Seano

C'mon Diesel, this is nothing but pure speculation on your part. If you had some kind of concrete evidence that such a thing might occur, that would be one thing- but this is based on nothing other than your own speculations as to what 'could' happen. Yeah sure, that could happen, and Angelina Jolie might leave Brad Pitt in favor of me, but I would say the odds of either happening are slim to none.

Yeah, you've gotta love that. I always root especially hard for players like that. It was very easy to root for the Mavs, cause JT, Kidd and Dirk are all good guys like that as opposed to those peckerheads down in Miami, acting all of about 12 years old what with all the fake coughing and carrying on like that. Really happy to see the good guys win here.

Yep. Congrats to Jet, JKidd and Dirk. It's nice to see all those guys getting a ring after all these years, and the fact they beat Miami to do it just makes it all the more sweet far as I'm concerned. Bosh to me is the most tolerable of the 3 stars in Miami, being the least arrogant of the three, the quietest and the most down to earth and very possibly the most intelligent, while LeBron and Wade are just insufferably cocky and arrogant, so I was very pleased to see them get their comeuppance like that. The guy I feel for if any would be Bibby, as he gave up 6M+ in salary next season in his attempt to get a ring. But that's the risk ya take I guess, and he knew that going in. No guarantees in life, none at all.

I'll take JJ Barea. This guy seems to have a knack for making really big plays, and seeing how he's done lately, it doesn't surprise me that the Mavericks were so resistant to trading him off in any deal. Unless something drastically changes to the otherwise, he is the heir apparent to Jason Kidd at PG for the Mavs. I needed a 3 point shooter, and he'll do just fine.

I don't know what metric they're using to judge best sports towns by, but I'd have to question Dallas being included in that group, at least when it comes to the Cowboys. I'm a lifelong Cowboys fan, and Cowboys fans are very well-known for their passive natures and for sitting on their hands during games, whereas other stadiums will get so freaking loud it's truly deafening. A lot of the Dallas fans are rich older people who have been attending games for decades, and that might partially explain their reserved behavior and the sedate atmosphere at the games. Still though, it's highly disturbing to see Shittsburgh fans taking over the stadium whenever the Squeelers come to town, and you see all that godawful black and yellow all over the place and despite them being in the minority, they're still much louder than the Cowboys fans in the Cowboys own stadium! I've noticed Cowboys fans have been much louder and seemed much more into it at the new stadium though thankfully, so maybe the shabbiness of old Texas Stadium was lulling the fans to sleep or something. But speaking of the Steelers, I absolutely despise that team, but I do have to admit their fans are amongst the best and most devoted in the entire league, and they will travel en masse to wherever their boys are playing and just take over opponents stadiums and are just louder than hell and TOTALLY behind their team.

Thanks, man. Yeah, Nicholas has been notified. I hate to see ngc passed over, but you're right. We should probably keep this thing moving.

Ok. Well I guess I'll take David West then, and I am really, REALLY surprised to see him still on the board at this point. Between Aldridge, Millsap and West I am absolutely stacked at the PF position and perhaps ridiculously so, but like I say it's very hard for me to pass on these players and especially when I consider them to be great value picks. Plus, assuming there's trading allowed with this, that gives me trading possibilities maybe. Anyway, David West is a heck of a player. He is long, long, LONG and has got a beautiful fadeaway mid-range jumper from about 16-20 feet that is absolutely unblockable due to his length. He's also one of those players who takes pride in his defensive efforts even more than he takes in his offensive game, for example being the 'go to' guy to match up against Kevin Durant. He's a very good player, very consistent, averaging between 18.9 and 21 PPG over the past four seasons while shooting over 50% in the past two seasons and in the mid to upper 80% range from the FT line and averaging from 8-9 rebounds per game, and that fadeaway J is so sweet that I would hesitate one moment to see him taking the last shot with the game on the line.

It's a really tough call to make. Do you trade your iconic but aging face of the franchise, even though he was still an effective player and his team was quite good? I'm sure what they were thinking at the time was that the team had gone as far as it possibly could with Dominique as its centerpiece player, and given his age and what could only be an accelerated rate of declining production, they made the best deal they could. And like Capstone said, had we re-signed Manning, we might be looking at this thing in an entirely different light today.

Interesting. I like the idea of a Gasol trade, at least in theory. If we were to trade Joe, in my opinion that would be one of the most palatable ways for us to get out from underneath his contract and still get a hell of a player in return. The Monta Ellis trade, I'm not nearly so high on.

You're welcome. You should be happy with your draft, as you've done well and so has everyone really. No one's really whiffed their drafts so far, and I give kudos to everyone for sticking with it through what's been coming up on two weeks now. The next logical step once this draft is finished is to find some way to play it out somehow, and on that note I'm going to take a look at some basketball sims and see if there's not some way we can sim a whole season with our given teams going head to head. I mean voting on the teams is great, but that's something which is entirely subjective and arbitrary- and beyond that I'm kind of attached to my team already and I'd love to find some way to play this out. That would be wicked fun, and I want to try and take down the Dieselputer along with all the rest of ya, heh! :biggrin:

Good pick on Lee. Looks like you've got a complete team there.

I see nuttin at all wrong with Dallas playing the zone, even if that's a tacit admission that they are over-matched trying to play man against Miami. The reality is that they ARE over-matched trying to play man against the damn Super Friends. They simply cannot match up to the Heat's quickness. What they're doing with that zone is protecting the paint (and protecting Chandler from fouling out) and forcing Miami to shoot it from outside, they're slowing the tempo down, and in switching between zone and man they're doing their best to keep the Heat off-balance. I say whatever it takes to win, do it, and they are. There is nothing at all wrong with that, especially given how every team in basketball is at a distinct disadvantage to the Heat and their three stars.

Shark tank, eh? That's funny. I read that and totally got an image in my head of Joe trying to jump the shark. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDthMGtZKa4

Heh. We can only hope, and then maybe next on Marvin's agenda should be a heart transplant.

Well I don't think it's so much that people don't want him, but rather they don't want to trade Josh for him. At least that's where I'm at. And yes he is an upgrade over Jamal, but Jamal is here, and we don't have to trade off one of our better players in order to get him. All it would take to keep Jamal here is money.

Yep. Agree 100%.

You can put Monta down as one of the poster children for why 2nd round picks DO matter.

I'm not really all that down with any Monta Ellis trade for the reasons that have been stated in this thread, namely that he is a shoot first guy who if his shot isn't falling will kill ya, because he brings very little else to the table. I would hate to trade someone like Smoove for that, and Horford???? That's just laughable, as in NO FRICKEN WAY. It's just highly ironic to me that we could have had this guy for nothing more than the cost of a 2nd round pick. We brought Monta in prior to the 2005 draft and were supposedly quite high on him as being one of the best pure shooters in the draft, but BK elected to go with the bigger and much more seasoned Salim Stoudamire at #31, and Ellis went nine picks later to the Warriors, and now we're talking about trading one of our better players for a guy we could have had for virtually nothing at all. I can't really fault BK on that one though. Well I can, but I won't. The main reason Monta lasted that long was his size, as he was seriously tiny coming out of high school in Mississippi. I mean the dude probably weighed 160 pounds max dripping wet, and there were lots and lots of doubts about the ability for his body to hold up given the rigors of the NBA game.

Ok. I will take Paul Millsap. I'm all about the front court depth, and there is no way I could pass on such a quality big man at this point in the draft. If I did, I would kick myself! He is the exact type of player that I was hoping Shelden Williams would become, because they pretty much mirror each other physically. They've got the same size, same height, same build, but Millsap obviously is just on an entirely different level so far as being a basketball player goes. He's another high energy guy, good rebounder, good shooter (career .528 FG%) and he is what I would consider to be a very good defensive player. He's heady and heads-up and actually led the Jazz in steals this season, which you probably don't see too often from the PF position. This was his first season as a full-time starter, and he became a true Mr. Reliability for the Jazz throughout all the drama going on with the team, so much so that you could pretty much mark him down 17-20 points and 7-10 rebounds every game. He even hit on 39% of his 3 point attempts this season. I like him a lot. I think he's a hell of player, and he's only 26 years old.

Oh I think your team is all right. I like the Dorell Wright pick a lot, especially as the 64th pick in the draft. I'd say that's a pretty serious bargain right there. Ed Davis is still really young, but he could turn into a good one. He's pretty skilled offensively already, and I like that left-handed shot. He's also got natural shot-blocking abilities and a knack for rebounding the ball, so he might develop into a pretty damn good player someday. Sheesh, I was wondering when Bargnani was gonna go! I will make my pick by 7 AM and likely much sooner. I'm kind of right in the middle of something right now.

No way are second round picks worthless. There are productive players chosen every season in the second round, and sometimes even star players. You just have to commit to developing them and playing them through all their ups and downs, similar to how the Spurs do it with their young and lowly drafted players. Not every second rounder is going to be a player obviously, just as not every lotto pick will, but you should be able to teach these guys to play and at the very least man the end of an NBA bench. And yeah, ideally that's what your bench should be composed of, your own cheap draftees developed to be players, rather than having to go out and piss away money on middling (or worse) free agents.

I think our bench was 'ok', but we lack true depth and are missing some pieces, like a true 3 point specialist and a defensive stopper type. When I think of great benches this past season, I think of teams like the Spurs and Bulls, as they pretty much had all the bases covered so far as benches go and they made use of their benches extensively. We were not on that level in my opinion, but then again LD often seemed pretty reluctant to use much of his bench. Etan Thomas appeared in a grand total of 13 games all season, which is just ridiculous. Players sitting on the bench should be used and given opportunity to play, I mean that's why they're there....and if a guy is so useless as to only merit getting into 13 games and playing less than 90 minutes all season, then why is he even on the team taking up a bench spot in the first place, and are there not street free agents or guys out of the NBADL who might be more useful to you than that?

Where did we rank attendance-wise in the Dominique years, I wonder? I'm thinking that maybe if you give people a real reason to come out and see the games, then they will? But I don't know. It's Atlanta, and attendance for the Hawks and especially Braves over the years just kind of leaves me scratching my head. I don't know how there could be empty seats in the playoffs when you've got an outstanding team and the opportunity to see Hall of Famers like Maddux and Glavine and Smoltz pitching, but back in the mid '90s there were empty seats and quite a few of them. I will never understand how that could be, especially when baseball tickets are so comparatively cheap.

Well I'm a Cowboys fan too, so I can totally relate to what Sturt's talking about here. Jerry Jones is a meddler most supreme, and his meddling along with his belief that he's qualified to be an NFL GM have been much, much more harmful than helpful to the Cowboys over the years. And yeah, the three NFL titles within his first five years of owning the team were awesome, but that was much more the result of a perfect storm of fortuitous circumstance coming together than anything that Jerry Jones did. You had Jimmy Johnson acting as coach and GM, you had the Herschel Walker trade (or robbery), which stocked the Cowboys for years, and you also had an uncapped NFL, and partly the reason why the league did put in the cap was to break up the dynasties in Dallas and San Francisco. I mean Dallas had second stringers who were All Pros and Pro Bowlers, so the league decided to put a stop to that. So Jerry got really, really lucky straight off the bat, but since '96 we've won two playoff games in 15 years despite all the advantages and resources the Cowboys have at their disposal, and most Cowboys fans are far less than pleased with Jerry as an owner. On the one hand he's an awesome owner, because he truly loves his team more than anything else and is more than willing to sink tons and tons of $$$$ into it, including building that palace of a stadium. But the flip-side of that is his damnable meddling and his massive ego, which leads him to think he's capable of making draft, free agent, and trade decisions himself while undercutting HOF level coaches in Johnson and Parcells, and that has just not worked out for us at all.

Oh I think he's a pretty good player. Your stats for his first 6 seasons are accurate, but they need to be placed in the context that he was strictly a bench player then who averaged less than 13 minutes per game in each of those seasons and only started 8 games in those 6 seasons, and he did leave college too early and was absolutely not prepared to play NBA ball in his early seasons. He's a great example of a guy who should have stayed in school a bit longer and refined his game. However, last year in Jersey when he earned real minutes and earned a starting role, he blew up and became a beast on the boards, 9th in offensive rebounds per game and 7th in defensive rebounds per and also went for 29 double-doubles in only 44 games started. Maybe this past season was a fluke for him (and he was in a contract season), but then again he's only 26 years old given a starters role and minutes for the very first time, so maybe that's who he really is?