What the hell is up with OKC...

[KendrickPerkins]

Sometimes their offense reminds me of when you go play a game of pick-up ball, and two of the guys on your team are buddies, and somehow they always end up passing the ball to one another.

Maybe that's because Ibaka is terrible with the ball in his hands, or Waiters is a black hole, or Adams can't create offense to save his life....

Of course the balls gonna be in your best two players hands you ****ing idiot. Not everyone is Golden State with play-making shot-makers at every position

[Monta Ellis MVP]

dumbest post i've ever read. all you're doing is naming the type of offense the championsihp team ran that year.

[bdreason]

We're pretending that the Bulls are a bad team now?

It's not that they lost the game, it's the way they're performing down the stretch. If you're getting good shots, and they don't go down, you can live with that. Thunder are just relying on talent, and hoping that either Durant or Westbrook will make their contested shots.

[Monta Ellis MVP]

Maybe that's because Ibaka is terrible with the ball in his hands, or Waiters is a black hole, or Adams can't create offense to save his life....

Of course the balls gonna be in your best two players hands you ****ing idiot. Not everyone is Golden State with play-making shot-makers at every position

They need to make it work or deal Durant or Westbrook for someone who can. No excuses.

[GIF REACTION]

dumbest post i've ever read. all you're doing is naming the type of offense the championsihp team ran that year.

Explain your logic here

I can post a dozen articles with quotes from players/coaches/analysts showing what I just said

I'm waiting

[KendrickPerkins]

They need to make it work or deal Durant or Westbrook for someone who can. No excuses.

Of course there aren't any excuses

If they don't win it all then **** em

Who's saying otherwise? Did you people forget it's November? God damn

[kamil]

Getting exposed after playin 3 real teams Durant needs to getout of that shithole.......

Is he good? Can the Cavs get him?

[Spurs m8]

What's happening is Durant is counting the days until he's playing for DC.

Nah, KD said if he leaves he's chasing success...something the Wizards can't provide tbh

[Monta Ellis MVP]

I'm new here but is GIF REACTION and ArbitraryWater the same poster? They are both LeBron fans and never have a real take of their own on a subject, they just copy/paste stuff from other people.

[J Shuttlesworth]

They're always having trouble closing the game. Attempting hero shots late in the game isn't working out for them.

[GIF REACTION]

For him, too. Which seems strange. Because he, however inadvertently, started this. His absence during the 2012 playoffs forced Spoelstra to experiment, inserting 6-foot-8 wing Shane Battier as a stretch “power” forward, and then leaving him there when Bosh returned. Bosh excelled at center. Small-ball prevailed. [COLOR="Red"]Copycats bred all over the NBA.[/COLOR]

“Now it’s like, we got to stay ahead of the curve,” Bosh said. “We got to kind of perfect the total. You’ve got to give it to Golden State. They can go small, they can go big, they can go medium. They can go everything. That’s kind of the next evolution, to be able to do it all. And to have big guys who can move and guard.”

While the Association long ago earned its reputation as a copycat league...

Early offense, floor-spacing, weak-side action and ball reversal -- all the hallmarks of the modern offensive juggernaut in the NBA. As if you needed any more evidence that this is a copycat league, look at the other contending team that made controversial coaching changes this summer and tell me what's different.

"Better spacing overall, more freedom to operate, more outside shots for now," the Bulls' Pau Gasol said after the game. ... As long as we don't forget the defensive end, we should be fine."

Allen said he wants Memphis to have the same effect on the league after this season the same way Golden State has influence teams.

“We’re going to end up winning the ring and make the league turn right back around,” he said. “It’s a copycat league. Everybody is linking onto going small. The way we play, we have counters to even up with that.”

Those franchises were already the most historically successful, and as Thorn said, “this has always been a copycat league.”

He added that after Golden State won the championship in June, led by Stephen Curry’s single-season record barrage of 3-pointers and with a high-voltage pace that had N.B.A. advocates in full-throated cheer, we should expect the game to continue trending in the direction that credentialed old-school folks like Phil Jackson and Gregg Popovich generally loathe.

But to cling stubbornly to the past is to fade away with it. In an effort to eradicate the image of them as so 1990s, the Knicks say they are planning to play a faster version of Jackson’s beloved triangle offense this season.

Popovich years ago recalibrated his once-plodding offense to feature the pace-pushing skills of Tony Parker. In winning the 2014 finals over Miami, the Spurs launched more 3-pointers (averaging 23.6 per game) than any title-winning team in history — until Curry and the Warriors fired them up at a clip of 31 a game in disposing of James and his Cleveland Cavaliers last June.

“We all know if you don’t shoot the 3, you’re probably not going to win,” Popovich said last spring. “Everybody in the league shoots the 3-point shot well and knows the importance. I still hate it.”

Many teams will try to copy the Warriors’ style. That’s what happens: One team innovates, others try to duplicate. But it will be a tall order, considering that the league has not seen a talent for ballhandling and shooting like Curry’s.

So, the copycats will have a hard time matching the model. But the innovators — see Popovich, Gregg, S.A. Spurs — spent the summer working on the Warriors’ antidote. San Antonio signed forwards LaMarcus Aldridge and David West to see if their new bigs can slow the Warriors’ smalls.

We’ll see which style prevails over the long haul. But whichever way it unfolds, one can’t help but appreciate the Warriors’ approach. The flow and spark coming from Golden State’s championship run in 2014-15 provided a stylistic masterpiece.

Hoiberg doesn't have the NBA rings that lend gravity to, and demand respect for, the coaching acumen of another 3-point specialist, Golden State's Steve Kerr. But in this copycat league, maybe it's another trend that Chicago wants to adopt on their sideline: the two Finals teams are chasing a championship with rookie head coaches, Kerr and Cleveland's David Blatt.

SI.com: There are a ton of teams starting to fully embrace this small ball strategy. Did you ever anticipate this would become so widespread, where teams like the Indiana Pacers essentially just banished Roy Hibbert because they didn’t want to play with traditional big guys anymore?


D’Antoni: Well, the league has always been a copycat league. I’m sure somebody is going to come up with something else and it will then go some place else. It’s just the game has changed. The rules have changed and the ability of players to be able to shoot threes and space the floor and be a power forward and be able to space all the way out to the three-point line—even centers can go out and shoot threes—it’s changed and people have to follow that. You give it enough time and I just think that it was kind of going that way anyway. And then what Golden State did, I just think it put everybody on notice and in order to beat them, you’re going to have to play that way. I think it’s a great thing. Obviously, I like that type of basketball. I like watching it. I think it’s exciting and I think fans love it. You’re trying to win and entertain and I think the Golden State Warriors accomplished both.

SI.com: I read about the presentation you gave during the Las Vegas Summer League and, essentially, you said to build a team’s offensive attack around a post player playing with his back to the basket is wasting an opportunity offensively. Why do you think that?

D’Antoni: If you look at the stats around the league, a post-up is not a very good shot. [Laughs] It just isn’t. Now again, in our business and leagues, a lot of times you say something and people take that as 100%: You’re always going to have post-ups and you’re always going to have 15-foot shots. They have not become the best shots. The best shots are layups and foul shots and three-point shots. So you try to gear your offense to where you can exploit those three things. And then, other teams are smart: They run you off the three so you have to shoot a 15-footer, or you can get a mismatch inside where you can post-up, and when you get a mismatch, you have to exploit that. But to go down and put your best offensive player on the block against their best defensive player, it’s just not a great option anymore. It just isn’t.

They say the NBA is a copycat league. And after the San Antonio Spurs won the 2014 Finals with radical resting strategies, it seems the league is frantically trying to Xerox the Spurs' blueprint.

To back it up a bit, the 2013-14 Spurs made history by becoming the first team to finish the season without a player averaging more than 30 minutes per game. Not one on the roster. Granted, if the Spurs weren't any good, that feat alone might not have created even a ripple.

But the Spurs were not just good, they won a championship over the Miami Heat in breathtaking fashion while employing coach Gregg Popovich's aggressive rest strategies.


And so the Xeroxing began. Case in point: Look at how the minutes leaderboard has transformed. Last season, 33 players averaged more than 35 minutes per game -- or about one per team. This season after the Spurs won it all? That total is 17, sliced nearly in half. How about the number of players who play more than 30 minutes per game? A total of 84 players this season, down from 99 last season and 120 as recently as 2008-09.

What's happening here? After seeing the above numbers, one longtime general manager responded bluntly:

"The Spurs Effect."

..

[Lakers Legend#32]

The Curse of the Sonics

[knicksman]

durant quits after seeing hes again 2nd in the league coz that who he is. A quitter

[Bosnian Sajo]

Even though I am a Pacers fan I am also a fan of OKC. Durant's regression has been very tough to watch. He has had the perfect opportunity in OKC with another top 5 player and a good supporting cast but he has not had the fortitude to take it to the next level. Big time bummer.

Yo enough with these posts man, made the same post yesterday except you were also a fan of the Cavs in that post.



Get outtttttttt.

[Relinquish]

Nah, KD said if he leaves he's chasing success...something the Wizards can't provide tbh

Of course they can.

Someone's still a bit salty about the other night.

Enjoy Aldridge