Transactions

Transactions 4/4-4/30 (Coaching/Management Edition)

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Charlotte Bobcats 

4/27    Relieve Sam Vincent of head coaching duties

4/29    Name Larry Brown head coach 

Weird times in Charlotte.  Firing your handpicked coach after a single season can never be considered a good thing and this is the second time Michael Jordan has done this (see Hamilton, Leonard in Washington).  Vincent didn’t seem horrible from afar, though it wasn’t clear why he needed to play Jeff McInnis so much (though it also wasn’t clear why the GM even put McInnis on the roster).  Still, Brown is a vast improvement and is much more likely to make this team competitive.  Having said that, Brown is sure to despise most of this roster.  Brown is hard on good point guards, so Raymond Felton is going to really feel some pain.  It seems that he will probably ride Emeka Okafor, Gerald Wallace, and Jared Dudley hard (his type of players).  Jason Richardson will also make an interesting test case and I shudder to see Brown watch Adam Morrison play (the polar opposite of a Brown player).  He can play but he is shot happy (7.3 threes attempted per game last year).  Brown is sure to change that.  Finally, I don’t anticipate quite as Brown having as many problems with MJ  as he did with Isiah Thomas.  True, Jordan and Isiah both seem like bad GMs but MJ has not been quite the meddler that Isiah was in New York.  Brown will likely be given a free reign by Jordan early on.  At the very least, there are now several reasons to pay attention to the Bobcats…

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Playoff Thoughts

Playoff Thoughts

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1.    Philly-Detroit:    When Philly took game one, I considered this a complete aberration.  Imagine my surprise to see the Sixers beat up the Pistons in game 3 to put the Pistons in a seriously defensive posture.  Yes, Philly matches up well at the point against Chauncey Billups because Andre Miller was playing well and couldn’t be overpowered by Billups’ size.  But the Sixers’ front court really can’t match up the depth the Pistons offer.  The Pistons also have a demonstrated history of dropping round one games to inferior teams but never losing series.  In fact, a year-by-year review of Detroit’s first round history in the 2000s bears this out:

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Playoff Thoughts

Playoff Thoughts

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1.    Recurring Matchups:    While watching the Cavs eviscerate the Wizards last night, I found myself a little bored.  Not just because the game had little competition but also because we’ve seen a bit more Wiz-Cavs than I need to see.  The two teams had a pretty entertaining playoff series in 2005-06 (that the Cavs won 4-2).  Last year, the Wiz were hurt and got shlumped by the Cavs 4-0 in the first round. Now, we are seeing a not too exciting series for the third straight year.  The first game wasn’t bad but this is not a match up, even when competitive, that really sparks the imagination. 

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Playoff Thoughts, Previews

More Playoff Predictions and Musings

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The past couple of seasons I’ve done the playoff preview by breaking down each team and how they played with or without a particular player, since a trade or for the final two months, etc. My point was to look for a sleeper team that might be somewhat underrated going in, the way Detroit was in 2004. That method usually didn’t find much, produced some mixed results and was too time-consuming for me to complete this year, so I wanted to change things up and simply try to defend my pre-season picks of Phoenix beating Boston in the Finals.

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Playoff Thoughts

Playoff Predictions with Kyle Wright

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Usually when we look at the playoffs, it’s pretty easy to discern the front runners and the also-rans.  Each year the question was whether the Spurs would win it all or whether their one nemesis (usually Dallas or Phoenix) could knock them off.  This year, however, it’s clear that the West is wide open.  The Spurs look like they are on pretty much equal footing with every other Western Conference team.   This creates fun and uncertainty.  Making predictions, however, is not such a reliable practice because so little separates the Western teams.  But our good friend Kyle Wright, the author of “The NBA Top to Bottom” took a crack at it.  Kyle, who has used his formula to rank every NBA team of All-Time from first to last, update his rankings for the 2007-08 season.  Without further ado, here is how the playoffs go based upon Kyle’s work:

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NBA Draft

NBA Draft Update: Post NCAA Tournament

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Another update on the prospect rankings I’ve been doing each month. This is the first one where I made an adjustment for pace. This had some effect, most notably with the North Carolina and Duke players who were all downgraded some because of the quick pace they play the game at.  These ratings are a quick and dirty look at which college players compare most favorably to successful prospects of the past. They’re very objective, except for my top 60 at the bottom. My top 60 won’t match up well with other mocks around the web. I think we agree that Beasley and Rose are excellent prospects and Tyler Hansbrough isn’t. Other than that there are a lot of differences. That makes sense, because what I do is done almost strictly from a stats angle.

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