Ty Thomas and LaMarcus Aldridge Revisited

by Ed Weiland

These two players will always be linked and compared. They play the same position, came into the league through the same draft and were dealt for each other the night of that draft. While Aldridge was chosen before Thomas, most stat guys like me felt Thomas had the much better future at the time. This was my bottom line opinions of the two players going into the draft: 

Thomas: The draft is weak, but I believe Tyrus Thomas is the best player available and the one player who has the best chance to become a perennial all-star. 

Aldridge: But right now Aldridge is just a good college player who isn’t producing enough on the court that I’d consider him a good NBA prospect. Right now he looks like a player who will spend his career backing up at PF and center around the league. Continue reading Ty Thomas and LaMarcus Aldridge Revisited…

Attendance Review

by Harlan Schreiber

As we slog through the non-basketball portion of the year, we like to shift gears and look at different subjects.  Something that had interested me is the NBA’s standing in terms of economics and popularity.  Based upon the reports that the NBA salary cap will be lowered the next few seasons, it seems pretty clear that the NBA revenues are not growing.  I was wondering whether this dip in revenues was reflected in attendance.  Thanks to Basketball-Reference.com we have some readily accessible attendance data.  For fun, I took the attendance of each franchise from the start of this decade (2000-01) and again in mid-decade (2004-05), finally also adding this last season (2008-09), to see the progression of attendance.  It’s an interesting sampling because the NBA was pretty popular in 2000-01 and the U.S. was still riding in the stock market bubble, while in 2004-05 and 2008-09 are very different times as well.   Continue reading Attendance Review…

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