2024-2025 NBA Season - In Bronny We Trust

Urlithani said:

I haven't watched a single game but I'm gonna have to root for Indiana.

In 3 finals games Tyrese Halliburton has over 50 points and 0 free throw attempts? That's just fishy as hell.

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He averages three per game on the season. He had about 10 games this season with 0 free throws, including a three game streak. He's not some SGA style penetrating scorer.

DickTrickle said:

He averages three per game on the season. He had about 10 games this season with 0 free throws, including a three game streak. He's not some SGA style penetrating scorer.

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You mean he’s not a SGA/Brunson foul merchant.

Nobody is looking at him angrily to warrant free throws. Unlike FGA who's probably got 1/3 or the entire league's free throws (while Jokic has to settle with "only" 1/3 of the entire league's tripple-doubles that isn't even worthy of being listed at the league's stats page).

My issue with a lot of the narratives around fixing is that the refs in NBA games are some of the worst in televised sports history. NFL is the only reasonable contender, and they are miles below the "It's not travelling until I think it is, regardless of steps." or "That's clearly a shooting foul when I think it is, until I think it isn't even though the shooter got roughed in both cases."

I don't think it's actually fixed, but we have instant replay technology. The refs should just call attention to potential things if they see them, and then replay needs to look at an aggregate of the game as well as the incident itself and compare the concepts. Every time a player calls attention to a play, instant replay should be able to look and determine if it was or was not a problematic play. We shouldn't be giving so much leeway to humans who are prone to make mistakes. Or be obviously biased.

Penalize players for calling foul when no foul (via instant replay) occurred. Negate calls frequently when the ref is clearly retarded. We have the technology.

Yeah, but when is when? According to players, always. Although in the finals so far it wasn't a problem, throughout the playoffs it was annoying watching constant demands for a challenge/review by the players, and too often it was BS (call was obviously ok).
Maddafakkas, mixmax your basketball, not everything else around it. We've had it enough with numerous time-outs, now we also have to suffer extended time-outs.
Refs are shit, won't argue that, and biased. And afaik there's some kind of scoring system in place for them, and they get $$ penalized if they eff up too much, but obviously it isn't enough.

Harshaw said:

I haven't watched NBA since Shaq was still playing. I saw this clip and she really is fucking impressive. I don't know where the fuck Angel Reese even thinks she's anywhere near her level.

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Honestly it's ESPN's fault. Their stake in the WNBA means they have to try and amp up the sport in any way possible. The college "rivalry" where Angel's team beat Caitlin's team (even though Caitlin carried the team in the game) was basically one game and a viral moment that ESPN cranked up to 11 and posted almost as much as they do about Aaron Rodgers. The two are drastically different players at very different skill levels in different positions. It doesn't even make sense to compare them in most cases, but it's obvious Reese is objectively inferior in almost every way compared to Caitlin.

And fuck ESPN specifically for spamming this trash constantly and now I know something about women's sports. Whatever part of my brain had to be emptied in order to soak that nonsense up is absolutely worse for it.

Harshaw said:

I haven't watched NBA since Shaq was still playing. I saw this clip and she really is fucking impressive. I don't know where the fuck Angel Reese even thinks she's anywhere near her level.

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The Angel Reese hate is warranted. There's apparently some sports betting group that does a prop bet every game on the under for when she'll miss her first shot and they've made a ton of money. She had a game recently where she got like five rebounds on one possession all from her own misses. Insane work.

Watching all her mebounds, it's like she's not even trying to make the shot but playing hot potato instead.

Since most of the WNBA is kind of inept comparatively, I could see that actually being a legit strat for eating up the clock if you are ahead and there's not a lot left in the game.

Granted it's kind of unintentional - she's just a really bad shooter.

The worst part about the constant foul calls is how badly it slows down the flow of the game. SGA and players who constantly play 40+ minutes a game benefit hugely from the constant foul calls that slow the game down, not only the shooting fouls.

The refs will be bad eternally, and only get worse, because the NBA decided to go all-in on basketball American "streetball" from the hoods of NYC and Chicago decades ago. They stopped calling over the back, 3 second violations, palming, moving screens, and travelling because playing basketball by the rules is hard and the pace of the game is slowed. You have to execute as a team instead of going 1 on 1 as much. This is only exacerbated by the NBA wanting everything to be exciting and so they instruct the refs to allow violation and fouls that don't "affect the ball handler" or "gain an advantage". Smart players realized this (starting with the white Euro players familiar with similar lax rules in soccer) and so they started flopping and exaggerating contact to take advantage of the ridiculousness. It is a death spiral of lack of rule enforcement leading to worse play leading to further lack of enforcement. This doesn't even touch on the completely fucking retarded concept of "physical playoff basketball" that comes at us in the post season where they allow so much excessive contact that it might as well be a completely different sport than the regular season.