2015-2016 NBA Regular Season - MDA to HOU - All-NBA - Harden snubbed - Anthony Davis is broke

sea manup said:

 
there was a thread about why anyone would want to live in cLeveLand and the #1 "reason" cLeveLanders gave for why cLeveLand is great is because you get to learn to live in a city without any opportunities. 

who was that one mod from the Land who was more insecure than a 8th grade girl? 

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This imprecision extends to the box score, where it's not hard to find home cooking at work. In his Motor City heyday, Ben Wallace somehow blocked a generous 653 shots in Detroit but just 458 on the road. More recently, Anthony Davis, in his first All-Star season, averaged 3.7 blocks at home and just 1.9 on the road. The Hornets averaged a whopping 5.0 more assists per game at home from 1994 through 2002.

Commissioner Adam Silver, czar of the uniquely technocratic NBA, is not wired for this kind of fuzzy math. When he took over for David Stern two years ago, he made a series of changes to sharpen the NBA's measurements. For the 2013-14 season, the league partnered with Stats LLC and installed SportVU player-tracking cameras in every arena. Now player speed, distance traveled and acceleration can all be cataloged and chewed on by data-crazed NBA fans and teams. The cameras even track potential assists. (Sorry, Charlotte!) To help dig into the mountain of data, the league office hired Harvard graduate Jason Rosenfeld as director of basketball analytics in the summer of 2014. The following March, the league began its first systematic public assessment of referees, publishing "Last Two Minutes" officiating reports.

More quietly, in 2014 Silver hired a sports science institute called P3 Applied Sports Science to modernize the league's draft combine. Beyond using tape measures, P3 puts players through a series of movements assessed by high-tech force plates embedded in the floor and cameras shooting from multiple angles, all feeding data into laptops. The founder, Dr. Marcus Elliott, says P3 asks not just how high do you jump but also how do you land and how high and how quickly can you jump a second time. The goal is to find patterns that predict injury. If a player lands on his right leg with disproportionately more force than his left, for example, that might be a signal of weakness in his left ankle. Even the smallest hitch in a player's running pattern could, over time, create a chain reaction of physical breakdowns, a human butterfly effect.

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It was a twist of the knee that helped Leonard fulfill that vision. During his second NBA season in 2012, Leonard was sidelined for 18 games with quadriceps tendinitis near his left knee. That offseason, the Spurs sent him to P3 to assess his vastus medialis, a teardrop-shaped muscle in the quads that powers the knee joint. "They focus on trying to balance out your body," Leonard explains. "You don't train there. I learned more about the body."

When P3's evaluation showed imbalances from his injury -- the particulars of which P3 refused to reveal to ESPN -- Leonard and Shelton devoted that summer to ensuring his quads weren't just strong but symmetrically and multidirectionally strong. "Most players are linear; they can run in a straight line and jump vertically," Shelton says. "But with Kawhi, we focus on perfecting change of direction."

His transformation was underway, and Leonard attacked it with zeal. Shelton, who works out the forward almost every summer in San Diego, says the practice court is where Leonard comes alive, morphing from the quietest player on the NBA's most media-averse team to a 230-pound blabbermouth: Why are we doing this? Where are we supposed to go with this? How's my form? Are my feet right? Is my weight distribution OK? How does my back look?

Indeed, P3's computers do only so much -- gleaning an athlete's movements through body sensors and superimposing those atop "ideal" movement patterns. It pays off only to the extent that a player can, over time, groove new habits. Shelton says Leonard, obsessed with achieving flawless precision, is, in that way, the perfect student: "Kawhi loves the analytics side, loves to look at everything, wants to know. That's the beauty about it."

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651akathePaul said:

Never would've guessed Dana Barros is third on the list of consecutive games with a 3-pointer made.


Korver 127
Steph 127
Barros 89

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Big J 33 said:

Great article on Portland's success this season..

http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/14841512/portland-trail-blazers-new-formula-success


 

"Almost everyone on the roster is young, and that's created a competitive environment," McCollum said. "Every one of us has something to prove, so everyone is working hard. That's great for our culture, especially for a young team."

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This is a happy team, yet also a professional outfit with a blend of Lillard's seriousness and puppy energy. In recent months, the training facility has become one-part workplace, one-part clubhouse, where guys hang out before and after practice.



On Monday afternoon following practice, McCollum sat by the court and scanned the floor. He landed on Meyers Leonard
 -- who had already finished his work but stayed to watch teammates Aminu, Maurice Harkless
 and Gerald Henderson
 put up shots -- with some requisite good-natured trash talk.



"Practice is over. That guy could be home, but he's staying here," McCollum said of Leonard.

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"The plan was never to tank," general manager Neil Olshey said. "Damian and C.J. and three guys from ClubSport
 could win 20 games. There was never going to be any bottoming out; there was going to be development. Our job was to make sure anyone who was on the floor had a long-term impact on this organization. That's what we've done. We've brought in quality, undervalued players we believed would complement them, and they have begun to thrive in our system and our culture."

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 Quote:

With an allowance to experiment and measured expectations for the season, the staff drew up pick-and-roll defensive schemes that extended pressure all over the floor. This was a 180 from the preferred coverage when Aldridge and Robin Lopez
 were manning the frontcourt. Rather than dropping into the paint, the young big men would stay up on pick-and-rolls.



Such a scheme requires agility, a strong suit of the young Portland big men. But it's complicated stuff, which is why young teams tend to struggle defensively and relatively unathletic teams like San Antonio can lead the world in defensive efficiency on the strength of their collective experience.

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Murkn3m said:

Uncharted byke

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slysniperwolf said:

amel223 said:

Lol D Rose and Lebron's chances of winning the chip is pretty much the same until the warriors gets disbanded or something.

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Lmao yea right. You wish. Lebrons chances of winning will always be way above that loser d-rose.


Keep riding the Warriors team and forgeting your team has been cheeks the last few years.
Lebron Takes them out every time. [emoji]128514[/emoji]

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bronconation24 said:

@ Harrison Barnes turning down all that money

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amel223 said:

I'm sure everyone in the Warriors rotation will be compensated. That franchise can't be lacking in dough.

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Silverbackhoney said:

Heh Cleveland videos.
Seth Rollins one? Anyone?
Peep?

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