2023-24 NBA Season Discussion

[GSP]

Crazy how Wolves could go from looking like the 04 Pistons to just another playoff team if the refs decide to call the game a certain way

none of these foul calls were foul calls in game 2

[OhayoKD]

Minnesota is going to lose every game for the rest of the playoffs if the refs call the game like this.

Minnesota needs to drive to the hoop every time. Denver does it and it's a foul yet Minnesota is settling for jump shots when the refs are calling every point of marginal contact.

Probably too late to comeback but the team needed to realize this earlier and start driving.

League couldn't have their new golden boy swept

[AEnigma]

Minnesota is going to lose every game for the rest of the playoffs if the refs call the game like this.

Minnesota needs to drive to the hoop every time. Denver does it and it's a foul yet Minnesota is settling for jump shots when the refs are calling every point of marginal contact.

Probably too late to comeback but the team needed to realize this earlier and start driving.

League couldn't have their new golden boy swept

“The League” does not want to market Jokic over Edwards.

[ronnymac2]

I said OKC vs. DAL was the most entertaining second round matchup for neutral fan, but even I have to say that IND vs. NYK will give them a run for their money. That Game 3 was insanely fun. Pacers earned that win tonight. Respect. They played us the full 48.

[Colbinii]

Crazy how Wolves could go from looking like the 04 Pistons to just another playoff team if the refs decide to call the game a certain way

none of these foul calls were foul calls in game 2

Half of them haven't been fouls in any playoff game this year

[Colbinii]

Minnesota is going to lose every game for the rest of the playoffs if the refs call the game like this.

Minnesota needs to drive to the hoop every time. Denver does it and it's a foul yet Minnesota is settling for jump shots when the refs are calling every point of marginal contact.

Probably too late to comeback but the team needed to realize this earlier and start driving.

League couldn't have their new golden boy swept

“The League” does not want to market Jokic over Edwards.

Yeah, weird hill to die on.

My only issue is Denver is as physical offensively if not more physical than Minnesota is defensively yet they would never call an offensive foul.

It's just so hard to win with defense in this league when the same physicality isn't called a foul on both ends.

This is being reffed like a December game.

[OhayoKD]

Crazy how Wolves could go from looking like the 04 Pistons to just another playoff team if the refs decide to call the game a certain way

none of these foul calls were foul calls in game 2

Half of them haven't been fouls in any playoff game this year

wonder if this is what kings fans felt vs the lakers in 2002 though this is an order of magnitude worse

[Colbinii]

Crazy how Wolves could go from looking like the 04 Pistons to just another playoff team if the refs decide to call the game a certain way

none of these foul calls were foul calls in game 2

Half of them haven't been fouls in any playoff game this year

wonder if this is what kings fans felt vs the lakers in 2002 though this is an order of magnitude worse

Minnesota is fked.

They refs went from game 2 to allowing physicality on both ends for both teams. Then in this game they have called just about every marginal contact a foul.

How does Minnesota play in game 4? Do they play physical or do they need to play it like a December game?

It's impossible for Minnesota to know. Denver on the other hand just plays their brand of finesse basketball either way.

[OhayoKD]

and now comes the garbage time statpadding

[OhayoKD]

Half of them haven't been fouls in any playoff game this year

wonder if this is what kings fans felt vs the lakers in 2002 though this is an order of magnitude worse

Minnesota is fked.

They refs went from game 2 to allowing physicality on both ends for both teams. Then in this game they have called just about every marginal contact a foul.

How does Minnesota play in game 4? Do they play physical or do they need to play it like a December game?

It's impossible for Minnesota to know. Denver on the other hand just plays their brand of finesse basketball either way.

The fouling is probably just a one-off because they wanted this to not be 0-3. What minny fans should actually be scared off is Murray getting going. If Murray plays like a superstar denver can win this. If not they won't. The league letting jamal play was inexcusable

[Texas Chuck]

So the defending champs winning one game(which I heard they basically couldn't) means clearly its a ref issue.

I can't remember another year like this where literally every time a team loses a good chunk of their supporters immediately goes to the refs.

I mean Minny is getting blown out, but its just a ref issue. And the league definitely rigging it for a longer series.....

Why do you guys watch and spend so much time discussing a product you essentially believe to be pro wrestling?

[OhayoKD]

So the defending champs winning one game(which I heard they basically couldn't) means clearly its a ref issue.

I can't remember another year like this where literally every time a team loses a good chunk of their supporters immediately goes to the refs.

I mean Minny is getting blown out, but its just a ref issue. And the league definitely rigging it for a longer series.....

Why do you guys watch and spend so much time discussing a product you essentially believe to be pro wrestling?

Close to everyone including most nuggets fans agreed Jamal should have been suspended before the game. Revisionism accusations don't work when the claim is made before the period of time there was an alleged revising.

A better question to ask is why the alleged best player in the world had more shots than points 2-0 down until garbage time

[Ambrose]

Nuggets looked far more composed tonight. That'd be my concern for MN going forward. But the Wolves started cold and things kind of snowballed. Those games happen so can't put too much into it.

[jalengreen]

So the defending champs winning one game(which I heard they basically couldn't) means clearly its a ref issue.

I can't remember another year like this where literally every time a team loses a good chunk of their supporters immediately goes to the refs.

I mean Minny is getting blown out, but its just a ref issue. And the league definitely rigging it for a longer series.....

Why do you guys watch and spend so much time discussing a product you essentially believe to be pro wrestling?

The reffing today was definitely inconsistent with how they've been calling the series. Wouldn't personally go any further than that, though; game to game variability in officiating standards happen.

As for the Murray topic, yeah he definitely should've been suspended and the NBA definitely had a vested interest in not suspending him.

That's my take on the matter. Would not say it's rigged, definitely not pro wrestling, but better chance Murray is suspended if he's worse at basketball or if the Nuggets were up 2-0 IMO.

[OhayoKD]

on/off tends to inflate the actual effect of 'fit" issues. Bad fit and all, Luka has basically averaged jordan/magic/hakeem game-level lift over a bunch of >10 game season samples for his first 5 years, and we know his ratings are basically unaffected with bench players and without starters.

Clearly you're talking WOWY-type stats yes? Those are worth looking at certainly, but using them to dismiss more granular +/- stat is not something I'd do lightly.

If you want to elaborate on this, that might help give me more confidence.

Well you saw the tweets posted where Luka has the best net-rating with bench and the best net-rating without 3 starters. He also plays alot less with starters, so you have a potential explanation for the game-level vs on/off gap there, not to mention him playing with other capable ball-handlers for most of his career.

And then there is the matter of this phenonom taking place with a very similar(offensive) player in Lebron in Miami where his on/off plunged staggering with another elite playmaker but his WOWY was still great(though admittedly not the girnormous outlier he was with better fitting cleveland rosters as a small-forward) and then in the playoffs they converted two titles(facing 2 atg level opponents) despite a bunch of injury context.

If this is what it is for Luka, then his on/off doesn't really matter to me. If the power of rotations isn't preventing you from taking otherwise bad teams to contention(in this case i think playing okc or minny close would qualify), then the team not being bad whenever you miss a few minutes of game time doesn't really affect how I view you as someone who elevates teams or the variety of players you can mantain that elevation with. The Mavs, even with luka playing with other playmakers got alot better with Luka over games so if the on/off is just a result of staggering and that staggering does not inhibit you from making the team much better...does it really matter?

Mind you this isn't specific to a certain playstyle. Curry has a good backup guard...suddenly negative on/off. Duncan and Drob, Jokic in the playoffs when he staggers with Gordon. The first thing i think you should look at when there's a disparity between the game and the spot minutes is what the rotations are like imo.

I'm also just very confident in Luka's skills and his film based on the impact we've seen from similar players and how he takes out most of a team's defenders on his own at a frequency no one else in the league does I think. I would need alot more focused and film-backed argumentation to buy the on/off is spotting something the game-level stuff isn't.

The NHL used this stat for a long time..

NHL's +/- is a completely different stat from basketball +/-. NHL +/- is just tallying up chosen positive and negative actions and subtracting the latter from the former. It's basically a less discriminatory PER, not an impact stat.

There's truth in this statement traditionally, but once basketball people made RAPM-type stats, the hockey people followed suit, so that data certainly exists now.

Having done some hockey +/- analysis, I'll note a couple things:

1. The low scoring of hockey makes +/- a noisier stat, and this is something that got a lot worse in the modern game when they let goalies where enough pads to basically cover the entire net.

2. Note that this also makes hockey a noisier game and one more like baseball where the playoffs don't even necessarily say that much about who the best team would be if you held all the same series again. With baseball, the main focus of analytics has been from a production/player tracking perspective rather than impact metrics for reasons not unrelated to this. Hockey is a challenge because it has similar noise issues to baseball, but as a flowing field sport it's a lot harder to measure production/player tracking beyond the absolute basics.

3. One wrinkle I didn't really grapple with until I started looking at the data was the fact that defensemen just play significantly more than the center and wings. I knew that +/- was a stat associated with defensemen and figured it was just because goals and assists tended to be dominated by the more offensive positions, but it's also because of them playing greater minutes, and thus having a tendency to have the bigger raw +/- numbers.[/quote]

Did not realise there were two plus-minuses but cool that they're gravitating towards winning as well. A big difference between soccer and hockey is the 82-game regular season sample. Do starters miss enough games to draw inferencers from there like we do from basketball?

[OhayoKD]

So the defending champs winning one game(which I heard they basically couldn't) means clearly its a ref issue.

I can't remember another year like this where literally every time a team loses a good chunk of their supporters immediately goes to the refs.

I mean Minny is getting blown out, but its just a ref issue. And the league definitely rigging it for a longer series.....

Why do you guys watch and spend so much time discussing a product you essentially believe to be pro wrestling?

The reffing today was definitely inconsistent with how they've been calling the series. Wouldn't personally go any further than that, though; game to game variability in officiating standards happen.

As for the Murray topic, yeah he definitely should've been suspended and the NBA definitely had a vested interest in not suspending him.

That's my take on the matter. Would not say it's rigged, definitely not pro wrestling, but better chance Murray is suspended if he's worse at basketball or if the Nuggets were up 2-0 IMO.

If there was no suspension you can just dismiss the refereeing complaints(which were there well before this game) as sour grapes. But the suspension takes away plausible deniablity. You give a massive mulligan to a team and then completely change how you call it. I'm not sure the league has ever been this blatant about putting the thumb on the scale to favor a team. I had an inkling they like dynasties from 2002(post-hoc analysis from laker fans found the refs were consisnently getting calls incorrect in a way biased towards LA), but not suspending murray after ant was the only player punished in game 2 makes it obvious they wanted Denver winning this game.

[WestGOAT]

So the defending champs winning one game(which I heard they basically couldn't) means clearly its a ref issue.

I can't remember another year like this where literally every time a team loses a good chunk of their supporters immediately goes to the refs.

I mean Minny is getting blown out, but its just a ref issue. And the league definitely rigging it for a longer series.....

Why do you guys watch and spend so much time discussing a product you essentially believe to be pro wrestling?

The reffing today was definitely inconsistent with how they've been calling the series. Wouldn't personally go any further than that, though; game to game variability in officiating standards happen.

As for the Murray topic, yeah he definitely should've been suspended and the NBA definitely had a vested interest in not suspending him.

That's my take on the matter. Would not say it's rigged, definitely not pro wrestling, but better chance Murray is suspended if he's worse at basketball or if the Nuggets were up 2-0 IMO.

If there was no suspension you can just dismiss the refereeing complaints(which were there well before this game) as sour grapes. But the suspension takes away plausible deniablity. You give a massive mulligan to a team and then completely change how you call it. I'm not sure the league has ever been this blatant about putting the thumb on the scale to favor a team. I had an inkling they like dynasties from 2002(post-hoc analysis from laker fans found the refs were consisnently getting calls incorrect in a way biased towards LA), but not suspending murray after ant was the only player punished in game 2 makes it obvious they wanted Denver winning this game.

The league has financial incentive to extend playoff series. They do it all the time, like in the 2016 finals when they decided it was good timing to finally suspend Draymond, hell they even do it during games to help boost comebacks and keeps it competitive. It's just part of the NBA unwritten memo.

[ardee]

Imagine telling Laker fans pre-2020 that 6'4 Josh Hart would move to forward in a few years and average nearly 15 rebounds per game in a Playoff run while shooting 45% from three....

[Colbinii]

So the defending champs winning one game(which I heard they basically couldn't) means clearly its a ref issue.

I can't remember another year like this where literally every time a team loses a good chunk of their supporters immediately goes to the refs.

I mean Minny is getting blown out, but its just a ref issue. And the league definitely rigging it for a longer series.....

Why do you guys watch and spend so much time discussing a product you essentially believe to be pro wrestling?

My main thing regarding the reffing switched from hard, physical but clean defense in G1 and G2 to literally December-like refereeing in G3.

Do you not see this as an issue/problem?

If you think it's fine, then I personally would say there definitely needs to be a level the referee's should be held to uphold in the post-season, and as someone who has watched a vast majority of post-season games this season, this game was the least physical playoff game I have seen all season.

Murray was great. But like I said earlier, Jokic initiates and creates more contact offensively than many of the defensive fouls called in G3. Should we be upholding offense and defensive players to the same physicality levels?

Or are we just at a point where basketball is 80% offense like we were in December (and like this game was refereed).

[Dutchball97]

And here I thought the Jokic haters would crawl back into their cave but no, it's the refs fault he had a solid game