****The Official 2016-2017 NBA Thread****

One thing I find interesting is how well Hassan Whiteside did in the playoffs in 2015-16. His contributed win shares per 48 minutes (0.275) was elite level. It's up there with guys like LeBron James, Stephen Curry, and Kevin Durant during playoff runs. He had 291 playoff minutes too, so it wasn't a fluke of small sample. He was just a very good player for us in that playoff run.

But maybe just as intriguing is that Tyler Johnson put together a 0.230 win shares contribution per 48 minutes, albeit on only 61 minutes played. If that's not a freak number, that's important...because we don't have Wade or Deng here contributing what he did to that playoff run, what Wade and Deng generally contributed in playoff runs their whole career as both are good playoff players (as opposed to Joe Johnson, for example).

Nobody else still here, including Goran Dragic, had very interesting playoff performances. I do think what Wade could bring to the table in a playoff run is efficiency and clutch performance in a playoff setting.

Not to say Dragic was bad in playoffs. He's OK. Winslow was OK especially defensively. Kelly Olynyk is OK.

But in a playoff setting we'd have to see Hassan Whiteside be dominant as he was before, maybe get a surprise out of Tyler Johnson as he plays just as well as he did before, and then James Johnson and Dion Waiters would have to be as different versus their previous playoff performances as they have been in a Heat uniform in general compared with their past uniforms. That's not actually hard to imagine.

 

Wade will be extremely valuable to someone (maybe even us) as a bench player in 6 minute spurts and crunch time minutes

I have no doubt he can summon what he has left in shorter bursts

 

Is he going to be ok with that, though?

 

If hes not he can always stick with the bulls.... hes not a starter on our team, our offense has changed, with him starting the offense goes through him again with a lot of ballstopping and isos

 

Sauces: John Wall didn't sign his supermax so he could team up with AD and Boogie in New Orleans.

 

He got paid by the Bulls. He got to play in his home town. Coming back to Miami would appeal to him I'm sure.

 

This is what I'm talking about, though. There are a lot of "ifs" here, and Wade's willingness to take on a bit role would be one of them.

Agreed. But would taking on a limited role appeal to him?

 

Bam Adebayo another good performance today. The highlights:

 

Thru 3 summer league games...

Troy Williams (23 yrs old, undrafted) is averaging 26 ppg. I knew he was going to be good because of his freakish athleticism and defense, but his handles and 3-point shot have really improved. He was out there destroying Josh Jackson (#4 pick) yesterday, lmao. Morey better hurry up and lock this guy up with a cheap contract. He is the main reason why Sam Dekker was easy to send to the Clips.

Isaiah Taylor (23 years old, undrafted) is leading the summer league in assists with 24. The crazy thing is he only has 3 turnovers. I didn't see this coming from him. We all knew he was a big time scorer from our D-league team last year, but his playmaking and decisions have been very impressive.

The Rockets have 3 roster spots open. 2 of them better go to these guys. Another outstanding job by the scouting department and player development. Who needs a first round pick???

 

This is one of my favorite guys for the draft at Miami's pick, Kyle Kuzma. He destroyed the Celtics, 31 points and 9 rebounds. Did a lot of work offensively and defensively against Tatum.

 

If you all don't keep this guy, I will gladly take him off your hands if I'm the Heat. That kid can effing play.

 

Lol...yeah, he's pretty good. Morey was smart enough to lock him up on a 3 yr contract last season. Isaiah earned it with his great play in the D-league. I get a good laugh when people say we need a backup PG....they must have never seen this kid.

I just hope we can lock up Troy Williams. He'd be the perfect fit when Ariza's contract is up after next season.

 

If I'm the Heat then I'm targeting the following PGs to bring in and develop:

Pierre Jackson, Detroit
Isaiah Taylor, Houston
Kendall Marshall, Clippers

Get me one of them.

 

It was a good performance, what was interesting is how much worse the Heat were with him on the bench.

 

I need the Knicks to hurry the hell up and get this Melo trade done. Our team is already holding team workouts and practices in Vegas. The early summer team practices organized by Harden really helped us with a great start last season. We need our 3rd piece there now.

 

Decided to check out the advanced stats with him. He's relatively low usage for a guy who plays a fair amount of point guard (78th in NBA among all guards), so totals aren't necessarily indicative.

Among our 6 guards who have played legit minutes (TJ, Dragic, Waiters, Rich, McGruder, Ellington) Tyler Johnson is...

2nd FG%
1st REB%
2nd FTR
3rd TS%
3rd AST%
2nd PER
2nd TOV%
1st STL%
2nd BLK%
2nd OWS
1st DWS
2nd Total WS

3rd OBPM
2nd DBPM
2nd BPM

He's our 4th best 3pt shooting guard...at 37%, which is a good thing haha.

He's just a really good two-way player. He fits with pretty much any lineup because he can play on/off ball. He's got a good motor, competes on defense, and is always in the right place making good decisions. It's hard to measure that, but I do think his impact across the board is real. A glue guy type. Plus he's 25 and has gotten better every year.

Obviously his contract isn't *good, but I don't think it's BAD either, especially given where he came from and what he's done within the HEAT culture.

 

He ended up in a great situation too, imo. Will fit like a glove in Walton's system.

I'm super impressed with this rookie class so far in Summer League. These kids are really good, especially given how many came out so young. I don't know how many SUPERstars will come out of this class, but damn there are a lot of guys who look like they'll be really good NBA players. Fun stuff.

 

Caleb Swanigan is looking nice at #26 too. great story as well, hard not to root for the guy

 

For the poker players in this thread...just busted the main late in day 2.

Quite the gut punch.

In other news, my NY Knicks may very well be the worst franchise in major sports at the moment.

I'm adopting the Cavs and anyone who plays vs the Warriors


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That blows. What were you holding when you went out?

The Knicks under Phil Jackson reminded me of the Dolphins under Bill Parcells. Excellent coaches that just didn't have it as executives.

 

Ack, have you played the Main before? Always a painful exit.

I played the Monster Stack in late June. Siting pretty at 92K in level eight and the big stack at my table by a country mile, riding the rail at level nine.

It can be a brutal game.


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Sloppy game for Bam tonight. His stat line ended up being ok, but too many turnovers, and just didn't look like he did in most of the other games.

 

He looked tired.

If you think about it, this is the 7th game he's played in 11 days and he's played 30 minutes in every one of them.

Even if he became a starter, he wouldn't play that kind of schedule during the regular season. More like 5 games over the same 11 day span.

And that's taking aside that he's 19 years old, and in college the pace was more like 3 or 4 games over that same span.

Heat are testing him out a little bit to see what he can take physically and tonight he looked like he hit a bit of a wall. Still played fairly well.

 

Absolutely. He's barely getting rest, and he's going hard the entire time he's on the court. I'm actually surprised it took this long to catch up to him. Ah, to be 19 (and a physical freak).

 

I know. He's such a freak. That tape of him TWO YEARS AGO blew my mind. Frickin 17-18 years old. He looks exactly like he does now, about to turn 20.

 

1st time @ the Main. Great experience, however you must run good at some point. I had a lot of bad spots and bad rivers day 1...day 2?? I was card dead and started trying to make moves late in the day with marginal hands and it caught up to me. On day 1 I was a river away from having about 125K before dinner.....never got above 80K the rest of the tournament. Asian kid was super aggressive so in the midst of being card dead I decided to let him commit chips on 3 streets then find a good bluff card to shove on the river. He actually had a hand when I did this and busto.

Props to Steve Kerr for sniffing out the mess the Knicks were/are and not letting "the zen master" talk him into joining the shnit show. Hornacek may not be a bad coach, but I saw first hand the total lack of respect the players have for him, or at least the schemes he was drawing up.

Knicks have a long way to go, no big FA want to go there so they are going to have to keep hitting in the draft and hope. They aren't likely to get anything for Me7o so just buy him out and move on.

 

It's a hell of an experience anyway, glad you got to have it. I gutted through three days in 2010. Felt like I had been used as a punching bag by the time I was out on day three.


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That was the first game I got to see. It was a bit disappointing. I wasn't too bothered by the TOs and poor shooting. I wrote that off to it being a bad game. But it seemed to me that he didn't do a good job of rotating on defense. Is that the norm or was that just fatigue related? He does seem to have active hands and his one on one defense was solid. I do expect him to get called for a few moving screens once the real games begin as they tend to call those a bit tighter.

 

I thought he looked tired.

 

I think it could have very well been fatigue. Like CK said, he's been going hard. Usually teams don't give young players the kind of minutes he's been playing in the summer league. I don't think Winslow played nearly this much in either year he participated. And the minutes he's playing are tough minutes, banging inside and running the floor. I haven't felt like his defensive rotations have been an issue in previous games.

I think there are some areas in which he needs to improve. I think his basketball IQ needs some work, and as hard as he works there are some lazy moments (not closing out on 3 point shooters, losing sight of his man after a shot, etc.). Also, his jumper hasn't really been falling. I'm not worried about those things, though, really. Because those are areas the Heat are going to get him better at based off of their history. The things that have been impressive for me aside from his motor are his face up game, and his ability to guard multiple positions one-on-one. His face up game is a little raw, but the tools are there clearly, which I don't think most people thought going into the draft. He's also gotten to the line A LOT, and has shot the ball well from there. It's hard to tell how much of it is a credit to him, and how much is just playing in a somewhat sloppy summer league where players are allotted 10 personal fouls, but it's probably somewhere in the middle.

 

I want to emphasize this because Bam has been asked to bring the ball all the way down the court whenever the situation allows. I think pretty much every time he steals the ball or gets a defensive rebound. And when he does it, he's sprinting at a hot pace with the ball in his hand in order to outrun and press whichever big is supposed to be running the floor with him, collapse the defense around the rim.

It's actually been a pretty scary phenomenon to watch for the defense because that's a big dude going explosively fast straight for the rim. It's similar to my eyes as when you see LeBron doing the same. He's just so big and fast and has a good handle, so when he pushes it like that and just super-aggressively goes straight to the rim, it very often ends with a foul. That's one reason Bam has been to the stripe so many times this summer league (67 free throw attempts in 7 games).

Couper Moorehead has talked about the phenomenon some. I agree with him that the next step in his evolution is figuring out more smoothly what to do when the paint gets shut down in those scenarios when he's pushing the ball that way. But there are times he does that and then finds an outlet for the assist.

As for what's falling and not falling, I think they're letting Bam sort of throw everything up against the wall right now (except three point attempts) to see what's going to work and not work for him, and then they'll kind of whittle down his game into the kinds of shots and situations that work for him. Then they'll have him keep working on everything in practice and when they see signs in practice that he's ready to translate to the game, they'll add pieces to his game.

 

I want to emphasize that Bam Adebayo is shooting 79% on his free throws.

Considering he came out of college everyone questioning his mid-range shooting capabilities in no small part because his Kentucky free throw shooting percentage ended up being only 65%, I think that's a pretty significant development.

He shot 76% in Orlando and is shooting 84% in Las Vegas.

Adebayo is averaging 20 points & 10 rebounds per 36 minutes in Summer Leagues.

Okaro White is averaging 19 points & 9 rebounds per 36 minutes.

EDIT: Hand Adebayo this much. He may have looked a little tired, and he didn't have his best overall game, but he did more in this game in terms of dishing the ball off under the basket to an open player than he had in any of the other games. If that's something he can add to his game early on, that's a great sign.

 

Bam didn't play today as tournament play started, but Miami gets the win anyway on a pretty exciting ending, so they move on. Hopefully Bam gets to play tomorrow after some much needed rest.

 

Disagreed. Phils moves, especially his drafts, were fine aside from Noah. Didnt love the Lopez contract or the trade of Chandler to take on Calderon but he never traded picks only acquired them (thats a new phenomenom for us knicks fans) and he straight up won the dump of Jr Spliff and Shumpert for Lance Thomas and a 2nd round pick since those guys couldnt play at all for him and Thomas is a good defender

 

I think his drafts have been fine. Ntilikina vs. Denis Smith Jr. will be an interesting one to watch for the next few years. I liked Ntlilikina quite a bit, but Smith has real potential and looks pretty good in the summer league.

 

This guy was not feeling Peyton's joke at all LOLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL

 

It's funny because it's true..

 

Smith has real potential as a lesser version of Stevie Turnover aka Steve Francis.

 

We'll see. I think he has the chance to be a better version. Baron Davis is another name that comes to mind.

 

Great, two players who never won anything and had as many turnovers as made field goals each game. Glad he's not a knick