I’VE MENTIONED this before, but it bears repeating for the newer members of the readership of this blog. The genesis of In Play Lose came from two primary sources. The first was How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart, David Foster Wallace’s review of the Austin’s autobiography, in which he espouses frustration at being unable to glean any sort of insight into what made Austin such a successful tennis player. The second is a piece written for Grantland by Bill Simmons from 2012 in which he chronicles 35 years of incompetence by the Golden State Warriors. (And for a daily dose of this, and a reminder of just how comically awful the Warriors were, I highly recommend all Lose disciples follow the excellent This Day in Suck twitter account.) Simmons wrote the piece in the aftermath of one of the rock bottom, lowest points in the franchise’s history – a number retirement ceremony for Chris Mullin in 2012, during which the fans started mercilessly booing new Warriors owner Joe “Light Years” Lacob.
The reason this ceremony had become the boiling point for the fans was a recently completed trade with the Milwaukee Bucks. The Dubs had acquired Andrew Bogut, who was injured and out for the season. In exchange, the Dubs had traded away Monta Ellis, their best player and pretty much the only player worth watching in yet another lost season. The trade was a signal that a full-on tank job was imminent, with the Warriors intent upon sinking to the bottom of the standings in order to save themselves from yielding a Top-7 protected draft pick, a pick they’d stupidly promised to the Utah Jazz as part of another terrible trade for Marcus Williams. (“Who is he?” you ask. Exactly.) I hated that Ellis trade at the time as well, and had I been at Oracle Arena that night, I would’ve booed Buzz Light Years, too. Sure, the new Warriors ownership had been dealt a pretty terrible hand by previous owner Chris Cohan, an owner who made Vivek and Robert Sarver look comparatively competent, but this was just more of the same. More bad moves, more bad decisions, with more losses to follow and more frustration for the fans.
But there was also a pseudo-legitimate basketballing reason for making this deal. The Warriors moved Ellis, in part, because they wanted to free up more minutes for a rookie on the roster that they liked quite a bit, a 6’7” shooting guard from Washington State named Klay Thompson. Thompson took over Ellis’ spot in the starting lineup after Ellis was moved, and has held the spot ever since.
Ellis has gone on to a decent, if erratic, career since that trade, mostly with the Dallas Mavericks and now with the Indiana Pacers. Defense, however, has never been his forte. The Pacers were in town Monday night to play the Dubs at Oracle Arena, and Ellis attempted to guard Klay Thompson, the guy he was moved to make room for back in 2012. Suffice to say, it didn’t go so well for the Pacers, as Thompson put on one of the most ridiculous performances in NBA history. That trade has come full circle, as Ellis got a birdseye view of Klay filling up the cylinder.
That trade, and the reasons for it, have come to look pretty smart in the rearview mirror. Thompson has developed into the ultimate catch-and-shoot guy, and quite possibly the greatest catch-and-shoot guy the league has ever seen with his mix of off-ball movement, great footwork, impeccable technique and a lightning-quick release. Thompson scored 60 points in only 29 minutes last night, while only taking 33 shots from the floor and only touching the ball 52 times. He had the ball in his hands for a total of 88.4 seconds and only took 11 dribbles on his 21 made field goals. No one in the NBA is as combustible as Klay, the guy who scored 37 points in a quarter and single-handedly shot the Warriors back into the playoffs last year in Game 6 against Oklahoma City.
The ‘hot hand’ notion has been debated by stat gurus for a while now, but I believe it exists – in part because the ‘hot hand’ is a product of great team play, as a team finds a matchup that is working and then goes about continuing to exploit it. The Pacers chose to have Ellis chase Klay around and not bother to switch, which was an incredibly dumb idea, and Klay promptly ran Ellis off one screen after another and found himself open for threes, for mid-rangers, and also for a whole bunch of layups, while the other Dubs made a point of constantly getting Klay the ball and fanning the flames. The Warriors assisted on 20 of Klay’s 21 field goals, and neither Steph Curry nor Draymond Green really had much interest in shooting after a while, the both of them content to continually feed the ball to Klay, who put on one of the more amazing offensive displays I’ve ever seen.
Oh, and by the way, Klay is arguably the fourth-best player on this team, with the top three being the guys combining to do this:
The Warriors are just ridiculous. It’s not a stretch of suggest that this is the greatest offense in the history of the NBA. In Monday night’s merciless 142:106 beatdown of the Indiana Pacers, the Warriors notched 45 assists – a total few teams ever reach, but it’s the second time they’ve reached that number of assists in the last two weeks. They had 35 assists by the end of the third quarter and had only committed four turnovers. They also decided to play some defense just for the fun of it, limiting the Pacers to a small number of threes while blocking 24% of the Pacers’ twos in the first half as they ran out to a 30-point halftime lead. The first three quarters of this game were a master class.
And it seems hard to believe, when you’re talking about a team whose offense is off the charts – they are presently scoring 2.7 points per 100 possessions more than any team in NBA history – but the Warriors still haven’t reached their full potential. The endgame sets are still something of a mess, in part because they’ve had so few scenarios in which to practice them. The offense went stagnant at the end of their most recent loss, a 132:127 2OT defeat to the Houston Rockets, whose win was much deserved. But it should be noted that the Warriors’ three worst shooting performances of the season coincided with their three defeats, suggesting that the only real chance anyone has to beat them is to hope that they miss. And losing just seems to piss them off, which doesn’t bode well for the next opponent. Steph goes 0-for-10 from three in a loss to Lakers, then comes back the next game and hits 13 threes against New Orleans, breaking the NBA record. It’s absolutely preposterous what they are doing. They scored 138 on Saturday against the Suns and seemed almost bored while doing it.
And speaking of being bored …
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| Earth to J.R., come in J.R. |
The Cleveland Cavaliers have also been spectacular to watch so far this season as well, using their open post offensive sets consisting of LeBron and four other shooters spacing the floor – but unlike the Warriors, who’ve been attempting to integrate Durant and a bunch of new faces into the mix, continuity and familiarity have been the order of the day in Cleveland. Without a whole lot to work on, and with no legitimate challengers in the East, the Cavs have quickly gotten bored. Really bored, as symbolized by J.R. Smith meandering off the court in the middle of the play during last week’s 20-point hammering of the Cavs by the Milwaukee Bucks, the first in a 3-game losing streak which saw them then get walloped by the Clippers at home and then get outplayed by the Bulls. Lack of focus and intensity was on display in all three games, as the Cavs missed assignments and threw the ball all over the gym. It’s almost like they had to go out and invent a 3-game losing streak for themselves in order to invent some urgency.
The Cavs righted the ship on Monday night in Toronto, a 116:112 win over the Raptors in which LeBron scored 35 and had his best game of the season – a fact which flew under the radar in the light of Klay going for 60. Monday’s NBA slate was remarkable, with buzzer beaters and OT games and 2OT games, with LeBron going for 35 and Lou Williams going for 38 points on only 55 touches, with Marc Gasol putting up a triple-double and Russell Westbrook putting up a triple-double for the sixth straight game – and pretty much all of that got shoved aside because Klay scored 60 points in 29 minutes.
NBA punditry is filled with ex-players from the 1990s who insist that the game was better back when they were still playing – which is natural, I suppose, but which is also completely, utterly wrong. The NBA game is better than it’s ever been. The SSOL Phoenix Suns were considered radical in their day for their frenzied pace of play; so far this season, half of the teams in the league are playing that fast or faster. But along with that pace has also come complexity on both ends of the floor. Not only is the game bigger, faster, and more agile, but it’s also more cerebral and geometric. Not only do you have to move fast and react fast, but you also have to think fast.
And somewhat paradoxically, you need to be able to think fast so that you don’t have to think fast. Steve Kerr has said that early in the season, he had to actually call plays for the Warriors while they were going about getting acclimated, in contrast to the free-flowing, organic sort of basketball they’ve played for the past couple of seasons. The game is less rigid and structured, so the complex pattern recognition needs to become instinctive and almost second nature. And whatever you do out there on the floor, do it fast!
OK, maybe not you, Dwight Howard. Slow it down there, big fella.
The league is blessed right now with extraordinary young talents, huge guys whose range is no longer limited to in and around the basket, guys like Towns and Davis and Porzingis who feel comfortable playing all over the floor and can also stroke it from deep. But there is one player whom I am absolutely loving right now who truly has the potential to be transcendent with his size, agility, and versatility – and, as we saw last week against the Cavs, also with his competitiveness. I don’t remember the last time I saw a guy look at a matchup with LeBron, decide he didn’t give a goddamn who LeBron is and just take it right at him quite like I saw from Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokuonmpo, aka Greek Freak. (At some point, I’ll figure out how to spell his surname right, so for now we’ll just use his first name.) Giannis torched LeBron and whomever else tried to guard him, scoring 34 points as the Bucks trampled Cleveland. He is a 6’11” point guard, crazy long and lean and limber. He is probably the single-most terrifying transition player in the NBA.
He still doesn’t have much of an outside shot, and for the sake of the rest of the league, they’d better hope he doesn’t develop one, because if he does he’ll wind up making Kevin Durant look comparatively guardable. At 22 years of age, having only played the game since 2007, Giannis is still only scratching the surface of his potential. The Bucks are still a work in progress, currently on the fringe of being a playoff team, but Giannis with the ball in his hands is must-see viewing.
Giannis was the 15th pick in the 2013 NBA draft, and I can say without any hesitation that I would have him on my team sooner than any of the 14 guys picked ahead of him. There are some good players there, to be sure: I love me some Steven Adams (#12), of course, and I love me some C.J. McCollum (#10). But otherwise? Well …
The top pick in the 2013 draft was Anthony Bennett, who is presently playing for the Nets: the Long Island Nets of the D-League, that is, having bombed out and ate himself out of the NBA. The second pick, Victor Oladipo, was meh in Orlando and is slightly less meh running alongside Russell Westbrook in OKC. #3 pick Otto Porter has been one of the few bright spots in the appalling mess that is the Buzzards early this season, so that one isn’t all that terrible. But the rest of this crew of guys picked before Giannis are players who are, at best, role players and who are, at worst, useless: Cody Zeller, Alex Len, Nerlens Noel, Ben McLemore, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Trey Burke, Michael Carter-Williams, Kelly Olynyk, and Shabazz Muhammad.
Hindsight is always 20/20, of course, and you really never know just what you’re going to get when you draft a player – maybe they get injured or whatnot – so you can’t say for sure that, had any of the 14 teams picking before the Bucks in 2013 drafted Giannis that he would have become the play that he is today (and threatening to become in the future). But at the same time, it shouldn’t be a surprise that some of the usual bottom-dwellers in the NBA were passing up Giannis and wound up looking like dunces: Orlando, Phoenix, New Orleans, Sacramento, Minnesota and also Philadelphia, who were just entering the Sam Hinkie reign of error and making a splash by drafting Michael Carter-Williams, a point guard who can’t shoot, and also trading with the Pelicans to acquire Noel, who was hurt and missed the whole season. All of the franchises that I just mentioned are some degree of perpetually terrible, and this draft is an example of why: they draft poorly, and then develop what they draft even worse.
Like I mentioned earlier, the Dubs scored 138 on Phoenix last Saturday without having to work particularly hard to do it. The Phoenix Suns are a mess. The Suns have three recent Top 10 draft picks on their team who are all about 7’0” tall and none of whom seem to have any idea how to play NBA basketball, and the Suns would trot one or sometimes two of those guys out on the court and none of them looked like they even knew where they were supposed to be. Oh, they are “raw” and they are “green” or what have you, but the Suns don't need “raw” and “green.” They need guys that can actually play.
That is three really bad misses in the draft by a team who seems to whiff all the time. If you’re perpetually in the lottery, year after year, either you have no eye for talent whatsoever or your coaching staff sucks. Part of why the Kings are in such dire shape is that they’ve whiffed so badly in the draft time and again. This list verges on criminal negligence. Thomas Robinson? Quincy Doubey? McLemore? Sauce Castillo? Huh?
Giannis was the 15th pick in the NBA draft, and think about some of the game’s other great performers at the moment and where they were selected. Klay Thompson was the 11th pick in 2011, drafted after the likes of Jan Veselý and Jimmer Ferdette. Also going in that 2011 draft were Kawhi Leonard at #22, Jimmy Butler at #30, and Isaiah Thomas at #60. Draymond Green was a 2nd round pick, as was Paul Millsap. You can find great players in a lot of places. There are guys who can fit a need, guys who you can develop, guys who can fit your system and excel. The principle tenet of Hinkieism was that the best chance to be successful is to have a superstar player, and the best way to acquire a superstar player is through the draft. But there is an intellectual dishonesty and laziness to that, in that you can be terrible and maybe a magic NBA lottery ping pong ball will bounce your way, but it doesn’t mean that you know anything about how to use that pick in the right way, it doesn’t say anything about your ability to develop that player, and it says nothing about your ability to put in place a functioning set of complimentary pieces around that player. Of course picking Anthony Davis was a no-brainer for the Pelicans, but what is he now surrounded with? You don’t just draft a guy and, suddenly, everything is copacetic. It’s not that simple.
This is why I’m not one of these people who obsesses about the draft. It’s an exciting moment, of course, a day sort of like Christmas in all American sports with the promise of potential wrapped up nicely in a package dressed in a bow tie and a nice suit, but the draft is an activity in which far too many of the usual actors go about making the usual mistakes. If you’re bad enough to be picking in the lottery in the first place, it’s likely that the guy(s) who drove you into the ditch aren’t likely to be the guy(s) capable of hoisting you out of it. And sure, everyone whiffs on a pick from time to time, or takes a flyer on a guy who doesn’t pan out, but making the same mistakes, again and again, is an unforgivable sin.
The Warriors have committed many unforgivable sins over the years when it comes to player acquisition, but I came to forgive Light Years Lacob and the Warriors for trading Monta Ellis long ago. Yeah, in hindsight, that was a pretty good deal for the Warriors. But under no circumstances could I have ever foreseen the heights to which this franchise has gone ever since that point. Part of what makes the Warriors so enticing, so engaging, is that their success seemingly came out of nowhere. Cleveland’s success is a bit more understandable, seeing as how landed LeBron and they managed to win the draft lottery four times, but even they whiffed pretty badly – they drafted Anthony Bennett, after all. The Warriors have cobbled it together from a host of unlikely sources – free agents, trades, drafts, 2nd round picks – with some shrewd moves, some good luck, and some great timing (and maybe just a little bit of sneaky stuff when it came to Andre Iguodola, although George Karl is probably just frothing a bit in that article, as he is wont to do). The Warriors ascent to the summit seems somewhat magical, in part because it makes no sense. But wherever it all came from, it’s magical to watch, and when guys are doing stuff like Klay was doing the other night, you just don’t ever want it to see it end.
When do we get to play the Pacers again? Can we play them again? Please? Pretty please?
