Game Threads Index (October 01, 2022):

“Me…Draymond and probably Giannis, three guys who can literally guard 1-through-5 and be effective.”

• Bam Adebayo

Are u guys agree ? Who else or the list is it ?

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Rewatching the NBA finals and Wiggins defense on Tatum was fucking elite. I’ve shared these numbers before and it has me wondering why Bridges was a first team all defender and Wiggins got no consideration?

Mikal Bridges: 1.6 stocks / 5.9 contested shots / 46.1% opponent FG% / +0.9 DefRAPTOR

Andrew Wiggins: 1.7 stocks / 8.4 contested shots / 43.4% opponent FG% / +1.9 DefRAPTOR

(Wiggins also contested the most threes in the league this year. The two drew the same number of offensive fouls and grabbed the same number of defensive rebounds. Bridges has the edge in Deflections, though, 2.0 to 1.2)

The warriors had the second best defense in the league (albeit Phoenix was 3), even while draymond missed 33 games. Wiggins was the best defender on the team during that stretch. Confusing why bridges got all this attention during the season and Wiggins didn’t? Weird how narratives start but Andrew opened peoples eyes in the playoffs. Let’s hope the people that have voted start paying attention this year.

Tonight, the Seattle Mariners defeated the Oakland A's 2-1, clinching their first playoff berth since 2001. In doing so, they ended the longest postseason drought in the big 4.

With the Mariners streak ended, the new owners of the longest drought are the Sacramento Kings, who have not appeared in the postseason since 2006. The Kings’ streak is not just the longest active drought in the big 4, it is also the longest drought in NBA history.

This is Jrue’s age 32 season

Middleton’s age 31 season

Lopez’s age 34 season

None of these guys are ancient but there’s also the issue that the Bucks don’t have many good young guys to develop to fill in the gaps. As we saw with the Warriors, you can definitely win with an older core, but you need younger guys to push you through the regular season and to develop for further contention. Poole and Wiggins were big parts of the Warriors run and led them in total minutes in the regular season.

The Warriors also have hope of contending for much longer imo since they have at least 3 young guys with pretty big potential on the roster to replace, for example, Klay if he falls off early.

After we saw Damian Jones take a corner 3, @jovanbuha asked if Darvin Ham about his confidence in Jones' range. He said he trusts Jones' shooting so far.

"If I have Robin Lopez making 3s, I’m sure I can make Damian Jones to make 3s."

Adds: "I love Robin. Miss you too, Brook."

From Kyle Goon

https://twitter.com/kylegoon/status/1576292380075884544

Poor Darvin is going to be the scapegoat but really liking him as a coach

The Warriors-Lakers game on October 18 is the second most expensive regular season NBA game of all-time, according to @TickPick. The average purchase price is $897. The only game more expensive was Kobe Bryant’s last game in 2016, which had an average purchase price of $1,137.

https://twitter.com/ArashMarkazi/status/1576064097551908864 This doesn’t make any sense. What would cause this game to be so expensive?

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The teams for the five-on-five game mentioned below were:

Team 1 — Cole Anthony, Terrence Ross, Chuma Okeke, Admiral Schofield and Mo Bamba

Team 2 — Jalen Suggs, Franz Wagner, Paolo Banchero, Bol Bol, Wendell Carter Jr.

Cole says his team won, 8-2

Clip included in tweet

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Wendell Carter says they tried out a frontline of Paolo Banchero, Bol Bol and Carter in today's practice.

Added that coach Mosley has emphasized they can all be positionless and that Bol's the best shooter among the bigs.

Clip included in tweet

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Disclaimer: training camp/preseason is a time teams experiment with different lineups. Lineups played during this time aren't guaranteed to be used later.

Seems like there's some fun experimenting happening in Orlando

A lot has been said about LeBron never actually recording his iconic 27/7/7 stat line. That got me wondering who actually has achieved that.

Turns out 4,373 games like that have actually been recorded, out of over 1.5M statlines ever recorded, about 1 every 330 stat lines. Most of those are, as you might imagine, end of bench guys who average 0/0/0 or 2/1/0 for their careers. I don't care about those games, and neither should you. So I arbitrarily whittled the list down to players whose career averages (rounded to the nearest whole number) add up to at least 16. This gave me a list of 1,014 games in which an at least semi-recognizable player recorded a regular season game exactly matching their career averages.

(Source: All data from basketball-reference, scraped using the Python package Beautiful Soup)

Who has recorded their average the most times?

Ben Wallace recorded his career average of 6 points, 10 rebounds, and 1 assist, a whopping nine (9) times in his 1088 game career.

Not far behind are:
- Taj Gibson: 7 games of 9/6/1/0
- Hakeem Olajuwon: 6 games of 22/11/2
- Allan Houston: 6 games of 17/3/2
- Brian Winters: 6 games of 16/3/4

Which of the elite stat-getters have done this?

Other Current Stars:

Who did this most recently?

Miles Bridges matched his career average of 13/6/2 and Dwight Howard recorded 16/12/1, each on April 7th, 2022. Both are un-signed right now for very, very different reasons.

The One-Hit Wonder

Believe it or not, a player with one career game played, actually managed to meet the PTS+REB+AST criteria. That man was Elijah Bryant of the Milwaukee Bucks in May 2021. Bryant recorded 16/6/3 (and played some garbage time playoff minutes en route to a ring) but hasn't played another regular season game, making that his career average. He is literally the best Bryant in NBA history based on only this criteria.

What should we do with this information?

I'm pretty sure this makes Ben Wallace the GOAT, with Taj Gibson as his runner up. Feel free to correct me.