NBA WHO SAYS NO Rankings - Part 4 of 5

Before we get started, let me just remind you that ESPN and its incessant NFL draft coverage can go piss up a rope and die of AIDS.  And also OMYGOD as I type this, the NFL schedule is being released.  I know everyone is on pins and needles like I am: is my team going to play six divisional games, four games against the NFC division we last played in 2011, four games against the AFC division we last played in 2012, and finally two additional games against the two teams in the other two AFC divisions that finished in the same place in the division that we did last year?  There's really no way to tell--I should probably tune into ESPN to watch this big reveal.  God, fuck the NFL.  Moving on.

GROUP A: “Completely and Utterly Untouchable”

5. Russell Westbrook
4. James Harden
3. Stephen Curry

For the first time in the history of my Sports Guy column, 

You're going to provide analysis that isn't self-important, isn't full of idiotic pop culture references, and most of all isn't terrible?

we’re dusting off the old Dr. Jack Breakdown gimmick and turning it into a threesome. 

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

I’m gonna throw my Eyes Wide Shut mask on, take a half-Viagra, throw down two glasses of wine and really get into this. 

Hey, that's kind of a funny "pop" (term used loosely here) culture reference with the Eyes Wide Shut thing.  It's also very self-important and I'm sure it will be terrible, but one out of three isn't bad.

Please, I implore you, for your own safety, don’t try this at home. I’m a professional. 

Go fuck an elephant.

Anyway …

SALARIES: Harden (signed through 2017-18) and Westbrook (signed through 2016-17) are max guys earning $16 million to $17 million per season … a paltry number in two summers when the NBA salary cap starts taking steroids and HGH, 

LIKE KOBE AMIRITE????????????????

but still. Meanwhile, Golden State has Curry locked down for $10.63 million (this season), $11.37 million (2015-16), and $12.1 million (2016-17). He won’t make as much money over those three years as Marcin Gortat. Anytime someone can make $11 million per year and you feel bad for them, you know they’re a bargain. ADVANTAGE: CURRY.

Curry signed that deal just before the start of the 2012-2013 season.  He had been injured for much of the lockout-shortened 2011-2012 season, playing in just 26 games and averaging a paltry 14 and 5.  Looks like one of those "it makes sense for both sides" contracts, really, since Curry would have been wise to take some guaranteed money, and the Warriors were paying him, at the very worst, to be a three point specialist.  Whelp, guess it worked out for the Warriors.  As a Nuggets fan I hate them, but I do love parity and fresh blood in the winner's circle so I wouldn't mind seeing them win a title this year.  JUST this year.  After that, fuck them.  Every important player on that team besides Curry and Bogut is a flaming cuntrag.  Also, if they pull it off, it'll be just the fifth title since 1991 (exceptions: that goofy 2004 Pistons team, the 2006 Heat team that had Shaq and Wade and every call in the Finals, THE FAWKIN' 2008 UBUNTUS, and the magical LeBron-defeating 2011 Mavericks) won by a team that didn't have Jordan, Olajuwon, Kobe, LeBron or Duncan.  And if Jordan hadn't gone to play baseball (IT WAS A SECRET GAMBLING SUSPENSION WHO SAYS NO????) we might be able to take Olajuwon off that list.  The more you know.

BEST GIMMICK: 

Oh yeah, this is crucial.  So glad we made it here after hitting all the important categories like "Salaries" and "nothing else."  BUT WHICH ONE OF THEM WOULD YOU WANT TO WATCH CASTAWAY WITH?

Sorry, fellas, you’re not topping Harden’s beard. Greatest NBA facial hair of all time in no particular order: 

Oh no you don't, buddy.  No cutting corners here.  I expect these lists to have a set order upon which any basketball worth a damn would definitely agree.

Wilt’s goatee; Bird’s wispy almost-mustache; [rest of list deleted]

I'm just going to stop you right there.  Thanks so much for your time.

SHEER AWESOMENESS OF THEIR CONVENTIONAL 2014-15 NUMBERS:Spectacular all the way around. Through Sunday’s games …

Westbrook 27.5 ppg 8.3 apg 7.2 rpg 2.1 spg 43-30-84% 9.4 FTA 3.7 3FGA
Harden 26.9 ppg 7.1 apg 5.8 rpg 1.9 spg 44-38-87% 9.8 FTA 6.7 3FGA
Curry 23.6 ppg 7.8 apg 4.4 rpg 2.2 spg 48-42-90% 4.3 FTA 8.0 3FGA

And Westbrook finished even hotter than that.  I hate him, he's a dick, I've definitely written here before that he is overrated, but damn.  Not sure I am going to ever write that again.

Some highlights: Westbrook working on the third 27-8-7 with a 30-plus PER in NBA history (the other two: 1989 MJ and 2013 LeBron) … 

He ended up just missing, with a 29.1 PER.

Steph knocking on the door of the 50-40-90 Club while jacking up a staggering EIGHT 3s per game (good luck ever seeing that again) … 

Just missed, shooting 48.7% from the floor.  But Steve Nash pulled off 50-40-90 twice while shooting between 4 and 5 threes per game.  I don't think it's some kind of Cy Young's win total unbreakable record.

Harden trying to become the first lefty 

OK, for fuck's sake, I appreciate that this breakdown category isn't dedicated to something as inane as facial hair, but this isn't baseball.  Who gives a flying sloppy fuck about basketball player handedness when it comes to statistical achievements?

to average 27, 7 and 6 

Just missed--only 5.7 boards.

while also trying to become the third player (after Kobe Bryant and Gilbert Arenas) to attempt 500 3s AND 750 free throws (the 500/750 Club!) … 

He got there easily.  Man, that guy gets to the line.  I thought there was a chance Curry was close to this as well, but not even.  He only attempted 337 FTs.

did I mention that Westbrook is a guard and he’s averaging eight freaking rebounds per 36 minutes? … my God, look at that Westbrook season!!!!!! Are those numbers real? Can we check the math again? ADVANTAGE: WESTBROOK.

I'm going with Curry, given that he did what he did on a team that had plenty of other good players, while Westbrook, minus Durant and Ibaka for chunks of time, was really the only guy on the Thunder capable of scoring or assisting.  But there's probably no wrong answer here.  WHAT IF WESTBROOK WAS LEFT HANDED THOUGH, CAN YOU EVEN IMAGE?!?!?!?!!

SHEER AWESOMENESS OF THEIR ADVANCED 2014-15 NUMBERS: Some of this stuff is bat-shit crazy. Through Sunday’s games
…

Westbrook 29.7 PER 38.4 usage 53.9% TS 6.6 RPM 8.4 WS; .234 WS/48
Harden 26.6 PER 30.9 usage 60.8% TS 8.51 RPM 13.2 WS .265 WS/48
Curry 27.8 PER 28.7 usage 62.9% TS 8.55 RPM 12.4 WS .286 WS/48

Some highlights: Steph’s WS/48 will be top 20 all time … 

He ended at .2881, 19th all time.

we’ve had only 17 30-plus PER seasons and 86 27-plus PER seasons (and Westbrook is knocking on the door), as well as just three guards who have cracked 30 PER (MJ, Wade and T-Mac) … 

Westbrook didn't make it, but Anthony Davis (who finishes at #1 in these rankings, deservedly so) did.  Make that eighteen 30+ PER seasons.

only Kevin Johnson (in 1997) ever averaged 20 points and eight assists with a 63 percent true shooting percentage … 

OK, you're starting to really reach now.  Also, as the three ball becomes more and more popular and players shoot it better and better, TS% league wide among guards should continue to increase.

West, Magic, Jordan, Oscar and CP3 are the only guards to ever finish a season with 16 win shares … 

Ah, the coveted 16 win share cutoff point.  Both Harden and Chris Paul made it this year.

and if we want to get super-fancy, Harden leads the NBA in points per game on drives and has assisted on more made 3s than anyone … 

I think I also wrote on this blog several times back in 2012 that contrary to what Simmons said, the Thunder didn't commit some kind of sin against humanity when they traded Harden.  I'm not going to take that back, because in-the-moment analysis is in-the-moment analysis and I stand by the idea that the trade was justifiable at the time, but wow.  Harden is really, really good, and the Thunder traded him for really, really nothing.

and Westbrook’s usage rate is threatening to break 2006 Kobe’s all-time NBA record (not necessarily a positive). 

He came up juuuuuuuuuust short, 38.7 to 38.4.  That Kobe team made the playoffs, though, which proves something, but I'm really not sure what.  So I'll just go ahead and remind you that Simmons is a fucktard.

I give Curry’s season a slight edge for its unselfish efficiency and efficient unselfishness. SLIGHT ADVANTAGE: CURRY.

Really awesome wordplay there, Kerouac.  Knocked that one out of the park.

MOST MANAGEABLE GLARING WEAKNESS: Golden State hides Curry on D as much as possible, but he’s a better and smarter defender than people realize. (Maybe he’s not Chris Paul on that end, but he’s not Damian Lillard either.) 

Ooooooooh. Cold blooded.  Lillard had basically the same defensive advanced metrics (defensive rating per 100 possessions and defensive win shares) as Westbrook this year, and was only slightly worse than Curry and Harden.

Westbrook plays with so much confidence/swagger/ferocity that he can’t stop going into 2006 Kobe mode, especially late in games, which is the best and the worst thing about him. 

More top-notch writing from this guy who gets paid to use words to express ideas.  Klosterman probably thinks that sentence is nectar from the Gods.

(I mean, are YOU gonna tell Westbrook not to shoot every time? I didn’t think so.) 

Aw snap!  In your face, readers!

And Harden’s night-to-night defense used to be somewhere between “reprehensible” and “he’s trolling us,” but he took enough guff that he actually started trying on both ends this season. Great for the Rockets; terrible for everyone who loved reading 1,200-post NBA Reddit threads centered on GIFs of Harden standing in cement as his man darted by him for a layup. He’s the most well rounded of the three. ADVANTAGE: HARDEN.

Indeed, the metrics bear it out.  Harden had more defensive win shares than the other two guys.

BEST NICKNAME: I enjoy “The Beard” and like “The Splash Brothers” a tiny bit more. 

Both of those are terrible, especially since one is a reference to a video game that was most popular ten years ago.

But you know how you’d never call Liam Neeson “Liam” or “Neeson,” or nickname him, like, “Li” or “The Angry Irishman”? He’s just “Liam Neeson,” right? Same for Russell Westbrook. He’s too cool for a nickname. He’s transcended nicknames.

That's simply untrue.  I have heard many commentators and dozens of NBA fans call him "Russ" this season.  You're making stuff up again, Bill.

Damn, I’m at capacity for Liam Neeson references in this column already. ADVANTAGE: WESTBROOK.

You've been at capacity for references to anything other than sports since 2002.

ONE-MAN-WRECKING-CREWNESS: 

Pretty dumb category (not that most of the rest of these aren't).

Um, Westbrook threw up 40-13-11, 39-14-11, 49-15-10, 30-11-17, 36-11-6 and 48-9-11 just in the past five weeks. Curry and Harden can eviscerate opposing defenses — and have — but only Westbrook makes you feel like you’re watching Lia— whoops, 

HIGH FIVE!

like you’re watching a WWE star sprint into a crowded Royal Rumble ring 

Yes, basketball is wrestling is basketball is Taken.  Couldn't agree more.

and immediately start clearing it out. He doesn’t need a nickname, but he might need his own entrance music. ADVANTAGE: WESTBROOK.

Topping off the wrestling motif there, with another wrestling reference.  Great stuff.

BEST QUALITY AS A TEAMMATE: Harden is a famously fun off-the-court guy — the kind of star who seems like he’d stay out with a new teammate until 6 a.m. and, um, show him around. 

He's not going to be your friend, Bill.  Let it go.

Westbrook would fight for any teammate or coach on and off the court; he even holds grudges on the level of, Even though Grantland has thrown more love my way than toward Kanye and Drake combined, I’m not appearing on the All-Star Break B.S. Report because Simmons is the asshole who keeps bringing up the Harden trade and saying that Scott Brooks isn’t good enough. (By the way — guilty!)

YOU'RE NOT THE CENTER OF THE FUCKING UNIVERSE YOU NAVEL-GAZING DIPSHIT!  JESUS CHRIST ON A FUCKING TRICYCLE

But Curry is turning into this generation’s Tim Duncan — an unselfish superstar who doesn’t want to be an alpha dog, 

I like Curry just fine, and I don't think this is a bad thing to say about him, but he most definitely wants to be an alpha dog.

pulls for everyone else at all times, 

That's what 99% of all pro athletes do.

has an infectious personality 

Duncan has an infectious personality?

and lacks any semblance of an ego. 

Yeah, those walk-away-before-the-ball-reaches-the-rim threes really scream "quiet guy who just wants to get the job done."  Again, not that that's a bad thing.  If I shot 48% from three, I'd do it too.  But what in the holy hell is Bill talking about?

I loved that he loved Klay Thompson’s 37-point Über–Heat Check quarter more than anyone. 

Who, among every player in the NBA, wouldn't have loved that if Thompson was their teammate?  What is this garbage?

He’s the best player on a team with phenomenal chemistry. That matters. SLIGHT ADVANTAGE: CURRY.

Excellent paragraph.  Full of sound, fury, and nothingness.

NIGHT-TO-NIGHT YOUTUBE/GIF/MEME/VINE POTENTIAL:

All of them.  Who gives a flying fuck?  It's 2015.  We all can watch all of their highlights every night.  It's not like there's limited space on the internet for them.

DEFENSE/REBOUNDING/STEALS: Good place to save some words. ADVANTAGE: WESTBROOK.

"Good place to admit that I actually don't know that much about basketball."

DURABILITY: Here, too. ADVANTAGE: HARDEN.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THEIR GIRLFRIENDS?  WHOSE IS HOTTEST?  WHY AM I READING THIS IF I DON'T GET TO SEE THEIR PICTURES?

POPULARITY: 

Yahtzee!

Big year for Curry — not only did he fetch the most All-Star votes, but LeBron’s departure from Miami allowed Golden State to become the NBA’s biggest bandwagon team. If your child is under 10 and searching for a hoops team that not-so-coincidentally might have a chance to win multiple titles, or you’re one of those secretly shady NBA fans-for-hire who drifts around from contender to contender because “I just root for players I like,” or you’re a casual fan who just likes watching dunks and 3s and that’s it, or you grew up in the Bay Area and wore a Warriors hat for 10 minutes when you were 8 years old back in the 1990s, then we have the bandwagon contender just for you! 

And there's your one place in the whole column where Bill actually says something funny.  Drink it up, people.

And yes, my daughter jumped on the Warriors bandwagon a few months ago. They’re irresistable. They’re bandwagon catnip. ADVANTAGE: CURRY.

Fuck those GSW fans.  They're horrible.  Even the long-suffering mainstays.  Fuck 'em all.

MEDIA SAVVY: You’d think Curry would win this in a landslide. 

You'd think, wouldn't you?  Finally, something fans really need to read more about.

But what about Westbrook’s tough-love strategy? 

YES, WHAT OF IT?  THIS IS FASCINATING.

I kind of dig it. Total dick for a week, goes generic for a week, becomes nice and thoughtful the next week. He’s like the arrogant, hard-to-get ladies’ man in a rom-com who keeps playing the frazzled-but-successful woman in his office who’s way too cute not to have a boyfriend (only she’s all about her work and her home life is a mess). 

That's how you think of yourself, isn't it?

Russell thanked us today! What does this mean? Does he like me? I love Russell Westbrook. 

Barf

If he punched me in the face the next time I saw him, I’d probably justify it by saying, “I probably deserved that.” Wait … don’t actually do that, Russell. SLIGHT ADVANTAGE: WESTBROOK.

No one cares.

MOST ANNOYING QUALITY:

Tie among all three of them, for being discussed extensively in this article.  Done and done.

BEST “WHAT IF?” BACKSTORY: 

WHAT WILL WE THINK ABOUT THESE POTENTIAL BACKSTORIES IN TEN YEARS WHEN THEY HAVE BECOME NON-STORIES?

Curry almost got traded to the Suns during the 2010 draft; nearly got dealt to Milwaukee for Andrew Bogut; and could have ended up in Minnesota had David Kahn not taken Ricky Rubio and Jonny Flynn over him. Westbrook trumps Curry with the whole “What if OKC never traded James Harden?” question lingering over his entire OKC tenure like a pungent fart on an airplane. 

I agree with the very mild intrigue of the Curry stuff.  The Westbrook stuff: sorry Bill, but the Harden trade isn't about Westbrook.  It's about Harden.  Let's see if he can get there...

And James Harden IS the James Harden from the previous sentence. ADVANTAGE: HARDEN.

He made it!  Go Bill go!

SWAGGER WHILE WALKING DOWN A RUNWAY BEFORE AN ESPN GAME DURING THOSE LUDICROUSLY LONG CAMERA SHOTS THAT

Don't care, we're skipping this category, you're not funny.

UNIQUENESS FACTOR: Brutal category. 

Totally brutal.  Oh wait, who gives a fucking runny shit?

Westbrook is basically Jim Brown 50 years later with basketball shorts on. 

Basically like literally OMG that's so what he is I can't even

And I just compared him to Teen Wolf 

Check that spot on your bingo cards, people.

and a poisoned movie character who uses so much of her brain that she becomes a robot, then turns invisible. 

I lost whatever reference he was making in copying and pasting this over to Blogger and removing the formatting--I can't guess it, and don't even want to know.

Somehow, I have him ranked third. 

He's a great athlete, who plays like another great athlete from a while ago, and a fictional great athlete from a bad movie.  So unique.

Curry is the greatest shooter I have ever seen in my life; he’s like Maravich reincarnated crossed with Steve Nash crossed with some sports movie character that hasn’t been invented yet. Somehow, I have him ranked second. 

He's a basketball player who is good at shooting basketballs into basketball hoops.  So unique.

And Harden is a true original – I’m half-convinced that Dork Elvis, Goldsberry and Hollinger wanted to see if there could be a superior and much more durable American version of Manu Ginobili, so they created Harden in an MIT lab in 2007 during the first-ever Sloan Conference. A left-handed scorer/creator who cares only about getting to the rim, getting fouled or shooting 3s?

He's just like this other guy who is about ten years older and also plays in the NBA.  So unique.

Important note:

No.  Moving on.

“SEEING THEM IN PERSON” FACTOR: Christ. This one isn’t fair, especially with Westbrook in Jim Brown/Bo Jackson/Young LeBron/Lucymode right now. But I saw Curry in Brooklyn earlier this month, and lemme tell you something: 

Hey, let us tell you something: most of us don't just travel around watching basketball as part of our jobs.  If we can make it to the arena nearest where we live when the Rockets, Thunder or Warriors are in town: great.  If not: we'll watch them on TV like everyone else.  You out of touch stereotype of an asshole journalist.

There is nothing — repeat, nothing — more exciting as an NBA fan right now than being in the house when Steph Curry is feeling it. Bird had the same quality, by the way. 

IT AWWWWWWL COMES BACK TO THE FACKIN' C'S!  I BET YOU THOUGHT IT WOULDN'T!  FACK YOU!

And these Curry shots are SWISHING. That’s the other thing. 

Not as SWISHINGLY as LEGEND'S, but they're still SWISHING.

When it starts happening, the energy in the building actually shifts and becomes something else. 

More exemplary use of the English language.  This guy knows how to paint a beautiful piece of shit with words.

It’s tangible. His teammates rise from their bench. 

Something unseen anywhere else in pro sports!

The fans start buzzing like they’re waiting for a band to make a Coachella entrance or something. 

MAYBE YOU HAVEN'T HEARD BUT BILL LIVES IN SOCAL NOW

Everyone stands because you simply have to stand. 

No, everyone stands because it's exciting, which happens all the time in every sport.

And all the limits of the sport we thought we understood get briefly removed. 

Barf

It’s amazing. Utterly, completely amazing. 

Barf barf

If you have the money and the Warriors are passing through your city, go see Steph Curry. 

Oh, you can't see them in person whenever you want?  Pity.  Perhaps you need a more connected family to get your media career off the ground.

You want to be there if he starts feeling it. Trust me. 

"You wouldn't know from watching on TV, peasant."

ADVANTAGE: CURRY.

I'm not even finishing this fucking segment of this shitstain of an article.  Here are the categories you missed, and the correct picks each:

NIGHT-TO-NIGHT COMPETITIVENESS: 

All of them, regardless of the fact that Westbrook looks meaner than the other two.

GUY YOU’D MOST WANT FOR THE NEXT 10 YEARS: 

All of them.

MOST VALUABLE RIGHT NOW:

Curry, I'd guess, but you can't pick wrong.

MEANING TO THEIR CITY:

NONE OF THEM, BECAUSE NONE OF THEM PLAY IN BEANTOWN AND THEY-AHFO-AH, NONE OF THEM AHHHH PROPAHLY APPRECIATED!

I'll wrap it up with LeBron and Anthony Davis in the next post.  Seriously, fuck Bill Simmons and fuck anyone who reads him for any reason other than to complain about him.

NBA WHO SAYS NO Rankings - Part 1

First, a fun (not really!) anecdote: on Thursday night I was at a bar that was (of course) showing NCAA tournament games on 59ish of its 60ish TVs.  The only exception was one screen over in a corner showing what was on ESPN at the time--a Phillies/Yankees spring training game.  No better demonstration of what ESPN's baseball coverage is all about than their decision to televise a game between two teams that, if things go well, will combine to win 150 games.  Anyways, I (partially) focused on this game for about 8 or 9 minutes.  That's all the time I needed to see: 1) Ryan Howard make an error trying to field a ground ball that 80% of high school first basemen would make 2) an unearned Yankee run score due to said error, and finally 3) a montage of Derek Jeter moments, likely prompted by the fact that new Yankees SS Didi Gregorious committed the baseball faux pas of coming up to bat while playing Jeter's former position.  I really feel bad for Gregoious.  If he starts at least 120 games at SS for the Yankees this year and performs at any worse than an All-Star level, someone in the Bronx is going to run onto the field and attack him by mid May.  Anyways, fuck ESPN's baseball coverage.

Now we move to Bill's piece de resistance, his Trade Value column.  Not content simply to write like an asshole, this year he also edited/promoted like an asshole as well.  I don't need to cover that, 1) because it's hard enough to just critique the flaws with the substance of this piece and 2) because Drew Magary did a great job talking about the other stuff last week.  It's awesome.  Go click that link and read it.  If I were to pick the best and most demonstrative line, it would be:

Bill Walton and Larry Bird changed my too-harsh opinion of Kobe's style…

(Magary) "No way! Two great basketball players told you a great player was great? WHAT A REVELATION."

Really, that just about sums up what Simmons is about at this point.  He's a wannabe "hoops nerd" who actually knows little about basketball but hopes that hiring Zach Lowe and having access to NBA greats via his ESPN gig will make his opinions interesting and legitimate.  But the opinions are just as idiotic as ever, and now, by flaunting these ESPN-facilitated relationships that would NEVER develop or maintain themselves organically if he were an independent blogger (even a nationally popular one) outside of the ESPNiverse, he's exposed for being a starfucker too.  Good on you, Bill.  Feel free to quit ESPN and go the fuck away any month now.  DIE.

Anyways, this is actually part 3 of 3 of his trade value column.  I'm just going to start here because it's plenty long anyways and I'm blogging at a snail's pace these days.  In fact, this whole first post is just going to be the first half of his recap of the previously published rankings from 60 up to 11, and commentary on how things have changed in the time since he made those rankings in January and February.  Really makes sense, right?  No one enjoys Bill's writing and Bill's thinking and Bill more than Bill, so of course he's going to comment on thoughts he thinks he thought a few weeks ago.

GROUP O: “You’re Just Lowballing Me Because He Expires Soon”

One of the dumbest features of what could (could) be an interesting premise for a column--the fact that conveniently, he ends up ranking guys that all have some relatively unimportant (relatively unimportant in the entire scheme of the player's total trade value, I mean) in common together consecutively in groups.  For fuck's sake, he puts Marc Gasol and LaMarcus Aldridge together at 13 and 14 below because they're both unrestricted free agents this offseason.  Yeah, they're maybe both top 20 value guys right now, but did you absolutely have to do it that way?  To the extent Bill takes this serious (he really, really does) this really takes away whatever legitimacy he was hoping to cultivate.

60. Brandon Knight
59. Greg Monroe
58. Paul Millsap
57. Draymond Green
56. Goran Dragic

UPDATE: In February, no. 56 and no. 60 DID get traded … and Dragic fetched a slightly higher price than Knight did. Big win for the 2015 Trade Value column! Don’t get used to it.

Both were dealt in three way deals, but in essence, in exchange for Knight the Bucks got a possibly useful combo guard (Michael Carter-Williams, who should be less of a shooting disaster now that he's not carrying the crappy Sixers around) who has two team option contract years left, a young point guard (Tyler Ennis) who may or may not be anything, and a warm body (Miles Plumlee).  Meanwhile, in exchange for Dragic, the Suns got a guy who probably doesn't even qualify as a warm body (Danny Granger or THE CORPSE of Danny Granger lolololol) and first round draft picks in 2017 (top 7 protected) and 2021 (apparently unprotected).

They're both good players, but Dragic is a better scorer than Knight (for now), so Dragic is definitely the better overall player (for now).  But as far as value goes, I feel like Carter-Williams + Ennis >>> a protected first rounder that's 27 months away and an unprotected first rounder that's more than two presidential elections away.  Like, that's a pretty clear win for the Bucks, as far as comparing their haul to Phoenix's.  Yeah yeah yeah, you've got to stockpile draft choices blah blah blah, but fuck that.  A first rounder in 2021?  The guy the Suns could potentially take with that pick is probably in like 8th grade right now.

GROUP N: “I’m Hanging Up and Calling You Back From a Pay Phone”

Why would a GM do this?  Because their office phone is tapped?  By who?  Unfunny, unclever, dumb.

55. DeMar DeRozan
54. Ty Lawson
53. Eric Bledsoe
52. Kevin Love

Here we have a group of guys who are thankfully not tied together by some unifying thread; Bill just thinks they have relatively equal trade value.  But here's another fundamental weakness of this whole thing that ruins its legitimacy from the start.  (And again, I get that the whole column is just supposed to be a fun thought exercise.  But you Billophiles out there know this to be true: Bill desperately wants to be taken seriously, and the NBA is the sport which he knows the most about.)  Love is a stretch four with just one year left on his deal.  Bledsoe is a point guard with four years left on his deal.  The idea of either getting traded for the other, or either getting traded for draft picks and trying to decide which would fetch more, is so totally dependent on the needs of the other hypothetical teams involved and those teams' willingness to take on long term salary that this list loses all meaning.

Yes, I know I just a minute ago said it was bullshit that Bill groups together guys who have something in common, and now I'm saying it's bullshit that he groups together guys who have nothing in common.  Guess what?  This whole dumb column is, in fact, bullshit.  If you asked me for a sincere idea for how to make it less bullshitty, after telling you to jump in a wood chipper, I'd suggest that the whole list be just 20 players long.  How the hell do we even begin to guess if the Suns would or would not swap Bledsoe for Love?  It's pointless.  The only fun and meaningful theoreticals of that kind involve superstar level players, not guys like the four listed above.

UPDATE: Latest odds for Kevin Love’s new home address this fall: Back Bay (-120), Brookline (+200), Beacon Hill (+350), Wellesley (+500), Weston (+500), South End (+700), Charlestown (+2000), Scituate/Hingham/Duxbury (+4000), Revere (+2000000).

KEVIN LOVE!!!  NEVAH WAS THEY-AH A TRUE-AH CELTIC.  HE'S BEEN PAHHHHT OF OW-UH CITY HIS WHOLE LIFE!  IT JUST TOOK HIM UNTIL NAW TO GET HE-AH!

GROUP M: “I Know, I Know, We’re Being Irrational”

51. Victor Oladipo
50. Alex Len
49. Jonas Valanciunas
48. Nikola Vucevic
47. Jusuf Nurkic
46. Nikola Mirotic
45. Derrick Favors

UPDATE: Oladipo made The Semi-Leap after the All-Star break: 12 games, 20.6 ppg, 4.8 apg, 45-39-83 percent splits, excellent defense and a recent Orlando Sentinel story headlined “Victor Oladipo is learning that success commands opponents’ attention.” 

That's not "making the leap."  "Making the leap" is a dumbass concept that Bill likes a lot (naturally), when he most commonly applies it to situation like this which would more properly be called "a good month-long stretch by a good player on a bad team."  OLADIPO IS ON HIS WAY TO THE HALL OF FAME, READERS.  YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST.

The following "self-deprecating" sentence is presented without commentary:

Please add “Oladipo over Bennett and Noel” to my all-time NBA draft win tally, along with “Durant over Oden,” “CP3 over Bogut and Williams,” “Derrick Williams over Kyrie,” “Okafor over Dwight” and “Jabari over Wiggins.” (Fine, I’m batting .500. Whatever.)

What an asshole.

GROUP L: “Sorry, He’s Worth More to Us Than He’s Worth to You”

44. The Completely Rejuvenated Pau Gasol

He gets a special nickname because he's white!

43. Jeff Teague
42: Zach Randolph
41. Joakim Noah
40. Markieff Morris
39. Wesley Matthews
38. Kyle Korver

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Korver is a good player signed to a good contract (about $6MM per year for the next two years).  Many contenders would be happy to have him; he's obviously the best pure three point shooter in the game right now (he has a shot at finishing the season above 50%) and he's not too much of a liability on defense because of his size.  But holy shit--Randolph is also signed for the next two years, at about $10MM per.  Teague is signed for the next two years at $8MM per.  Noah is signed for next year at $13MM.  You're either drunk or mentally challenged if you think Korver has more value than any of those guys, and it's not particularly close.

UPDATE: Matthews was earmarked for an $80 million to $90 million market max payday before that unfortunate Achilles injury. What a bummer. 

Even without that injury, since he was on an expiring deal this year, he's probably the one guy from the above list who maybe actually belonged alongside the likes of Korver.

If you gave me a do-over, I’d stick Matthews on the Trade Value DL, move Oladipo into this group and give Oladipo’s old spot to Michael Kidd-Gilchrist. Why? Because MKG is destroying people on defense, to the point that he boasted, “I want to be the best defender ever” last week — and nobody laughed. 

I'll laugh.  He's not even in the top 20 in the NBA right now in defensive rating, which might seem to some like a bullshit fancypants way to judge defense until you see that the top 5 (currently) are Draymond Green, Kawhi Leonard, Tim Duncan, Rudy Gobert and Tony Allen.  Or in other words, five guys who all are frequently mentioned as among the best in the league based on the ol' eye test.  So yeah, maybe Kidd-Gilchrist is on his way to greatness, but he's a couple plane flights away.

Kawhi and MKG are in the Finals in any “Which Guy Would You NOT Want Guarding You If You Had To Score A Basket To Save Your Own Life?” contest.

That isn't a contest, and it's a really dumb way of trying to make the point you're trying to make.  In any case, Leonard is obviously way better, as are a lot of guys.

GROUP K: “No Thanks — We Don’t Want Him to Come Back and Haunt Us”

37. Rudy Gobert
36. Jabari Parker
35. Joel Embiid

UPDATE: I didn’t have the balls to throw Gobert in the low 20s with Giannis and Wiggins. Big mistake. His next 11 games after Part 2 was published: 11.3 ppg, 15.9 rpg, 2.6 bpg, nine wins in 11 games, one Kirk Goldsberry piece titled “Rudy Gobert Is Making Utah an Elite Defensive Team.” Anytime “The French Rejection” and “The Gobert Report” aren’t your best possible nicknames, you know something special is going on. All hail the Stifle Tower!

MICHAEL KIDD-GILCHRIST FOR DEFENSIVE POY!!!!  Also, just the fact that you have to account for a guy like Embiid in these rankings makes them not worth writing, or reading.  Obviously the guy is untradeable right now.  Nothing anyone offered the Sixers would be good enough, and if they shopped him around, every team they offered him to would say that they were asking an insane price.

GROUP J: “Don’t Tell Anyone, and I’ll Deny It to the Death, But I’m Listening”

34. Carmelo Anthony

HAHAHAHAHA again.  Simmons went into greater detail about how fucked Carmelo and the Knicks are in the full version of part 2 of these rankings, but he (Simmons) still refused to recant his position that you can "absolutely" win a title if Carmelo is your best player.  Really, if I had to pick one piece of evidence that he's a fucking moron when it comes to the NBA, I might settle on that one.

33. Chris Bosh
33. Hassan Whiteside
32. Dwight Howard

UPDATE: Whiteside wasn’t really a top-60 guy (just filling in for Bosh), 

Just another reminder that while Bill wants these rankings to be taken seriously, a guy with like 100 games of NBA experience can be plugged in for a ten time all star.  Because both guys play on the same team and sort of play the same position, kind of!  It makes sense!  WHO SAYS NO

but let’s say I told you, “I will bet you $100 that Whiteside will either make the 2016 All-Star Game OR be out of the league before the 2016 All-Star Game, and you can pick only one of the two sides of that bet,” which side would you pick? I can’t decide, either.

I hate entertaining his little thought experiments, but I'll take the latter.  Whiteside kind of seems like an asshole who can't get his shit together.

GROUP I: “This Is So Ludicrous That I Can’t Even Hang Up On You Yet”

31. Gregg Popovich

UPDATE: I don’t know if you noticed the ’69 Celts potential of the 2015 Spurs lately, but … well … I mean …

IT ALL COMES BACK TO THE C'S!  BAWSTON IS THE LITAHRAL AND FIG-YOU-A-TIVE CENTAH OF THE UNIVAHSE!  FIFTY YE-AHS FROM NOW, PEOPLE WILL ASK "DID THE POPOVICH SPURS PROPAHLY CARRY THE DYNASTY BANNER ESTABLISHED BY THE AUERBACH C'S?  AND THE ANSWER WILL BE FACK YOU, BEANTOWN IS THE GREATEST!  I BET POPOVICH WEARS C'S PAJAMAS TO BED!  WHO SAYS NO?

More later.

Simmons explains the science of NBA watchability (Part 2)

First, your Bill NFL gambling update.  He went 7-6 last week, a nice big healthy step up from the 4-11 mark he posted the previous week.  MNF is still in progress, but Bill took the Eagles and I'll give him that (currently 31-7 in the 2nd quarter).  Thus he has gone 7-6 again this week, meaning that if you had shadowed him for the last 3 weeks (since returning from his suspension) and put $10 on every game, you'd only be down about $60.  Meanwhile, Year of the Dog (tm)?  You bet your swollen nutsack it is.  Dogs went 7-6 last week, and assuming the Eagles hold on and cover, will go 3-10 this week.  That brings them to 69-74 on the season so far.  Year of the Dog.  WHO SAYS NO?

Anyways, when we last left Bill, he was explaining why he considers certain NBA teams fun to watch and others not fun to watch.  This kind of thought exercise is only carried out by people who don't actually like sports, and need to find a way to categorize and rank everything in order to have fun while watching the games which they're only watching while waiting for gossipy non-news things to happen.  (A compulsive need to constantly make up or predict gambling lines is a classic symptom also present in this kind of fuckhead.)  But just wait until you see the hotness of some of the hot takes he drops in this second half of his watchability rankings.  I'm not including the actual rankings/point scores he and Lowe assigned to the teams, because that's stuff only idiots would care about, but just know that the commentary goes in ascending order from "mediocre to watch" to "OMG SO FUN TO WATCH BECAUSE THINK ABOUT THE CELEBS WHO WILL BE SITTING COURTSIDE."  We start with the Rockets, who are a fun team to watch for a lot of reasons, one of which is that they employ one of the game's best shot blockers/defenders/rebounders.

Simmons: I don’t enjoy watching Dwight Howard play basketball. It’s that simple.

OK.  Well that's another way to approach it I suppose.  On one hand, Dwight Howard is an athletic freak who is good at basketball.  On the other hand, maybe you don't like to watch him play basketball, because he's an asshole manchild, or because you're still mad that the 2009 Magic knocked the Celtics out of the playoffs, or something.  Reasons.  That's what Bill has.  Reasons.

Lowe: I still love watching him play defense. He had some “Holy shit!” defensive moments in crunch time of that Portland series.

Yeah but!  When you think about it, Bill really makes a great point here.

Simmons: Great point. I will amend to “I’d rather sit through Season 1 of The Leftovers again 

That's actually shockingly timely for a Bill reference.

than watch Dwight Howard play offense.” 

Only guys who are good at offense are fun to watch!  Bill Russell is a God on Earth!  No one denies this!

But I could see them missing the playoffs for five reasons: 

You're right.  54 win team loses Chandler Parsons and Jeremy Lin, adds Trevor Ariza and Jason Terry.  Seems like a recipe for failure to me.  After all, the West is as nasty as ever this year.  Let's hear those reasons.

Dwight’s health (you never know), 

Stunningly worthless analysis.  It's not like he's Greg Oden.  He's started 70+ games in every season of his career other than the lockout-shortened one.  Even when he's 75%, like he supposedly was two years ago in LA, he's still a total badass.  But yeah, you never know.  His arms could fall off in his sleep at any point.

Post-Contract Ariza (in this case, we DO know), 

Ariza signed as a free agent with Houston back in 2009, after being a key cog on that 2009 Magic team that went to the Finals.  He went from "very good 6th man" to "OK starter," who was good for 15/6/4 with decent 3 point shooting and good defense, before the Rockets sent him to New Orleans in a trade for Courtney Lee.  WE KNOW EXACTLY WHAT WE'RE GETTING OUT OF ARIZA, AND THAT COULD COST THE ROCKETS A PLAYOFF SPOT.  What?

no proven bench guys whatsoever (aren’t they gonna miss Linsanity, or am I crazy?), 

You're crazy, and dumb, and a lot of other things.  You're certainly right that trusting 2nd year Isaiah Canaan, old as dirt Terry and a couple young Euros to anchor your bench is a little risky.  You're certainly wrong that they're going to miss Lin, who made too much and never gelled with Harden's ball-hogging style.

McHale’s coaching (sorry, no. 32, you know I love you), 

About as worthwhile as "Dwight's health (you never know)."

and Year 2 of the whole “Dwight and James are our leaders” thing (I mean … come on). 

YEAH, AM I RIGHT????!  COOOOOOOME ONNNNN!

Remember, you could finish 48-34 and miss the playoffs in the West. 

This is true, and it wouldn't be crazy if the Rockets missed.  But the same can be said for everyone other than the Clippers, Spurs and maybe the Warriors.  Saying "their best player might get hurt, and their bench isn't awesome, and other stuff" is not analysis.  It's just pooping onto a keyboard.

At gunpoint, I’d pick the Rockets or Blazers to fall out if I had to pick anyone from last year’s eight.

You wouldn't pick a Mavs team that was the 8 seed last year, is still old as dirt, and either treaded water in the offseason or got a little worse by losing Jose Calderon, Vince Carter, Shawn Marion and Sam Dalembert and adding Parsons, Tyson Chandler and Raymond Felton?  Cool.

Lowe: That’s bold. I get the concerns, especially with big-man depth, but it’s hard to see a team with a healthy Howard-Harden combination missing the playoffs. One of Jeff Adrien and Joey Dorsey will emerge as a useful bench big, Trevor Ariza will fit in, and Terrence Jones should take another leap. 

Enough of your common sense, Lowe!  We need more scalding hot takes!

Simmons: Can we at least agree that the Rockets could finish as a top-12 team that still misses the playoffs?

Define "could."

Lowe: I’d say this: They’re a playoff team that is one serious injury from being a lottery team. But you can say that for anyone outside the Thunder-Spurs-Clippers trio atop the West.

And there you go, with the Thunder removed due to injury since the writing of this article, and me adding the Warriors, who I hate, but who are pretty fucking good.

Simmons: For the record, I will always dislike the decision to let Chandler Parsons leave. 

And Asik!  Where will they get minutes from white guys this year????

That three-year offer sheet made him untradable? Fine. Year 1, you’re not dealing him, anyway. Year 2, it’s a fair number with salaries going haywire. And Year 3, the salary cap is going to be roughly $400 million per team. I’m not selling my Dork Elvis Fan Club membership or anything, but I thought he whiffed on that one. Well, unless he knows he’s getting Rondo. (And he might.)

IT ALL COMES BACK TO BEANTOWN.  IT ALWAYS DOES!  THE FATE OF EVERY TEAM IN THE LEAGUE IS INEXTRICABLY TIED TO THE C'S!  FACK YOU!

Moving on to the Timberwolves.

Lowe: This is our last certain lottery team, and they’re up this high because of you.

Simmons: Why, thank you. Good news, Minnesota fans … even though you haven’t made the playoffs in 10 years, you’re our highest-ranked League Pass lottery team by far! Pour some skunked champagne over each other’s heads!

Is... is that a reference of some kind?  A terrible joke?  Why do I still read this guy's work?

Lowe: I ranked them 11 spots lower than you, so I’m here to be the buzzkill: This team has some exciting pieces, particularly the young dunkers, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into exciting 48-minute NBA basketball games. Zach LaVine has looked overwhelmed in preseason, and Andrew Wiggins is facing stiff veteran competition for minutes — unless/until Flip Saunders The GM trades one of Corey Brewer, Chase Budinger, or (least likely) Kevin Martin. 

Simmons: LaVine looking overwhelmed in the preseason was a bigger lock than me ranking the T-Wolves too high. Come on, you’re not a wee bit excited to watch the T-Wolves?

Bill is that person who comes up with a completely subjective and ridiculous set of criteria on which to rank something, and then when you disagree with him, he needs validation so badly that he wants to argue with you over something that basically comes down to "You don't have the same favorite color as me?  Aw, come on!!!!"  Also, without Kevin Love, this team is going to be dreadful this year.  They might as well get Wiggins as many minutes as they can, because his development is the only significant positive that team's going to generate this year.

Simmons: I’m excited to start developing a fully formed opinion of Wiggins. (Can he become this generation’s T-Mac? Is he a poor man’s T-Mac? Is he a bankrupt T-Mac?) 

It's entirely possible he's a totally independent entity from T-Mac, who will have his own strengths and weaknesses and not even be named "Tracy McGrady."

I’m excited for Rubio’s contract year. 

Yeah, in order to boost his offseason earnings, he might even step up his game and learn to play D-minus level defense.  (Not that he isn't fun to watch on the other end of the court, of course.)

I’m excited for Shabazz Muhammad and Anthony Bennett being in crazy-good shape. I’m excited for every Gorgui Dieng 20-10-5 game that makes me regret trashing Minnesota’s 2013 draft-day trade, but still. I’m excited for lots and lots and lots of dunks and alley-oops. I’m even excited for the whiff of post–Kevin Love Ewing Theory potential.

What an asshole.

Pelicans:

Simmons: Anthony Davis, Anthony Davis, and Anthony Davis. Oh, and Anthony Davis. Did I forget anything?

YEAH!  BILL WAS EXCITED ABOUT HIM FIRST, EVERYONE!  HE WAS EXCITED ABOUT DAVIS WAY BACK WHEN DAVIS WAS STILL AT KENTUCKY AND WAS NATIONAL PLAYER OF THE YEAR AS A FRESHMAN, PLAYING FOR THE NATIONAL CHAMPION!  THE REST OF YOU MUST LOOK TO BILL FOR GUIDANCE AS TO WHEN TO BE EXCITED ABOUT A PLAYER!  FACK YOU!

Raptors:

Simmons: Infinitely more fun on the Trade Machine than League Pass. Do you realize they have $28 million worth of Johnson/Fields/Hayes/Williams/Hansbrough expirings? My God. I need to take a long shower and regroup.

NERDGASM!  ZOMG!  The Trade Machine is certainly a useful tool, considering how complex the NBA's cap rules are.  It's also just a calculator with some faces next to the numbers.  You don't need to bring it up in every fucking column.  We're not talking about Orville and Wilbur at Kitty Hawk here.  Get the fuck over it.

Wizards:

Lowe: I do endorse John Wall fast breaks, Bradley Beal stretching his game, Nene’s passing and angry dunks, everything about Marcin Gortat, and Paul Pierce already getting four guys suspended and nearly smushing poor Tom Thibodeau in a Pierce–Joakim Noah sandwich. DeJuan Blair and Kris Humphries were sneaky good signings, and Professor Miller, PhD, is still holding office hours down in the low post for all you suckas. Maybe this team should be higher?

Guys.  It's your fucking rankings.  You invented them.  It's not the periodic table of the elements.  For fucking fuck's sake, just rank the teams however you see fit.

Simmons: I think you’re right. 

Of course you do.

We did our rankings before we found out that America’s Team wants to thug it up and embrace the spirit of the Bad Boy Pistons. It’s a great idea. Maybe they can’t beat Cleveland in a talent show, but they can beat them up inside, use their depth to wear them down, and maybe rattle them with the whole hard fouls/trash-talking/eyeballing routine. 

Great idea in 1990.  Not such a great idea in 2014 given the 500 rules changes that have happened in the meantime, although I will admit I kind of like the team the Wizards have put together and wouldn't mind seeing them go deep in the postseason.

It just can’t be forgotten how many key Cavs have never been in a seven-game war. That’s their biggest issue in my opinion.

Well, their best player has been in like ten 7 game wars.  I'm pretty sure that will even out with the fact that none of Washington's most important players had been in the playoffs before last year, when they participated in zero 7 game wars.  Among Wizards who are likely to play at least 10 minutes per game, only Pierce, Gortat, Gooden and Miller (who somehow has played only one game 7 in his million year career) have played in one.  But good attempt at starting a totally worthless narrative there.

Lowe: I was just having this conversation with a front-office guy the other day. Sometimes you get so deep in the weeds, you forget about the obvious stuff: Cleveland’s second- and third-best players have never been to the playoffs.

Their best player is one of the best players ever, and he has two rings and three additional Finals appearances.  I think they'll probably be fine.

Knicks:

Simmons: I never expected them to score this highly, 

And they shouldn't, because holy shit are they unwatchable.  Don't worry though, they'll only be on TNT/ESPN like 35 times this year.

but man … MSG, Carmelo (our most divisive NBA star), Phil Jackson is-he-awake-or-napping shots, Earl Smith III, Jose Calderon’s offense (perpetually underrated), Jose Calderon’s ghastly defense (properly rated), Derek Fisher’s expensive suits, the goofy celeb shots, 

OMG LIKE I TOLD YOU IN THE INTRO!  CELEBS!  AND MSG!  ISN'T WATCHING A GAME BEING PLAYED THERE A MILLION TIMES MORE INTERESTING THAT WATCHING A GAME BEING PLAYED IN A NON-FAMOUS ARENA?  WHO SAY NO!

the Spike-Phil feud, the classic uniforms, the storied history (a history of six Finals appearances in 68 years, but still), 

So, the non-storied history.  Got it.

the first-class TV production, 

Holy shit dude, it's 2014.  Every single NBA team has first class TV production.  You may have heard, but there's a considerable amount of money flowing through this business.

Clyde’s outfits, 

Somehow sadder than "the Spike-Phil feud."

the MSG crowd during a big game, 

So much different on TV than a non-famous arena crowd!

and, of course, the comedy of Amar’e’s Expiring and Bargnani’s Expiring bouncing around and roping me into yet another Trade Machine session.

DIE.

Lowe: You nailed it. This team isn’t very good

And not only that, they play a slow pace (29th in the league last season; 30th so far this season) and get like 60% of their scoring from Melo isolating, starting to drive, and then shooting 15 foot pullup jumpers, or isolating, starting to drive, and getting fouled.  It's ridiculous.  I'd rather watch college basketball than the shitty offbrand NBA ball the Knicks play.

Simmons: And if that’s not enough, Rondo might be a Knick in three months. I factored in a possible Rondo trade for my ranking:

DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE

I hope Rondo stays in Boston this whole season and then signs somewhere else next summer.  That would be satisfying.  Not as satisfying as when the Celtics got nowhere in the 2014 draft lottery, but still.  Very satisfying.

Thunder:

Simmons: In general, I’d boycott the Thunder if I didn’t love watching Durant and Westbrook so much. We just watched the Thunder miss the Finals because OKC had to play a washed-up Derek Fisher, in crunch time, in its biggest playoff games. What happened this summer? They turned two 2014 first-rounders, some cap space and Kendrick Perkins’s Expiring Contract into Mitch McGary, Anthony Morrow, a D-Leaguer, and Kendrick Perkins’s Expiring Contract. Anthony Morrow. That was your big move, OKC????

Big ups to Bill for not bringing up Harden!  Lowe did near the end of the section (not pictured here), but somehow Bill didn't.  Maybe he finally let himself be edited.

Bulls:

Simmons: Here’s another Eastern team that can knock the young Cavs around and get into their heads. 

I like how the Cavs top eight this season (so far, anyways) includes LeBron (30), Love (26), Anderson Varejao (32), Shawn Marion (36) and Mike Miller (34).  They are "the young Cavs" if you are a ballgargler who likes to create narratives, I guess.

But they also have more unanswered questions than any other contender. 

Do they?  Are you going to "prove" this by listing questions about the Bulls, which essentially all boil down to "This team isn't the dynastic Celtics of the 60s or the Showtime Lakers--HOW WILL THEY COPE?"  Of course you are.

Can Taj Gibson jump a level? Can McDermott and Mirotic guard ANYONE? What are they getting from Rose? Was Pau on cruise control during the Lakers/D’Antoni era, or is Pau more washed-up than we realize? Can you play Pau and Noah at the same time? Intriguing — all of it. 

You can do this for literally every team, from the best to the worst.   You can do it for the Spurs.  You can do it for the 76ers.  You have proved exactly nothing.

We should have ranked these guys higher.

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

Simmons: And don’t tell anyone, but I’m secretly pumped to watch McDermott. 

I wonder why.

I love anyone and everyone with 25-foot range. It’s why I loved Curry so much before the 2009 draft. 

Only me!  Me me me me!  Only I was excited about this 2nd team All-American with a NBA-playing father who averaged almost 30 points per game the season before and carried his team on an very memorable March Madness run in 2008!  I AM AT THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE! ME ME ME ME MEMEMEMEMEMEMEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

It’s also why I got stuck holding all this Jimmer stock. You want any?

OK, that's actually mildly funny.

Mavericks:

Lowe: We both had them in the same spot. 

CAN WE AGREE THAT THEY ARE PROPERLY RANKED THEN?  HOLY SHIT, I WORRY THAT WE CANNOT.  THEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN ONE SPOT LOWER.  IT'S OBVIOUS.

It feels right. 

WHEW.

Simmons: If Carlisle could figure out how to use Monta Freaking Ellis, he’s DEFINITELY figuring out the perfect way to use Chandler Parsons. Because Houston never totally figured it out. By the way, I love that Chandler’s weight goes up and down just like Chandler Bing’s weight did on Friends.

See, that's the kind of reference I know and expect from Bill.

Spurs:

Simmons: And maybe our final season for Parker as an elite playmaker (very quietly, it’s Year 14 for him!!!) 

NO ONE DENIES THIS!  THIS IS IT!  HE WILL SUDDEN GO FROM ELITE TO NON-ELITE IN JULY OF 2015!

and Boris Diaw playing at the right weight. 

File this and similar comments under "things people who aren't actually sports fans care about."  Which of course is why this was written in the first place.

My biggest question: How will they remain motivated after last season? 

Good point--what about their coach or best players indicates they're interested in being more than a flash in the pan?  YOU'RE GUILTY UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT, SPURS.  LET'S SEE SOME EFFORT OUT THERE.

How do you top redeeming one of the worst sports defeats ever, winning the NBA title at home AND murdering the LeBron era in Miami? 

I don't know, let's ask Popovich and Duncan, which I can totally do telepathically because I know exactly how they'd respond to that kind of drivel.  "By winning another championship this summer," they both said.  Good to know.

There’s some decent letdown potential hanging over this season. 

You're a fucking idiot.

Clippers:

Simmons: Plus, I sit right across from Ballmer’s seats, so I can gawk at him as he’s behaving like a heavier, balder Bob Sacre in real time. 

Now we're combining caring about people at the arena who aren't on the team with analyzing someone's weight!  NBA US Weekly editor Bill Simmons is here to dish, everyone.

I put the Clips over the Warriors for three reasons. First, they feature more day-to-day dunks, alley-oops and general WHOA moments. 

But which team is more NOW?

Second, I think they’re making the 2015 Finals. 

God, I hope not.  Imagine the articles Bill would write.

And third, give me in-the-moment Ballmer reactions over in-the-moment Joe Lacob reactions every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Cavaliers:

Simmons: In 11 years, LeBron played with only one elite player who made him better: Dwyane Wade in 2011 and most of 2012 before he slowly turned into Heavier, 

And again.

Moodier, Not-As-Good Dwyane Wade. 

This is also known as "being a pro athlete in your early 30s."  Not that Bill would argue that, but even though I hate Wade, this is kind of an unnecessary driveby attack on him.

Kevin Love will make LeBron better every single game. Remember, LeBron has never — not in his entire life — played with a great rebounder, a great outlet passer, or a great pick-and-roll forward. 

OK, this is splitting hairs a bit, because the "LeBron has never had great teammates" thing is sort of kind of right, but Zydrunas Ilgauskas was an elite rebounder for much of LeBron's time in Cleveland.  Just saying.  That dude was a monster on the offensive glass.

Never. Not ever. 

NEVER EXCEPT FOR THOSE FOUR OR FIVE SEASONS.  Also, let's not shed a tear for LeBron re: the quality of his teammates.  Wade, even FLABBY Wade, is awesome, and Bosh is also pretty damn good.  It's not like it was all LeBron going to the Finals four straight years in Miami.

I can’t wait to watch them. I want to upgrade my score to a perfect 50. Is it too late?

Yes, but it's not too late for you to strap yourself to a rocket and launch yourself into deep space.

Lowe: You’re short-changing Bosh as a pick-and-pop guy who gave LeBron space to work and defended his tail off in Miami.

Fair point.  Bill, your counter?

Simmons: Bosh was a very good pick-and-pop partner for LeBron. Love could be a GREAT pick-and-pop partner for LeBron. That’s my defense.

Awesome.

Simmons: And what happens when Varejao gets hurt? If anyone out there thinks the Cavs are getting 100 games out of Anderson Varejao over the next eight months, I have some Pets.com stock to sell you. 

Wow, SUPER timely.  He must have realized the Jimmer joke was good, and decided to go back to the "worthless stock" well.  And then for some reason he didn't pick a company that's falling apart now (Zynga) or something that fell apart during the 2009 recession (Bear Stearns).  Nope.  He went right to the 90s, where he's most comfortable.  Good for him.  Change is scary.

Lowe: They get the top spot in spite of the ugliest uniform/court design combination in the league. 

These are things that definitely matter to you if you're a basketball fan!  (Pretty sad to see Lowe get in on this line of analysis.)

Simmons: One other thing — every 2015 Cavs home game is going to be appointment viewing. Even the ones against Philly and Utah. Everyone forgets how fantastic their home games were in 2009 and 2010, 

I don't think anyone who cares about the NBA forgets that.  I know you invented the concept of fandom, Bill, but it's maybe just maybe possible that there are other people just as enlightened about sports as you are.  Hard to believe, I'm sure.

how much energy ripped through that building every night, and how LeBron always seemed to feed off his hometown peeps. 

Yo!  Bill is hip to the youth culture, homies!

They went 39-2 at home in 2009 with inferior talent, a clueless coach and a roster that couldn’t do 40 percent of the stuff that this 2015 Cavs team can do. These LeBron 2.0 home games are going to be a borderline religious experience. I really believe that.

Such a bold and daring take.  It shows real guts to hold an opinion like "The team that employs the best player in a generation and two other very solid supporting cast members will be exciting to watch," but Bill is here to put his reputation on the line.

Christ, I hate this guy.  Maybe I'll go back to focusing on his terrible NFL gambling tips next week.

Super top secret NFL gambling update; Simmons explains the science of NBA watchability (Part 1)

First, a quick update: underdogs went 8-7 against the spread last week and now stand at 52-50 on the season.  Is it the Year of the Dog?  IT IS THE COUSINFUCKING YEAR OF THE DOG YOU PUCKERING ASSHOLES.  We'll see what the next few weeks bring, but my guess is this: underdogs will cover about as often as they fail to cover, and anyone who makes picks based on gut feelings developed in August about whether this is the Year of the Dog is a board certified dumbshit who should be ignored, and later thrown down a well.

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of his suspension, Bill has seemingly taken his ball and gone home when it comes to NFL picks columns.  We'll know for sure by this afternoon, but he was unsuspended as of last Thursday but Bill Barnwell still wrote last week's picks column.  This could be ESPN quietly telling Simmons to just stay away from the NFL and focus on the NBA.  It could be Simmons quietly telling ESPN that he'd rather just stay away from the NFL and focus on the NBA.  Or it could be Simmons just being a moody little bitch.  We can't know for sure, but I do know this much: in Simmons's absence, Barnwell sure as hell started sounding like Simmons.  Fucking disappointing.  Here's what I mean--some samples from Barnwell's picks column from two Fridays ago:

I have to admit I was tempted to just make this entire Week 6 preview out of J.J. Watt GIFs from Thursday night’s Texans-Colts game and call it a column. I know that he’s not better at quarterback than Ryan Fitzpatrick, if only because Fitzpatrick has spent his entire career prepping to play quarterback and Watt is built to play defensive line, but if you gave Watt six months’ notice that he was going to be Houston’s quarterback, don’t you think he would have a shot at being pretty good at it?

WHO SAYS NO????

JETS (+9.5) over Broncos

The referee assigned to this game is 33-year-old rookie Brad Allen, who joined the NFL this year after refereeing in the ACC. I have to admit that he is my new favorite referee, if only because he seems to be taking everything incredibly seriously. Allen makes his various motions for penalties like he just reread the rulebook and practiced against a mirror for hours, like he’s a new teacher being observed by the principal. Here’s his first call, a hold, from Thursday’s Packers-Vikings game:

[gif of very robotic and precise holding call signal from Allen]

That’s incredible! If Dave Chappelle’s white-guy voice could be a holding motion, it would be Brad Allen’s. Compare that to the holding call of a veteran referee like Gene Steratore:

[gif of very casual and lackadaisical holding call signal from Steratore, which still pretty much looks like Allen's]

Steratore is ready to blow this joint, man. By the time he’s grasped his wrist for the hold, he’s already ready to signal the side and get those chains moving. Get in, get out, go home. Allen, meanwhile? He’s grabbing his arm firmly, dropping his elbow all the way to his waist, looking directly into the camera … just textbook stuff. It’s Don Draper and Bob Benson in stripes. I’m excited about the Brad Allen era.

Sure sounds like something Bill would write (and a subject Bill would find fascinating, because other than the NBA, he doesn't care about sports), doesn't it?

In fact, the Eagles have more defensive and special teams touchdowns through five games than any other team in NFL history. Four teams were previously tied for the record with six, most recently the 2003 Chiefs, who were going through the absolute climax of Dante Hall hysteria. Most public schools in the K.C. area shut down as children insisted upon solely communicating by throwing up the X. It was a crazy time.

LOL!  Barnwell also went 4-9 against the spread that week, further evidence that either he's turning into Simmons or he let Simmons write his column for him.

So what about last week? A little more of the same, except that he went 9-4 against the spread, because he's not a fucking idiot. But still, read this shit:

WASHINGTON (-5.5) over Titans

You played SimCity, right? You know, the original SimCity, the one you had on a gigantic 5.25-inch floppy disk, that SimCity. Do you remember how bad your attempts at a metropolis were when you played SimCity as a little kid? They were bizarre, nihilistic works of art.

Residential buildings just slapped next to smokestacks. A decaying commercial zone, victimized by a statistically improbable number of simultaneous earthquakes and Godzilla attacks. Electrical lines building a grid totally unconnected to any power plant. For public safety, six police stations and six fire stations placed directly next to one another next to a road that never loops back on itself and just runs out in the middle of nowhere. Oh, and the totally useful sports stadium, presumably attended by the one poor, confused family who showed up to live in one of your residential zones for a couple of in-game seconds before immediately leaving in a terrified huff.

Washington vs. Tennessee is the football equivalent of that city you created.

Oooh!  But which unwatchable and irrelevant 1970s movie is that game like?  Which season of The Challenge is it like?

Texans (+3) over STEELERS

OK. It’s time to talk about this ubiquitous J.J. Watt commercial that’s taken over television in the past two weeks.

[entirely too long seven breakdown of this piece of uninteresting corporate advertising follows, treating the ad like it was written by Hemingway and containing zero good jokes along with a bunch of dumb references and rhetorical questions]

Look, I know Barnwell has always been prone to throw a couple mediocre jokes into his analysis.  But during Simmons's suspension, it sure seemed to get a lot worse.  I hope Barnwell goes back to being the old Barnwell soon.  Simmons-Barnwell hybrid sucks ass.  Anyways, Simmons did do his fucking dumb as rocks guess the line podcast this week, so maybe that means he's back; but he also didn't tweet a Thursday night pick, so who the fuck knows.  Whatever the outcome, if it results in less Simmons in the world, it's a good thing.

Anyways, Simmons has been busy lately; the suspension appears to have mercifully cut his NBA team preview video series off after he and Jalen Rose got through the 11 worst teams in the league.  (I say mercifully, because holy fucking flying cats, did you try to watch any of those?  That shit wouldn't fly on local access cable at 4 AM. Other than the money, why is Jalen Rose working so much with this numbnuts?  Oh, that's right.  It's probably about the money.)  But he and Zach Lowe have released their annual "watchability rankings" for NBA teams, designed to let League Pass subscribers know which teams are worth checking in on from time to time.

For once, I'm not going to hammer on the premise of a Simmons article.  This is actually something worth writing (not necessarily by Simmons; but by somebody).  TNT and ESPN show so many goddamn unwatchable games it makes steam come out of my ears.  It's bad enough that some of the good teams from big cities play ugly basketball, like the Bulls and Rockets.  It's 1000 times worse that regardless of what a shitpile the Lakers and Knicks are, they're each going to be on national TV like 25 times this year.  It's horrid.  The Lakers, now that Nash is out for the year, could very well lose 60 games.  The Knicks should make the playoffs, but as I've ranted about before, that's because of the joke of a division they play in.  So for fans that don't want a Cavs/Nets or Thunder/Lakers blowout to be their only TV option, League Pass makes sense (even though it runs pretty poorly a lot of the time), and thus we might as well have a watchability ranking.

Of course, whether this is a good idea and whether it is executed competently are two entirely different things.  And not even the presence of Lowe is enough to keep this from turning into a blimp crash.  Come one, come all, marvel at Bill's obvious idiocy even when he is talking about the one sport he kind of knows, he's discussing a reasonable topic, and he has an awesome wingman.

BUT FIRST!  Someone decided that Bill "Voice Made For Photography" Simmons needed more TV time.

VIEWING ALERT!!!!! At 7 p.m. ET on Thursday (10/23), The Grantland Basketball Hour makes its triumphant debut on ESPN.

I didn't watch!  And I never will!

Your hosts? Bill Simmons and Jalen Rose, who will be joined by Jeff Van Gundy, Doc Rivers, Michelle Beadle, Zach Lowe and rappers Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur. We made up only two of those guests.

LOL!  Those last two guys were brutally murdered!

Watch us live, add us to your DVR season pass, do whatever you need to do.

Never.

One hour of free basketball chatter, 7 p.m. Thursday, ESPN. See you there.

I'd rather eat glass.

Last year’s League Pass Rankings kicked off with Simmons writing, “If I watch more than 75 total minutes of the Suns this season, I’m gonna feel like I failed.”

You failed years ago, buddy boy.

So clearly, you came to the right place for intelligent analysis and an all-encompassing feel for the league. Our mission remains the same: Figure out which 2014-15 NBA teams have the best chance to steal our attention, night after night, as we’re watching five games at once. Both Simmons and Lowe awarded all 30 teams between 0 and 10 points in each of the following five categories.

Using categories and a points system is a fine way to do this kind of thing.  A fine way, that is, until Simmons then spends most of the article questioning the legitimacy of his own horseshit manufactured rankings, that are a function of his own fucking system.  It makes me want to stick a fork in an outlet.

Category No. 1: Relevance/Zeitgeist
Interpreted as “relevance to the playoff picture,” 

Sure.

“relevance to NBA junkies on the Internet,” 

What does that mean?  I'm not saying it doesn't exist as a separate concept from relevance to the playoff picture, but what the fuck does it mean?

and “general day-to-day relevance.” 

I do know what that means.  It means absolutely nothing.  It was included here to make Bill feel like he's been extra smart and analytical.

Category No. 2: Hoops Nerdgasm Potential

I don't think nerds of any kind, including sports nerds like me, should embrace the term "nerdgasm."  That makes us even less likely to ever get sex without paying for it.

Covers special events like, “OH MY GOD, Phoenix is playing Bledsoe, Dragic and Isaiah Thomas right now with Gerald Green at the 4 and a Morris twin at center!” 

OH MY GOD THEY'RE PLAYING SMALLBALL, THAT'S THE CRAZIEST SHIT EVER, I JUST JIZZED ON MY IPAD!

— as well as everything Pop and Carlisle are doing on a daily basis, 

Meh.  Those guys are both great coaches, but is it really particularly titillating to see what lineups they've constructed or which players Pop gave the night off?  This isn't really "nerdgasm" (last time I'm typing that, by the way) material.  It's more like, stuff that you appreciate when you see how many games the Spurs and Mavs are winning.

everything that Stan Van Gundy and David Blatt might try this season, and everything that gets Haralabob Voulgaris fired up on Twitter (in a good way). 

SVG is a great coach but the Pistons are trash.  I don't think he can prevent that.  David Blatt is a rookie NBA coach who will probably make a bunch of dumb mistakes this year.  Not seeing the appeal.  Voulgaris is a guy who writes sometimes funny tweets about the NBA.  If you're watching games because you hope he's going to tweet about them later, your priorities are backwards.

If you’re coaching so creatively that you coax Zach into one of those 4,500-word columns with 15 embedded YouTube clips, you’ll score highly here.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.  Not that Lowe isn't a good writer, just that, meh, I watch games to watch games.  I'm not a coach.  I don't need to be impressed by the 14 different screen and roll variations the Cavs draw up, in part because I won't recognize them as the game is happening anyways.  And this should go without saying, but neither will Bill.  He may not even recognize them in the YouTube clips AS he's reading the Lowe article.

Category No. 3: League Pass Minutiae
Covers the quality of announcing teams (a.k.a. The Sean Elliott Mute Button Factor) and sideline reporters (we love you, Abby Chin!), as well as uniform colors, crowd behavior, any wide shot of empty seats on TV (sorry, Miami), the home arena’s floor pattern, the mascots, and for a second time, the mascots. You know, all the stuff Zach obsesses over.

Judging based on uniform colors, crowd behavior, shots of empty seats, or home arena floor patterns is completely retarded.  But mascots rule, and I have absolutely no problem with judgment based on announcing teams.  Any non-Boston hockey fan who's ever been subjected to Jack Edwards knows that a terrible announcer can ruin a game with his or her buttfuckery.  (Fortunately, to my knowledge there is not a single local NBA announcer who comes within a mile of Edwards.)

Category No. 4: Individual Player Appeal
If you employ the likes of LeBron, Durant or Curry on your team? You’re looking great for this category. If you revolve your team around Boogie Cousins? You’re looking great with one of us and shockingly decent with the other one. But if your only exciting player is missing the entire 2014-15 season with a broken leg? You might be looking at a Robert Parish — a.k.a. the double zero.

HE WAS A CELTIC GO FACKIN' C'S!  This category is pretty dumb in the context of this article, as that is the exact kind of thing a "hoops nerd" should NOT care about.  First of all, watch good teams because they're good, regardless of whether they're the Clippers or the Spurs.  Second of all, pretty much every guard and small forward in the NBA is exciting to watch if you're a basketball fan, as are a good number of the big men.  If you judge a game's watchability on OOOH DO THEY HAVE A GUY WHO DOES CRAZY DUNKS AND CAN HIT 3s, then you should watch every game.

Category No. 5: Unintentional Comedy/Irrational Affection/Personality Intangibles

Turn the Simmonsmeter up to 11.

This intentionally vague category covers moments like “Enes Kanter just took his 10th 3 of the night,” “Byron Scott is defending Phoenix’s 3-guard offense with Jeremy Lin, Nick Young and Steve Nash right now,” 

Hey, that's double counting!  We already saw that offense when we ejaculated everywhere back in Category No. 2!

“Boris Diaw is feeling it,” any text or tweet that simply reads “Dante Exum!!!!,” 

Don't text your friends the name of a player who just made a good play.  That's a dumb thing to do.

“Marcus Smart just dove for a loose ball and inadvertently took out the scorer’s table while down 25 with 90 seconds to play,” 

HE'S BAWSTAHN TOUGH!  SOUTHIE TOUGH, EXCEPT THAT HE'S NOT ALLOWED TO LIVE THEY-AH!  HE'S ONE OF US!  THE ANTI TOM BRADY!  FACK YOU!

“Giannis is starting at point guard,” 

He's not.

“Dion Waiters is feeling it,” “Dirk just made his seventh straight one-legged fall-away,” “Blake Griffin just

And so on and so forth.  You get it.  This is a fine category, except that like I just said, pretty much every game features guys who can do incredible things, so... just watch.  No need to make a big production out of your pre-watching.

We each scored all 30 teams on our own, then combined those scores into a bigger score that you’ll read below. The lowest possible score? Zero. 

Thank you for clarifying what 0 times 10 is.

The highest possible score? 100. (Hypothetically achieved by the 1986 Celts, 2005 Suns, 2011 Heat and 1982 Lakers.) 

THE 1982 LAKERS DID NAWT DESERVE THIS HYPOTHETICAL HONOR!

This is getting kind of long, so I'm not going to do a full detailed breakdown.  Below are some LOWlights (lol) from Part 1 of Bill's rankings, which are written as a dialogue between him and Lowe.  I am very glad they chose that format because it makes it easy to tell when something utterly inane was Bill's idea versus Zach's idea.  Not that it would be hard to do if their thoughts were combined together; but this makes things that much clearer.

Re: the Pacers

Simmons: They have to trade David West within the next three months, right? In the Bill and Jalen Preview for the Pacers (coming Wednesday!), Jalen smartly pushes for a West-to-Charlotte trade for former Hoosier Noah Vonleh or former Hoosier Cody Zeller. 

Bill thinks Jalen is so well-spoken.  Also, big thumbs down for the HEY THAT PRO TEAM SHOULD TRADE FOR COLLEGE PLAYERS WHO PLAYED IN THE SAME GEOGRAPHICAL AREA idea fart, regardless of whether it was Jalen or Bill who came up with it.

The Pacers should bottom out for a year and get a meaningful asset for West … right?

ALWAYS TANK WHEN YOU GET THE CHANCE!  NEVER BE AVERAGE!  EVERY TEAM SHOULD BE TRYING TO WIN 82 OR 0 GAMES!  THERE IS NO INBETWEEN!  Well, it's really not that simple ever, or in this case, as Zach will patiently explain.

Lowe: Hmm … West has a $12.6 million option for the 2015-16 season, and it’s the rare option that presents an interesting choice for the player. As a 34-year-old on a semi-expiring deal, West just doesn’t have a lot of trade value. I don’t see the Hornets giving up a potential good young big for him, but they are the right sort of team for a trade like this — a longtime sad sack with some irrational exuberance and/or desperation to accelerate their rise.

Right.  So West 1) is old and declining, so less of an asset in that sense, and 2) isn't actually an expiring deal, so way less of an asset in that sense.  Thus maybe it's not in Indiana's interests to go into the season saying WE GOTTA UNLOAD THIS GUY.  ASAP.  DON'T CARE WHAT WE GET FOR HIM.

Simmons: We disagree — it’s difficult enough to find a playoff-proven veteran/locker room leader that West’s value might be higher than you think. 

"Hey you, guy who knows more about the NBA than I could ever possibly know about anything--you are wrong.  West is a PROVEN 15 and 7 guy in the playoffs.  People forget that."

I would flip Zeller for him in 2.2 seconds. Imagine Charlotte becoming a genuine contender. 

Because they traded Zeller for West?  Did the Pacers throw in a magically healed Paul George who's ready to play right now, too?

And even better, imagine West and Lance improbably reuniting. 

Ah.  That's what this was all about.  LANCE STEPHENSON IS GOOFY AND KIND OF RAN HIMSELF OUT OF INDIANAPOLIS.  WHAT IF DAVID WEST AND HIM WERE TEAMMATES AGAIN.  WHO SAYS NO.

If it happens, I hope someone takes a cell phone video of West rejoicing upon hearing that he got traded to a contender … and then realizing that he has to play with Lance again.

Oh man!  That's what sports are REALLY all about!  Viral videos of what athletes do when they're not playing!  Bill needs a job at TMZ.

Re: the Magic

Simmons: Serious question: Would this team win more games with Jacque Vaughn or Mo Vaughn coaching?

Awesome joke.  Straight out of 1997.

Re: the Nuggets

Simmons: I bumped them two points just because marijuana is legal in Colorado — on a night with a low number of games, at least we can watch Denver’s home games and guess which opponents may have wake-and-baked that morning.

LOL!  Marijuana reefers!  That's what some guys who visit Denver will be smoking, you can bet on that!  Remember when that one kid you grew up around who was always getting into trouble started smoking weed at a relatively young age, and would look all high and stuff?  This will be like that!!!!!!

Re: the Celtics

Simmons: What about Rondo for the Derrick Williams/Reggie Evans expirings, Ben McLemore and a top-seven-protected 2015 pick? That trade makes the 2015 NBA season 5 percent more fun — admit it.

NO ONE DENIES THIS.  Rondo could take the Kings all the way to 10th place in the west!  The Celtics would get the better end of the deal!  WHO SAYS NO??????????????

Lowe: I think Boston would do that. 

They're going nowhere fast and Rondo is in the last year of his deal.  You fucking think they might want to pick up McLemore in exchange for someone they don't need and a little bit of expiring money that they also don't need?  But why in the Christ would the Kings do this?  So they can clear slightly more money next offseason?  They're ditching Rudy Gay and the cap might go up, or at least will definitely go up in two offseasons.  They're not just going to hand McLemore to Boston because that would give Bill a case of the warm fuzzies.

But let’s say the cap sticks at the projected $66.3 million for 2015-16, then rises into the mid–$80 million range in 2016-17 — an outcome that is not a foregone conclusion on either side, by the way. That could present Boston with the chance to re-sign Rondo this summer at a number that ends up looking good. I’ve always thought that was the best scenario for them, barring a knockout trade package — to get Rondo back below the max and use him as a lever to draw the next big star to Boston.

Ah, there you go.  THAT'S why the Kings would do it--so they can help Boston achieve their best case scenario with regard to Rondo--trade him for an asset, and then re-sign him after a tanking season and keep the asset.

WHO

SAYS

NOOOOOOOOOOO

Re: the Heat

Simmons: Here’s a clip of Dan Le Batard walking the streets of Miami in February.

["Milk was a bad choice" clip from Anchorman, a movie that came out more than ten years ago and was quoted to the point of death as of 2009 or so]

GIVE IT TO ME AGAIN!!!!!!

[Same clip, because why not double down on your unfunny and untopical reference?]

Re: the Bucks

Simmons: That’s part of my 2016 sports czar campaign — regular citizens will no longer be allowed to fund stadiums for professional sports owners if those owners spent the past two years destroying a players’ union in a one-sided lockout, creating an owner-friendly salary structure and doubling/tripling the value of their franchises with the latest media rights megadeal. The good people of Wisconsin shouldn’t spend ONE PENNY on that new stadium. Tell those billionaires to screw off.

Simmons, still pandering to Bucks fans after all these years because 50 diptards wrote the owner an email asking them to hire Bill for the front office.  Kind of sad.  Really sad, actually.  Related note: fuck NBA owners.  At least Bill and I can agree on that.

Re: the Hawks

Lowe: And yet despite all this — all the beauty of Mike Budenholzer’s system, all the talent on hand — you ranked them 10 spots lower than I did. Nothing divides us like the Hawks and Grizzlies. The Hawks are a delight to watch, and they have an awesome new court. Also, should we call Mike Scott the regional manager? The office manager? Does going by “Mike” instead of “Michael” invalidate this? The character Michael Scott was awful at basketball, but he was a chucker — just like Mike Scott!

Lowe wanted to make sure he got in on the untimely and unfunny references game.

Simmons: Why not just call him “The Office”? 

OHMYGOD THAT WOULD BE PERFECT LET'S DO IT!!!!

Would you consider Charlotte a 2015 contender if they flipped Noah Vonleh AND Cody Zeller for Al Horford? Who says no? Sorry … you know I have to do this every 1,200 words. It’s part of my contract.

DIE.

Simmons: Two pectoral tears, a racism scandal, a crazy ownership situation and possible tanking … maybe the Hawks ARE ranked correctly.

OH!  Thank goodness.  I was worried that the arbitrary ranking system you invented for this column might have produced some incorrect outputs.  Good to see it's functioning flawlessly.  NEWS FLASH ASSHOLE, IT'S YOUR SYSTEM.  YOU DON'T LIKE IT, JUST CHANGE IT AND RANK THE TEAMS HOW YOU WANT TO.  STOP DIDDLING YOURSELF AND JUST WRITE ABOUT BASKETBALL.  FUCKING TITS.  I HATE THIS GUY.

More from part 2 of this Simmons/Lowe "discussion" next week.

I'm sorry I've said many times that Bill knows the NBA, I was completely wrong (part 1)

Here's Bill's ode to Carmelo Anthony, penned shortly after Melo re-upped with the Knicks. Full disclosure: I am a Nuggets fan, and definitely hold a small grudge against Carmelo for the way he demanded the trade that sent him out of town. (I say small grudge, because three years later, the anger I initially felt is heavily tempered by the fact that the Nuggets probably won that trade.  At the very least it's quasi-semi-even-ish.)  Anyways, in case you didn't know it, Bill is a big Carmelo fan.  I'm not sure why--maybe he saw Darko and Melo walking down a hallway a few months before the 2003 draft, decided Darko was a sure bust and Melo was a sure 25,000+ point scorer, and is still riding high on that prediction.  If you have a brain, you can look at what Melo has accomplished in the NBA: tons of points, not enough anything else (although to his credit, his assist and rebounding percentages have improved ever so slightly in New York; he's also maintained his true shooting percentage despite an increased usage rate), and probably most importantly, a terrible playoff record.  You can then conclude that Melo is a good player who isn't capable of winning a championship without help from some other stars.  Bill, unsurprisingly, does not take this route.

I'm not trying to spout lava-hot taeks along the lines of WINNING IS ALL THAT MATTERS IN THE NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION JUST ASK MIKEL JORDAN QED.  But moreso than in the NFL, NHL or MLB, a star player needs to prove his worth by doing well in the postseason.  It's up to him to carry his team, because he can carry it, in a way that no other major sport athlete can.  Quarterbacks and goalies CAN have huge impacts, but those don't measure up to the impact an NBA star SHOULD have on nearly every playoff series in which they participate.  Sure, a goalie can steal a couple game or even a series; but no goalie, not even the best of the best, is going to be able to do that year in and year out for the entire playoff stretch.  Same for QBs.  But an NBA superstar who is capable of leading a team to a championship should almost always be "on" in the playoffs.

So how has Melo been in April and May, eleven years into his career?  Well, before looking at that, let's at least give him credit for having BEEN to the playoffs ten of eleven possible times.  And the Knicks missing the party this past season is hardly Melo's fault, after he put up 10.7 win shares and 27/8/3 while shooting 45%/40%/85%.  But that's pretty much where the compliments can stop.  Melo has gotten his teams out of the first round just twice in his ten playoff appearances--to the conference finals on a stacked Denver team in 2009, and to the second round in 2013 on a not particularly stacked Knicks team.  That's not a WINNING WINNER in my book.

Eight out of ten times, it's been one series and done for Melo's teams--and sometimes with him playing like garbage.  Most of his career averages are roughly equivalent in the regular season and in the playoffs, except for one very important one: his FG% drops from 45.5 to 41.7, and his TS% drops from 54.7 to 51.1.  Other stars--both current stars and retired stars he's often compared to, like Bernard King and Alex English--don't have this problem.  As for the good performance/bad performance divide, he was an absolute mess in the 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008 and 2011 playoffs.  Three of those were tough matchups (top seeded Timberwolves in 2004 while he was a rookie, eventual champ Spurs in 2005, and eventual conference champ Lakers in 2008), but you'd think he would have shown up for ONE of those series, rather than average 19 points while shooting well under 40% and winning just a single game in all three series combined.  Two more of those bad performances came against less tough matchups (the mediocre 2006 Clippers and aging 2011 Celtics) and he couldn't hit the ocean from the beach against either, shooting 33% and 38% respectively.  Put a different way, in ten career playoff appearances, a guy who is a sure thing to finish his career in the league's all time top 25 in points, and has a good shot at the top 10, has shown up and played well during the playoffs in just half of his career appearances.  In just those five good performances, he has won three total series (two in 2009, one in 2013) and has guided his teams to a 20-24 record.  In the GOOD performances.  In the bad performances, his teams are a combined 2-20.

I think that's more than enough prologue.  I wanted to lay that out there because I'll be referencing those numbers throughout this series of posts.  If you tl;dr'ed over those last three paragraphs, which is fine (you short attention span having cretin), all you need to know is this: Melo is an awesome scorer, but he has a shitty playoff record that does not befit his reputation as a star, and Bill thinks you can win a title if Melo is your best player, which is fucking idiotic. No, really, he thinks that.  Here:

This wasn’t one of our happier years at the “You Can Absolutely Win a Title If Carmelo Anthony Is Your Best Player” Fan Club headquarters. 

Like I said.  With just two exceptions (the 2004 Pistons and the 2011 Mavericks), in order to win a title in the past 20ish (actually 23) years, you've needed to have one of these guys on your team: Jordan, Olajuwon, Duncan, Kobe, Shaq, KG, LeBron.  If you didn't have one of those guys, your title chances were sparse.  They've been hogging all the titles since before the internet existed.  Look at the names who aren't on that list--Malone, Stockton, Ewing, Durant.  But at least each of those I just named have played for a title.  Melo hasn't even done that.  And somehow you "absolutely" can win a title with him as your best player?  Particularly now that he's on the wrong side of 30?  Go fuck yourself.

Our man missed the 2014 playoffs in the rancid Eastern Conference, 

All it took to make the playoffs in the east last season was going 38-44.  In a division where the other four teams besides the Knicks were a combined 76 games below .500, the Knicks couldn't pull that off.

then received a rude comeuppance from his new Knicks boss, Phil Jackson, who lobbied him publicly to stick around at a discount price. 

What does Phil Jackson know about putting together a winning team?  Obviously giving Melo a max extension and continuing to surround him with mediocre teammates is the fast track to titletown.

The Bulls couldn’t carve out enough cap space for him. 

Slash didn't want to.

The Lakers couldn’t offer a good enough supporting cast. 

Fortunately he'll still have Andrea Bargnani and Iman Shumpert around next year!

The Rockets never gained momentum, for whatever reason. 

Because they already have James Harden filling the "scores a lot, not great at anything else, you probably don't want him to be your best player" role, and filling it better than Anthony does in New York.

Carmelo ended up re-signing for $122 million for five years, pretending that was the plan all along … even though it wasn’t.

Based on the circumstances that brought him to NYC, i.e., he demanded a trade there because his wife told him to demand a trade there, I wouldn't be too surprised if that was the plan all along.

You know what really shocked me? Hearing Knicks fans and Lakers fans wonder whether it was a smart idea to splurge on Carmelo at all. Where are you REALLY going if he’s your best player?, they kept asking. 

The answer is in those three paragraphs at the top of the post.  You're going to the second round, if you're really lucky and everything comes together, and otherwise you're going to the golf course.

Take my friend Lewis, a lifelong Southern California guy, one of those complicated superfans who’s nutty enough to grow a beard for the entire NHL playoffs, only he’s rational enough to freak out over Kobe’s cap-crippling two-year extension, but he’s also irrational enough to still believe the Lakers could eventually sign Kevin Love AND Kevin Durant. You can always count on him for a rationally irrational reaction, if that makes sense.

It doesn't, because you're a god-fucking-awful writer who learned from another mostly god-fucking-awful writer (Klosterman) that it's useful to readers to describe people/things with contradicting terms and then just say "if that makes sense" and move on.  Sounds to me like Lewis is a non-complicated fan.  He likes his teams and is optimistic about them, but also acknowledges when they do stupid stuff.

When news broke two weekends ago that the Lakers had become serious Carmelo contenders, I couldn’t wait for Lewis’s reaction. 

We're all just as fascinated by your friends as you are, definitely.

After all, he reacted to last March’s Marian Gaborik trade as if his Kings had just acquired Gretzky again — I figured Carmelo would rank highly on the Gaborik Reaction Scale. 

Turns out, Lewis isn't a fucking dunce.

Instead, here’s the email exchange we had.

FASCINATING.

Me: Are u officially in Carmelo mode?
Lewis: God no. Hope he goes to the Knicks.

Isn't this what you want from your sportswriters, everyone?  Word for word transcriptions of completely unremarkable emails containing no original or entertaining ideas about stuff happening in the world of sports?

Wait a second … my rationally irrational Lakers buddy didn’t want Carmelo?

SURE LOOKS THAT WAY.  Holy shit, this is horrendous and we're not even halfway through my first post about it, which will probably be one of four or five by the time I'm done.

Me: You don’t mean that.
Lewis: It’s a bandaid on a broken arm. It locks them up with no flexibility for two years until Kobe goes.

Why is Lewis friends with Bill?  He's too smart for that.

He didn’t want Carmelo Anthony??? On the Lakers???

MORE REPEATED PUNCTUATION PLEASE!  I LIKE MY SPORTSWRITING TO LOOK LIKE IT WAS DRAFTED BY A 12 YEAR OLD GIRL!!!!!!!

I surfed a few Lakers blogs and message boards and found similar ambivalence. Some fans wanted him, others didn’t understand the point. Many felt like the rationally irrational Lewis — they wanted the Lakers to land a top-five lottery pick (if it’s lower than that, it goes to Phoenix), wipe Nash’s expiring contract off their cap, then make a run at the Kevins (Love in 2015, Durant in 2016). 

They'd rather take that very sensible path, than sign a guy who hasn't won shit in his career, plays the same kind of game Kobe does, and is on the wrong side of 30?  Those lunatics!

That’s a smart plan, except (a) they could easily stink and STILL lose that 2015 lottery pick, 

Definitely a reason not to tank.  Like Bill always says: you never want to tank in the NBA, you always want to be mediocre.  Definitely don't do what you can to win the lottery, because it's way too risky to try that.

(b) Love will probably get traded this season (and might like his new team), 

I "love" (lol!) the spin here.  Love is a free agent after this season, which is why Laker fans are hoping their team can sign him.  Bill's counterargument: 1) Love will probably get traded this season, which has nearly fuck-all to do with his impending offseason, and 2) assuming he does get traded, which isn't a certainty, he might want to sign an extension with his new team.  GAME, SET, MATCH.  NICE TRY, DUMMIES.  YOUR PLAN HAS BEEN POTENTIALLY MAYBE RUINED.

(c) nobody knows what Durant wants to do, 

Somehow dumber than the Love analysis.

and (d) nobody knows if the post–Dr. Buss Lakers are still a destination franchise.

Yeah, who would want to go play for the Lakers anymore?  Now that they've moved to Fargo, forfeited all their championships and history, and are owned by a mill worker who is forced to pay them their salaries in grain rather than dollars, let's face facts: it's over for that so-called "franchise."

What a fucking diptard.

And it’s not like the Lakers are loaded with assets; they have Julius Randle, the promise of future cap space, the allure of Los Angeles and that’s about it. 

MAY NOT EVEN BE A DESTINATION FRANCHISE ANYMORE.

They’re owned by Jimmy Boy Buss. They owe Kobe $23.5 million this season and $25 million next season — nearly 40 percent of their cap — without even knowing if he can play at a high level anymore. 

Say he can't.  What's the consequence to a 2015 free agent?  You spend one season on a team that features an HOFer in his final season, and then you free up some cap room to go after more good players in the summer of 2016.  What a frightening prospect.  Clearly, signing 30 year old Carmelo is a much better idea.

The best asset on that side of Staples Center is probably Ramona Shelburne’s reporting for ESPN.com; she’s better than anyone on their actual team. The Lakers may have switched bodies with the Clippers two years ago and we just haven’t realized it yet.

Seems unlikely.

Knowing that, how could any Lakers fan not want one of the best scoring forwards in NBA history? 

For all the fifty reasons we've been over so far?

Why weren’t Knicks fans freaking out that they might lose their franchise player for nothing? 

Because they've watched him do a whole lot of scoring and a whole lot of nothing else in three seasons, including going 7-14 in the playoffs in the much weaker of the two conferences?

Why were so many Bulls fans (and I know three of them) 

I DON'T HATE THE BULLS!  I HAVE THREE BULLS FAN FRIENDS!

saying things like “I’d love to get Melo, but I hate the thought of giving up Taj [Gibson] for him”?

Because Gibson is 3/4ths the player Melo is for 1/3rd the price, and the Bulls already added a scorer in Paul Gasol?

How did Carmelo Anthony, only 30 years old and still in his prime, 

We don't need to split hairs here, but at best, I would argue that he's "very late" in his prime.

become the NBA’s most underappreciated and misunderstood player?

Probably by being an incomplete player who has won three playoff series in eleven years.

The problems start here: Carmelo Anthony is definitely better than your typical All-Star, but he’s not quite a superstar. You know what that makes him? 

What direction do you think Bill is going to take this?  If you had to guess, what kind of analogy is he going to construct?

An almost-but-not-quite-superstar. He’s not Leo DiCaprio or Will Smith — he can’t open a movie by himself. He’s more like Seth Rogen or Channing Tatum — he can open the right movie by himself. There’s a big difference.

Please stop banging your head on your keyboard/tablet.  I'm just as embarrassed for Bill as you are, but we need to finish this.

Here’s something I wrote on July 8, 2010, the day that LeBron took his talents to South Beach.

I need my NBA superstar to sell tickets, generate interest locally and nationally, single-handedly guarantee an average supporting cast 45-50 wins, and potentially be the best player on a Finals team if the other pieces are in place, which means only LeBron, Wade, Howard, Durant and Kobe qualify. There’s a level just a shade below (the Almost-But-Not-Quite-Superstar) with Steve Nash, Dirk Nowitzki, Carmelo Anthony, Brandon Roy, Chris Paul and Deron Williams. (Note: I think Derrick Rose gets there next season.) Then you have elite guys like Bosh, Pau Gasol and Amar’e Stoudemire who need good teammates to help them thrive … and if they don’t have them, you’re heading to the lottery. You know what we call these people? All-Stars.

Sorry, Portland fans — I made a mistake not telling you to take a deep breath before you read that paragraph. My bad. 

Oh man, the guy who was their team's best player back then ended up getting hurt and retiring!  I bet that was really hard for them to read about!

But exactly four years later, those levels look like this.

Superstars: LeBron, Durant.

Almost-But-Not-Quite-Superstars: Blake Griffin, Dwight Howard, Anthony Davis, Carmelo Anthony, Kevin Love, Chris Paul, Russell Westbrook, Paul George.

Watch out: super hot Paul George taeks can be read here.  REALLY, HE'S MORE LIKE JEREMY RENNER THAN CHANNING TATUM.  I'M SURE WE CAN AGREE ON THAT.

All-Stars: Stephen Curry, James Harden, LaMarcus Aldridge, Damian Lillard, Tony Parker, Tim Duncan, Dirk Nowitzki, Joakim Noah, Chris Bosh, Derrick Rose (if healthy), Rajon Rondo (if healthy), Kobe Bryant (???).

A few semi-stunned notes about that revised list. 

Quasi-mystified!

First, two true superstars 

Are those like True Yankees?

is the NBA’s lowest number since 1979, the season before Bird and Magic showed up. 

That bullshit list, and Bill's serious analysis of the bullshit list that he just bullshitted out, is even more bullshitty than bullshit.  Anyone who dares repeat this analysis in conversation with you ("Hey, did you know the NBA only has two True Superstars right now, its lowest number since 1979?") should be immediately kicked in the balls.

Second, Anthony Davis is our only superstar in waiting right now … well, unless you feel like bending the rules and counting Joel Embiid If He Stays Healthy or my illegitimate Australian son, Ben Simmons (a frighteningly gifted high schooler who looks likeBenji Wilson 2.0).

You like Anthony Davis.  We get it.  I hope you (the readers this time, not Bill) realize that if Davis continues to get better and becomes an All Star for years to come, which seems pretty likely at this point, Bill is going to talk about how he knew Davis would be good in every fucking column for the next decade?  So fun.  I'm really looking forward to it.  Only a basketball savant like Bill could tell that a five star recruit, turned NCAA tournament Most Outstanding Player, turned #1 overall draft pick would be a star.  Good for Bill.  Someone give him a condescending pat on the head for me.

Third, we’re in the middle of an under-30 talent boom that’s as loaded as any run since the early ’90s, and yet we dipped from 11 superstars and almost-but-not-quite-superstars in 2010 to 10 of those guys in 2014.

PRETTY CRAZY.  LET'S GET A ROUNDTABLE WITH COUSIN SAL, MALCOLM GLADWELL AND ZACH LOWE GOING AND MAYBE WE CAN FIGURE OUT WHY THIS DEFINITELY EXISTING AND NOT AT ALL RIDICULOUS, POINTLESS AND MADE UP TREND IS HAPPENING.

Six dropped out and five jumped in, not including Rose, who briefly careered into the superstar group in 2011 and 2012. 

NO ONE DENIES THIS!

(You also could have talked me into putting Curry, Harden and Aldridge on the Almost-But-Not-Quite-Superstar list after enough drinks.) 

But only then!  Unless you pump him full of Mike's Hard Lemonade, Bill's analysis of the True Superstar tiers remains solid and unimpeachable.

I didn’t expect that much turnover. 

Neither did anyone, because no one gives a flying donkey cunt about your list.

Four years doesn’t seem like that long of a time, right?

In the context of writing this blog and watching bad sportswriting stay bad sportswriting, let me assure you: it feels like fucking eons.

And fourth, Carmelo’s 2014 level was a tougher call than everyone else’s combined. After all, he’s made one conference finals and zero Finals. He’s never won more than 54 regular-season games or made an All-NBA first team, although he did finish third in 2013’s MVP voting (no small feat). 

ESPECIALLY FOR A NON-TRUE SUPERSTAR!

He’s made only seven All-Star teams in 11 years (two fewer than Chris Bosh). Most damning, Carmelo has lost nearly twice as many playoff games as he has won: 23 wins, 44 losses. 

It's 22 wins, 44 losses.  Really not that hard to check the "GP" column on basketballreference.com and see whether your numbers add up.

You can’t even use the whole “Look, Carmelo can drag any mediocre team to 44 wins and the playoffs!” argument anymore — not after last season.

Exactly.  Although he was very awesome last year, it wasn't even enough to MAKE the playoffs in a putrid division in a putrid conference--and you think that with the right team, that includes no one who's better than him, you're winning a title?  Keep fucking dreaming.

So what’s left? Can’t we downgrade him to All-Star and be done with it? Isn’t 11 years enough time to know — to truly, unequivocally know — whether it’s with television shows, music groups, girlfriends, quarterbacks or basketball players?

The first two: who the fuck knows, and why are we talking about them?  The third: I certainly hope so.  The fourth: eh, probably, although there is Kurt Warner.  The fifth: fucking DEFINITELY.

For me, it keeps coming back to one question: Can you win the NBA championship if Carmelo Anthony is your best player?

The short answer: Yes.

You can.

One sentence paragraphs.

No one does them quite like Bill Plaschke.

Who is a fucking moron.

Like Bill.

More later.