession early in the first quarter, Curry dribbled around a screen and found himself in a pocket of open space. Immediately, even before he had time to set his feet, Curry pulled up and fired a three-pointer.

Myers, the general manager who was in the arena watching that night, couldn’t believe his eyes. As the ball swished through the net, he turned to the other Warriors executives around him to confirm what he had just seen. “Did he just shoot that off one foot?” he asked. “Who shoots a three off one foot?”

And just like Rinus Michels found Cruyff to carry out Total Football, the Warriors found Steph Curry

The shot was only one of dozens of stunners Curry had made during his young NBA career. But it played a crucial role in firming up another idea the team was batting around. The Warriors were dreaming about what would happen if they gave Curry a green light to take more shots, and more crazy ones, too — not off one foot, exactly, but from places on the floor where nobody had ever routinely taken shots.

Curry had already reached the point where he could take as many as 10 threes in one game without anyone noticing. It didn’t matter if the shot was off one foot, from 1.5m behind the three-point line or the popcorn stand in the concourse. His accuracy didn’t seem to suffer much. Before every game, in fact, Curry practices these kinds of bombs by shooting from the half-court logo.

The team realised that any possession that ended with a three-point attempt by Curry was worthwhile — and that they would never discourage him from taking one. In this, the season of Curry’s unleashing, the Warriors are shooting 17 per cent more threes than a season ago. Curry is attempting more than 11 a game. No NBA team had ever had a player attempt more than nine. Last season he hit 286 threes. This season he is on pace for about 400.

What amazes fans even more is the location of those shots. NBA players shoot an average of 28 per cent from 8m or beyond. Most players don’t even take them unless the shot clock is running out. Curry has taken 253 such deep shots this year and made 47 per cent of them. The result is that defenders have strayed even farther from the basket to guard him, opening even bigger spaces for his teammates.

“Stretching a defence makes it easier to score,” Myers said.

The success of the Warriors this season has turned Curry, 28, into one the NBA’s biggest stars. He has an everyman appeal because he isn’t a giant.

His celebrity has raised the profile of the three-point shot. This year, like the last four years, NBA teams are taking more three-pointers than ever. They now amount to 28.3 per cent of total shots. College teams also hit another high in three-pointers attempted per game this season. High school teams have caught the bug, too.

The owners know other teams will try and find a way to stop them and beat them, but they know it wont be overnight

Guber, the team’s co-owner, said other NBA teams will try to emulate the Warriors’ original approach as they attempt to end the team’s reign. “Other teams will do it in a different way,” he said. “They’ll take chances and challenge the incumbent and come up with another way to create the magic.”

For now, the Warriors have it. They turned the three-point line into a boundary in time. The kind of strategy that unfolded inside the line belonged to the game’s past. The future of basketball, they believed, lay behind the line — and Curry showed it was farther behind that line than even they imagined.

“I don’t know why it took so long,” Lacob said. “You would think in sports that this would’ve been tried a long time ago.”

 

[Burningleviathan]

Well that was crap. Went to bed at half time.

Teams like Orlando were experimenting with three point shooting with Dwight in the middle and shooters out side. Got themselves to the finals once.
Houston has the same focus in getting rid of the mid range jumper.
The difference to GSW to the others is the found a couple of ungodly shooters in Curry and Thompson. If one of them doesn't have the shot they have then it doesn't work.

 

[Magpiespower]

Finally, some good news for the Lakers this year.

Hired Luke Walton as head coach.

Welcome home!

 

[Magpiespower]

Lottery just finished...

1 - Sixers
2 - Lakers (Welcome to LA, Brandon Ingram!)
3 - Celtics
4 - Suns
5 - T'Wolves
6 - Pelicans
7 - Nuggets
8 - Kings
9 - Raptors
10 - Bucks
11 - Magic
12 - Jazz
13 - Suns
14 - Bulls

 

[LFC2010]

Is there a clear cut no.1 this season?

Would love it if Simmons dropped to 3. That's if Boston don't try and trade it off.

 

[Magpiespower]

Simmons and Ingram are the consensus top two picks.

Simmons is dead keen on LA. New Sixers boss Bryan Colangelo said he's open to trade (but that was when they might've got LA's lottery pick.) Still, there might be some wheeling and dealing to come.

Just glad the Lakers didn't slide out of the top three. And lose our pick to Philly. F@%k, that would've been a nightmare...

 

[RussellEbertHandball]

Stuck this in the Burgo academy thread but it has relevance for this thread. Its not only Aussie players making an impact on the NBA but also Aussie sports scientists

BrockBlitz you will be interested in this story NBA Australia website that piggy backs off Sporting News



http://australia.sportingnews.com/n...urs-catapult-finals/pnjswamkhh0z15q31tx9q1w8b
Science of Success: How Australians are changing teams in the NBA and beyond

The NBA Finals are in full bloom.Each year, our minds turn to what it takes for an organisation — not just ateam — to return to this theatre: culture, cohesion, talent, strategy, health, and… innovation.
.....
Survey the field and you’ll find that something leaps off the page: The Australian sports science community has rapidly spread its tentacles throughout the major North American leagues. Riding the wave of interest in the country’s elite sporting programs and following in the footsteps of those who first ventured into European football, Australian medical and high performance personnel have found roles with the Warriors, Spurs, Sixers, Bucks [Port's ex physio Tim O'Leary went to the Bucks at end of 2015 footy season], and Celtics, among others.

In the last few years, what was once a curiosity and later a convenient narrative has become a wholesome story of research and development.

Darren Burgess, who blazed a trail by taking up a position as Liverpool’s head of fitness and conditioning at the beginning of this decade and is currently High Performance Manager at the Port Adelaide Football Club, has watched it all unfold. “When I started to travel with the Socceroos — which was the end of 2007, start of 2008 — whenever we played in a country anywhere around the world, I’d just send some cold emails and say, ‘Look, I’m an Aussie, any chance I can come and just have a chat to you about what you’re doing?’,” recalls Burgess. “You never got knocked back, because you were an Aussie.” “Nobody knew who anybody was but because you were an Aussie, they always said, ‘Yeah, come on down and tell us what’s happening at the AIS (Australian Institute of Sport)!’”

Burgess notes that many of his colleagues forged their habits in competitions like the AFL and NRL, where hard salary caps and rigid auditing necessitate creativity and a need to breed winning cultures with more than just shrewd talent acquisition. “The [other] big thing is: Our sports are salary-cap dependent,” says Burgess. “All of the big clubs, whether it’s rugby, rugby league, or AFL, can’t go and spend money and buy the best player. In a draft system like the AFL, you’re kind of forced to develop your own players. Clubs have really successfully looked for other ways to fast-track players and to ensure that players are injury-free and develop well.”

You might wonder, what prompted this headhunting of Australian medical and conditioning experts, and will it be more than an overnight trend?
For the NBA, those tabbed as progressive franchises or perceived as embracing big data jumped first. But the phase didn’t start there, and nor does it appear to be drawing to any form of conclusion. Collegiate football programs have plucked sports scientists from the Southern Hemisphere for some time now. Just ask Alex Hampton, who is now in his fourth year serving as the Assistant Strength and Conditioning Coach with the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars, but cut his teeth with the nearby Florida State University regime. It has kick-started a slow-burning philosophical change, to the point where those outside the coaching orthodoxy can have their voices heard. “It’s probably just that lack of thought about sports science at all [that delayed it in the U.S.],” Hampton told NBA Australia. “You had your [football] coaches, you had your medical, and you had your strength and conditioning.”

Footballing codes of all kinds have cautiously deviated from the monotonous, quantity-over-quality loads of deeply engrained preparation methods. Transferring the targeted technique to indoor sports where the physical toll hits more so in rigorous travel schedules and sleep deprivation than in bruising bodychecks isn’t always smooth, but it can be done.

“People within [other] codes probably think that it doesn’t, but recovery is recovery, and you know, periodisation is periodisation,” Burgess says. “As long you’re familiar with the sport and familiar with the demands of match day, I think it transfers really well. It, in fact, gives you an advantage because it doesn’t give you any bias that you might have if you played the sport or if you’ve worked in only one sport. I think it transfers really well.” As the standard-bearers for organisational best practice and poster boys for the utopian, global village model, San Antonio took the plunge in late 2014 by hiring its director of medical services from the Australian sporting spectrum.

Phil Coles, whose time at Liverpool and with the Socceroos overlapped with Burgess, joined the Spurs via the NRL’s Newcastle Knights. Says Coles: “Pop certainly doesn’t lead by committee. Pop leads by… leading. He’s certainly the boss.” “But the reason he’s succeeded for so long is that he’s open to discussing ideas, he’s open to evolving, and the amazing thing about the Spurs’ stability over the years is that they’ve kept that stability without stagnating.”
......
Coles also notes that the next challenge for the wearable tech industry’s innovators is to make their devices, put simply, more wearable. Part of that task falls squarely at the feet of Australian company Catapult Sports, the wearable tech firm that has evolved from a little-engine-that-could a decade ago, to a necessary pivot in any conversation surrounding sports science.
.....
The Spurs and Mavs were the league’s guinea pigs, according to Catapult Sports Performance Manager Ewan Robson, dabbling in their products almost four years ago. The next hurdle to overcome is in marrying up what teams can collect and decipher in training loads with in-game data........
“The reason for that [interest] is that we’re just in the early stages of launching our new OptimEye T6 device, which is the unit that is usable with our ClearSky (our indoor system),” says Robson. “With the launch of this ClearSky system and even just the change in the device that we’re offering for basketball — the device is about half the size of the [OptimEye] S5 — I think that’s gonna really help the discussion. At the end of the day, it’s half the size. For usability [in the games], it’s going to be a pretty important piece.” As former Catapult head of sports science Michael Regan once wrote, “The truth lies in the balance of objective numbers, subjective coaching and the knowledge of the person.” Homogenising data from wearable tech would be a major step for the league at-large. It’s a topic that’s been on the table for some time.
[This is the guy we got from Catapult as our GPS expert and recruited in December 2014 and discussed in this thread https://www.bigfooty.com/forum/threads/port-adelaide-appoints-michael-regan-as-afl’s-first-gps-analyst.1084060/ and he is given the title on the club's website Michael Regan List Analyst and Innovation Manager]
.........
A lot has changed since ambitious graduates like Burgess were mailing out applications by the dozen and getting little in return. There is a budding generation of sports scientists who can refer to Burgess’ blueprint and apply the insights from tools like Catapult to develop Australia’s influence.

.......
http://australia.sportingnews.com/n...urs-catapult-finals/pnjswamkhh0z15q31tx9q1w8b

 

[DaTBird187]

Only in America would they consistently celebrate the Armed Forces before every game. Such a bizarre society.

 

[RussellEbertHandball]

SI cover for this week