Orlando’s GM is on the hot-seat, which is why he made the ill-advised Ibaka deal over the summer. Now, his seat’s grown hotter, he has a logjam in his front court, and the trade market on Ibaka is zilch because he’s set to hit free agency.

Nope. King was WORSE.

Yep, I gotcha. I partially brought up the discussion because I think people need to be wary of treating an 8-point hole as a 1-possession game in the same way that a 6 or 7 point deficit is treated as a 1-possession game. It’s backfired for the Patriots before, as well as for the Chiefs this year against the Steelers…

Again, I just think it comes down to how late in the game it was (under 10 minutes left in the 4th?), and coaches evalutate these situations. I guess I should walk back my statement a bit — I’m not 100% certain in either a) Belichick making the right call or b) Belichick making the wrong one, I just believe it is much…

Again, 4th and 15 is incredibly tough — you’re correct. But the “two score game” notion is a dangerous one, given how difficult hitting 2 consecutive 2pt conversions would have been. If you score a TD, you’re down between 13 and 11 points — still a 2-score game, but you don’t require a 2 point conversion, necessarily.

Correct, it’s nominally a 2-score game. But we need to stop treating 8-point deficits (and more importantly, 16-point deficits) as merely 1 and 2 score games — you need 2 consecutive 2 pt conversions (which are generally a 50-50 proposition, more or less), when the opponent knows what to expect. You’d also then have…

Respectfully, I wholly disagree.

Yeah, I mean, I’m not saying 4th and 15 would be easy, but quite frankly, when you’re down by 19, you gotta continue taking the best decision possible to get back in the game. Maybe Belichick saw something in the coverage that he didn’t like, sure, but from the outside looking in, it was a bad possession to kick a FG…

Which makes his later decision to kick a FG when down 28-9 all the more mind-boggling. Sure, it ended up working out, but the math in that situation suggested that he should’ve gone for the TD on 4th down rather than kick the FG, when down 19.

It’s also a question of performance vs. expectations. Everyone expected, going into the game, that the Falcons’ D would perform basically as poorly as it did the entire second half. They grossly outperformed expectations throughout the 2/3rds of the game, which is why it feels like such a letdown.

I mean, personally, I agree. But when there is empirical evidence showing that referees can be influenced into making calls that skew towards one team or the other, I’d be out there complaining if I was a part of the Falcons.

It is really disappointing to have to break the two of them apart, but one of Lillard/CJ has to go. The Blazers will never sniff anything near a passable defense with those two as their starting guards.

Because, frankly, even with video evidence, the referees who make the final call are human, and there is data proving that referees are influenced into making calls/throwing flags based upon how the players react to the previous calls throughout the game. In this case, it didn’t matter — there was a review and clear…

Also important to note that Beal is healthy, too — I saw a stat recently, he’s missed something like 20+ games in each of his first 4 seasons in the league??

Honestly, at this point, it’s probably best for them to drop to the 6th seed. If they can’t swing the 2nd or 3rd seed, you might as well drop out of the 4/5 muck in order to avoid facing GSW until the WCF.

Jury’s still out on how much Korver will help them in a series against GSW. He was BADLY exploited on the defensive end last night, far worse than JR ever was. I think there’s a likelihood that he remains part of a bench mob in a rematch with GSW, if JR’s ready to go by then — there’s no good place to hide Korver’s…

The Seattle game was almost single-handedly Mike McCarthy’s fault. Same goes with the Arizona game, they should’ve gone for two at the end of regulation rather than risk letting their shitty defense go back out onto the field.

Also, do you really want to be calling a first-round pick “crap”? Even if this ends up being a low pick due to LeBron staving off Father Time for another two years, it’s still of solid value.

As far as it being “exposed”, I meant relative to their recent “successes”. Because when you play teams with holes in their O-lines for a few weeks that make your pass rush look decent, some people forget about the preceding 10-12 weeks of evidence to the contrary. I do also think there is a *huge* drop-off between a…

I love your response and I wish I could give you more than one star.