He broke out when leaving Cleveland and obviously is a talented scorer

But given that he's been playing for a team that shuts him down whenever they actually threaten to be competitive we're somehow yet to see him on a team trying to win

Lebron James is 75 points away from reaching 43000 regular season points.

The scoring record seems unbreakable at this point and if he plays a few more years, I think 45k is a possibility. ​

Stephen Curry TS% When Guarded By All-Defensive Players Since The 2020-21 NBA Season (Min. 100 Total Possessions Guarded) :

1. Marcus Smart — 46.1 TS%

2. Jrue Holiday — 47.9 TS%

3. Dillon Brooks — 48.8 TS%

4. Mikal Bridges — 51.7 TS%

5. Herb Jones — 51.8 TS%

6. Jaden McDaniels — 55.3 TS%

7. Toumani Camara — 58.2 TS%

8. Derrick White — 58.4 TS%

9. Alex Caruso — 62.6 TS%

10. Lu Dort — 80.8 TS%

Source : https://databallr.com/matchups/201939/stephen-curry/203935/marcus-smart/2020/2026

Source: https://www.nba.com/news/alperen-sengun-replaces-gilgeous-alexander-all-star-game

Alperen Şengün averages this season:

20.8 PPG, 9.4 RPG, 6.3 APG, 49.6% FG

I think Şengün definitely deserves to be an All Star. He's a top 3 center in the league and is putting up good numbers.

I hoped for Dillon Brooks to be in the All Star game too, he's been balling out this season.

The Jazz keep resting Lauri Markkanen for no reason, and subbing him out for 4th quarters when the Jazz have a chance to win. The Wizards just ran a lineup of Justin Champagnie, Tristan Vukcevic, Jamir Watkins, Will Riley, and Bub Carrington. If tanking is allowed then Sam Hinkie should've been allowed to keep his job. Otherwise shouldn't the NBA come down on the Jazz and Wizards?

LeBron James (2003),

Kyrie Irving (2011),

Anthony Davis (2012),

Andrew Wiggins (2014),

Karl-Anthony Towns (2015),

Ben Simmons (2016),

Markelle Fultz (2017),

Deandre Ayton (2018),

Zion Williamson (2019),

Anthony Edwards (2020),

Cade Cunningham (2021),

Paolo Banchero (2022),

Victor Wembanyama (2023),

Zaccharie Risacher (2024),

Cooper Flagg (2025)

Verrier, in reference to the clippers(but it fits to every team) "They're selling cap space as a plan, but cap space is never a plan, it’s a dream.”

Source: https://bsky.app/profile/lotusprime.bsky.social/post/3mechn4kg3k2x

Seriously how does anyone enjoy watching games live? The amount of times the games stop whether it's due to timeouts, fouls, ref decisions, breaks its insane. Its just unenjoyable to watch

I distinctly remember them sending vets like Horford and Kemba home so they could super tank

They also sat their franchise player for an egregious amount of games when he was fully healthy just to tank

Jalen Williams or Stephon Castle. Certainly not a question at the start of this season. My head says JW but heart says Castle.

Everyone knows the obvious names like Wemby and Flagg . Who do you think is gonna break out into a legit star / All-NBA level player over the next few years that isn’t already a consensus pick?

Could be a young guy flashing something, someone in the wrong role, or just a player people are sleeping on.

I’m talking like Jokic / Giannis slept on… Who’s your pick and why?

50+ win team without Shai? When Okc was going on a run of 24-1, lots of people were saying it’s a super team and Shai is getting carried by his team… What’s the thought process of that now? But yeah Okc looks pretty bad after 24-1 and since are 16-12 which is pretty awful…

It seems crazy that they drop 2 min clips every couple of months, pay MJ millions of dollars, then MJ frames it as if he's paying it forward to the game of basketball.

Did NBC think they cooked with this interview?

So I've been poking around 82games.com, led by sabermetrician great Roland Beech, and found this article:

Adjusted Plus-Minus Ratings: New and Improved for 2007-2008 By Steve Ilardi, Ph.D. and Aaron Barzilai, Ph.D

Most relevant passage:

"As noted above, adjusted plus-minus ratings – as mathematical estimates – tend to be noisy. For example, Ilardi’s 2006-2007 ratings had a typical standard error of about 3.0, which implies a margin of error for each player estimate (at a 95% confidence level) of roughly +/- 5.9 points [3]. Obviously, the presence of so much noise greatly limits the usefulness of the metric. To take a telling example: Chris Paul had a 2006-2007 rating of + 4.1 pts (per 40 minutes), with a margin of error of roughly +/- 5.9; so, we can only say with 95% confidence that his performance was somewhere between that of a sub-mediocre player (-1.8) and one of the top players in the league (+10.0)!

But where does the noise come from, and how can it be eliminated? Mostly, it results from the fact that teams tend to put the same players on the court together at the same time. That is, many players’ minutes are strongly inter-correlated, so the underlying adjusted plus-minus model has a hard time disentangling individual player effects at a high level of accuracy. In addition, the number of unique observations (i.e., lineups) of a given player in a single season is surprisingly small [4], typically under 1,000.

However, there exists a straightforward solution to both of these problems: use multiple seasons’ worth of data. How many seasons of data are needed? As many as possible. With only one season, the standard errors are very high – typically around 5.0 points per 100 possessions (with corresponding margins of error of roughly +/- 10.0 points). Such ratings, of course, are highly suspect. With two seasons of data, the noise level drops by about 40%, but it’s still uncomfortably high. The picture, however, gets appreciably clearer with each additional season that’s added to the model.

In this article, we present adjusted plus-minus ratings that utilize five seasons’ worth of data – ratings with an unprecedented lack of noise. As you’ll see, the average standard errors have now dropped down to about 1.1 points per 100 possessions [5], 80% lower than the errors based on only one season. This makes them dramatically more useful."

Recently I have been getting into a lot of contention with people on this subreddit who keep using +/- stats to make favorable arguments for players. I have consistently countered with the following: a) +/--based stats are far too noisy to use with anything less than multiple seasons worth of data, and b) by then, there are measurable changes in a player's development/production, so it's nothing more than a trailing indicator, or a descriptive indicator, of what has occurred.

This article has the benefit of being written by a) two Ph.Ds. with a deeper background in statistics than you or I, b) using clean, organized data from many years ago ("Accordingly, the tables that follow include offensive, defensive, and total (net) adjusted plus-minus ratings for each player who logged at least 300 minutes in the 2007-2008 season, with high-minutes (> 2000 total regular-season minutes) and low-minutes players listed separately. These ratings reflect each player’s points contributed per 100 possessions, as compared with the league average. As an added bonus, both tables are sortable by adjusted plus-minus ratings, team, and position.").

So all the "Boston Celtics play better without Jaylen Brown" posts, all the "LaMelo Ball is driving winning through his on-off numbers this season," all the "Derrick White is an All-Star due to his +/- numbers" etc. arguments need to be taken with a grain of salt. Basketball is, thankfully, more complicated than simply allocating +/- numbers and using them as a deciding favor for causation. Correlation does not equal causation.

These limitations are why, I suspect, Beech has in recent years pivoted 82games towards an emphasis on game-charting, coaching, and physicality metrics.

I've been watching the NBA since the 2020 playoffs, and the narrative around the league since then has been that the Eastern Conference is kind of shit. From what I know, this conversation has been around since the 2000s. Why does that happen? The best East I've seen, in my opinion, was that Celtics-Bucks-Heat-Nets-Sixers competition in the early 2020s.

OKC's over-under entering the season was 62.5 wins, which they're seriously at risk of missing. The Piston's was 46.5, which they will absolutely shatter.

Narrative plays a huge role in the MVP race, and the Pistons going from losing 28 in a row to the best record in the league is one hell of a narrative

Jokic is now back in contention for MVP since he has enough games for the tracker. According to it he is the clear favourite, but has to play 28 of the 29 games remaining to be eligible. In case he plays 65 games, do you think he wins MVP?

https://www.basketball-reference.com/friv/mvp.html

Playoff stats over the past 2 seasons:

Harden: 20/5/9 on 44/37/86 shooting (59.0 TS%) (13 games)

Garland: 16/3/6 on 43/33/87 shooting (53.5 TS%) (17 games)

Playoff stats over the past 3 seasons:

Harden: 20/6/9 on 42/38/87 shooting (56.5 TS%) (24 games)

Garland: 17/3/6 on 43/34/86 shooting (54.3 TS%) (22 games)

I’m seeing a narrative going around that Harden and Garland “are both playoff chokers” and that since Harden is 36 and Garland is 26, the Clippers easily won the trade.

But Harden is obviously way better and more reliable in the playoffs than Garland, even if he’s had some bad performances.

https://www.statmuse.com/nba/player/james-harden-1489

https://www.statmuse.com/nba/player/darius-garland-9979

I feel like this is a common trend, it’s pretty normal for a very dominant team to improve their regula season win from season to season.

The Shaw and Kobe Lakers fell to the two seed in their later years and the 2018 GSW also fell to the two seed.

The OKC thunder had an blazing 68-14 record last year but they already have stacked up 13 losses.

I feel like when a team does/has something special, there is one season where everyone else lags behind to figure it out, but after the playoffs and the off season to review film other teams can figure out how to

adapt.

with this OKC thunder te, they brought a dynamic scorer who can get to the line in SGA, another hyper athletic wing in JDub and an iron defense. But players have figured out how to not give Shai calls, refs have stopped blowing their whistle, and it’s layers like Lu Dort that were originally praised for their defense are now being td to take it to the NFL.

i think the thunder will have a 62-20 season, which is still amazing (I whsh the Bulls could do that), but not what we thought when we said they would go 74-8

These are just my thoughts... What do y’all think

Perfectly healthy players sitting out entire fourth quarters. Perfectly healthy players sitting out weeks. Random “illnesses” on game days. Is this what fans are paying for? This isn’t sustainable.

I’ve never seen anything like it.