WMC 24-25: What To WMC About Now? PLAYOFF TIME!

When the chips are down this team will mentally crumble. never being able to rise to the level needed for these kind of celebration games just frustrates me. Nights like this I really miss watching not just Kobe and Magic out but their supporting casts out there. Win or lose I never felt like the moment was too big for those guys.

 

Gotta be like 0-100 or something

 

No pride, no class.

 

This team sucks. They weren't a contender before the deadline & Luke Kennard isn't going to propel us to a contender. Anybody who had any thoughts of this team competing for a championship, I got some locks on the NBA tomorrow, cashapp me the money first, please.

 

I’m not even asking for a championship this year. I just want a team that plays hard and acts like it cares

 

so you're saying there's no chance?

 

We clutch though

 

Coaching problem? I thought we hired a young Pat Riley

 

when you GOAT doesn't get back on D, and nothing happens to him, it's bad for morale. This is what we've signed up for, but I'm hoping we don't for next season. This season feels punted, but there's time to turn it around. You never know who turns up on the buyout market I suppose.

 

GL with this team doing those things.

 

what are other teams' records vs. +.500, though?

i looked it up, and it's (unsurprisingly) the difference between the top 3 seeds in each conference and everyone else. only the pistons (18-6!), thunder (18-10), spurs (19-11), and interestingly, boston (17-12) and houston (15-10) have convincingly positive records against +.500 teams, and it's clear that det/okc/sas are the top teams in the league at this point.

the knicks are 17-15, nuggets 13-13, wolves 12-14. i think us and the nuggets could probably both argue that we've had enough injury issues to warrant some consideration, and i think we're basically in the knicks/wolves tier overall, which is sort of what i expected before the season. the big surprises to me were det and SA making their leaps a little faster than i thought. but i expected houston/denver/okc to be clearly better than us, and they are.

i have no idea how boston is doing this well, and that's my wmc. it's probably an argument for mazulla as COY, tbh. they're starting neemias queta and playing baylor scheierman real nba minutes. it's amazing, tbh.

 

I think that’s what’s driving me over the wall. I don’t fear a single guy on that Boston roster and they thoroughly whooped us and are playing well.

 

The C Bags have a legit basketball program and we do not. From the front office down through the coaching staff and the players, they're all on the same page in terms of how they want to play. The guys they bring in adapt to an established basketball culture. We don't have that.

 

i'm hopeful we can get to that under the new ownership, and honestly, with lebron and klutch no longer running things.

 

This is why the Lakers are going nowhere fast…unwatchable stuff, LeBron is no longer capable of defending a full possession. Just stays where he is and doesn’t rotate, can’t have that in addition to Austin and Luka athleticism deficits

 

I do too. When we were interested in hiring Hurley, and then when we got some of the initial remarks about hiring JJ, I thought this was the direction we were going. I do think the plan at the time was to get off of AD pretty quickly (had the Luka opportunity never arisen, I think he may have been shipped out last summer), which would probably have caused LeBron to depart last summer as well. Then we would pivot to a full rebuild like we had from 2014-2018, only this time with Walter and a more professional front office in place to start implementing this new culture. JJ would have a blank canvas to implement his preferred play-style (true-5 offense, switch-heavy defense) and the built-out front office would scour the earth to bring in players that fit that mold given the relative lack of assets.

The Luka trade, and to a lesser degree Austin's continued improvement, changed all of that. We went right into another win-now window with a superstar that functions best within a different style of play.