2022-23 NBA Season Thread

[pwaldo]

As an aside, I notice European and African players are really dominating the modern basketball game. We've got Luka, Jokic, Giannis, Embiid, and (likely) soon to be Wembanyama. Americans are really starting to fall behind foreign born talent.

Funny you should say that. I was just about to post a thread about this. I think I made one a few years ago and the consensus was a bit mixed even though I felt that the foreign players would win in a 5 on 5. Now I think they would dominate that and they would still win with a full roster battle IMO.

[WilyWestbrook0]

Oh my gosh! I turned off the Cavs and Bulls game because it wasn't looking too good early. Well, Cavs came back, and Donovan Mitchell had 71 points!!!!!!!!!!!!

Why do I miss it when my teams and players do amazing things, lol. I missed the Vikings NFL comeback game too.

[pwaldo]

Oh my gosh! I turned off the Cavs and Bulls game because it wasn't looking too good early. Well, Cavs came back, and Donovan Mitchell had 71 points!!!!!!!!!!!!

Why do I miss it when my teams and players do amazing things, lol. I missed the Vikings NFL comeback game too.

Has to be the quietest and least talked about 70+ point NBA game of all time

[WilyWestbrook0]

Has to be the quietest and least talked about 70+ point NBA game of all time

It just so happened on the same sports night where an NFL player had cardiac arrest on Monday Night Football. I found out about Damar Hamlin literally just a few minutes after seeing the box score for the Cavs game.

[bakemeister52]

Hey, the Football game and Hamlin, changed the night for sports looking on the laptop for me!

Bake

[pwaldo]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/nb...nt-effort.html

The day after Donovan Mitchell's historic 71-point game, the Cleveland Cavaliers were issued tests for performance-enhancing drugs.

Mitchell became the sixth player in NBA history to reach the 70-point plateau in a single game Monday's 145-134 overtime win over the Chicago Bulls, making him the the player to score the most points since Kobe Bryant's 81-pointer in 2006.

And following the sensational performance, Mitchell took to Twitter to reveal that he had been subjected to a drug test.

'Andddd just like that we are drug tested this morning,' Mitchell wrote on Twitter to his teammate, Robin Lopez, along with three crying-laughing emojis.

Players are typically subject to four random tests for PEDs during the season and two during the offseason, according to the collective bargaining agreement between the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association.

Mitchell's 71 points in Monday's victory also entered the history books the most ever scored by a player standing under 6-foot-5.

[bakemeister52]

Amazing this feat didn't make big news and now to hear that he made history for most scoring for a playing under 6'5"!

Bake

[WilyWestbrook0]

We're now over 40 games into the season, and we have five teams over 60 WP% in the East: Boston (back on a hot streak with 5 consecutive wins after an embarrassing loss to an SGA-less OKC), Brooklyn (Durant got hurt again though), Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Philly. In the West, just two teams over 60 WP%: Denver and Memphis (currently on an 8 game win streak, longest in the league at the moment).

We've seen some really gaudy stats this season: 60-20-10 triple double from Luka, 71 point game from Donovan Mitchell, and I believe a record number of 50 point games from individual players. There are only three teams scoring fewer than 110 PPG on average: the Heat, Clippers, and Rockets. There's even a team giving up more than 120 a game: the Spurs.

What's funny is I remember fans on basketball Internet forums of the early 2000s saying that the league would never be high scoring again like it was in the 1980s and early 1990s because players were much more athletic and physically stronger. Well I guess they never anticipated that rule and strategy changes could happen. Now I'm hearing that players are scoring more these days because they're also allegedly much more athletic now than they were in the 2000s, lol. Honestly, I think it's mostly due to rule and strategy changes. People complained the game was too physical 20-25 years ago, and now it's gone the reverse way: take away the physicality, increase the speed, and now we have tons of 3s and free throws.

[pwaldo]

What's funny is I remember fans on basketball Internet forums of the early 2000s saying that the league would never be high scoring again like it was in the 1980s and early 1990s because players were much more athletic and physically stronger.

I don't know how any fan could have thought that since defense always seemed to be on the way out after those record low scoring games between the Knicks and Heat. It is like the league all agreed that they could never have defensive boring games like that again. Combine that with people being more lazy, no emphasis on defense, and an influx of players from Europe (they play less defense than Americans) and it was a recipe for high scoring to return. I still don't think anybody thought it would get to this high scoring though. Just too many players putting up eye popping numbers that it just becomes numbing. This reminds me of NFL QB numbers now or everyone hitting 50 or more home runs in baseball after only 2 guys could do it in a decade but at least hitting 3s is a shooting skill.

[WilyWestbrook0]

I don't know how any fan could have thought that since defense always seemed to be on the way out after those record low scoring games between the Knicks and Heat. It is like the league all agreed that they could never have defensive boring games like that again. Combine that with people being more lazy, no emphasis on defense, and an influx of players from Europe (they play less defense than Americans) and it was a recipe for high scoring to return. I still don't think anybody thought it would get to this high scoring though. Just too many players putting up eye popping numbers that it just becomes numbing. This reminds me of NFL QB numbers now or everyone hitting 50 or more home runs in baseball after only 2 guys could do it in a decade but at least hitting 3s is a shooting skill.

It seems every generation tends to think the current one is somehow exponentially much more athletic than the prior one, as though humans evolve and change at rapid rates. I've always found it kind of comical. Kind of like how every generation thinks it's much more enlightened than the previous ones, or how the older generation prefers things from its own time, and hates how the "kids today" do things.

There are certain things I like about today's game -- the pacing, spacing, and shooting can be very fun to watch when done expertly -- but I do miss some of the defensive physicality of prior years. I think I've written this here before, or maybe it was on another sports forum, but my favorite eras were the early 1990s and the mid 2010s because I think they had the best balance of both. I saw last night that the Warriors had eight players in double figures; the most ever was ten, and that was last done in 1994 by the Suns and 1993 by the Sonics. So clearly a lot of scoring was done in the early 1990s, but it was still very physical then, too -- just not a whole lot of 3 pt shooting, though you had specialists like Reggie Miller, John Paxson, etc. And in the mid 2010s you had 3 pt shooting like Curry in his prime, but you still had some pretty good defense -- I remember the 2015 Christmas game between the Cavs and Warriors was like 90-80 or something, which you'd never see today.