First of all, that’s a great interview

Baseball already has this problem. It was actually a whole thing. They made a movie about it. It’s called 61*.

They do have similar skill sets in a lot of ways. I think the big difference is that Garnett was a much better scorer. If Dray was actually a first option and had the kind of usage that Garnett had, his scoring numbers would be a lot uglier. Also, Dray can definitely shoot you out of games at times, which isn’t as…

He is 100% not the MVP of the Warriors. He’s the thing that makes them a great team instead of a very good one, and he’s one of the greatest second/third bananas ever already, but he’s not the most valuable player on the team, either this year or last year. I love him, but he’s not.

Draymond getting a triple double without points is still one of the weirdest, most incredible statlines ever

Fuck Northwestern

The question with their offense - when you’re looking strictly at what they provide on the court and not their narrative, playoff standing, teammates, etc - isn’t so much the difference in their offense; it’s what you value in offense. Kawhi is a MUCH more efficient scorer, Russell scores much more. Per 100…

Right? At LEAST do per 100 possessions, instead of per game. It’s not like it even harms Westbrook, he still wins out in all 3 categories over Kawhi.

I think Kawhi and Harden are having better seasons than Russ, but whatever, I didn’t really come here to argue about that. I wouldn’t be angry about any of them getting the MVP. They’re all really good.

He’s been a crazy efficient finisher for them on offense as well. It’s not just the defense that makes him ideal. The Warriors don’t need him to do anything on offense except jam on fools at the rim, and they’ve gotten him to mostly buy in on doing nothing except jam on fools at the rim. And it’s a pretty significant…

The Rockets are really good. The Pelicans have some glaring weaknesses - they have like one good perimeter defender on their roster and some pretty crummy bench players. And the Rockets are a particularly bad matchup for the Pelicans.

He’s a really good player, but in a very specific way. It’s really not that hard to be a round peg in a square hole when you’re a very good 32 year old one-way player. Even before you get into contracts and no-trades, the universe of teams that are both (a) good enough to contend for a title with Melo and (b) really…

Ricky Rubio is paid 13 million dollars a year for four years and is not a player who should be starting for a playoff team basically ever. And it seems to me, given the near-future expectations of each team, that salary cap space is much more valuable to the Wolves than the Knicks right now. At the same time, the…

+1

Yes, I agree that those are mistakes that he made - conscious choices he made that were wrong. People who were praising him as some kind of perfect genius GM were wrong. But I don’t think many GMs are perfect, and I think Hinkie - despite his mistakes - was mostly a pretty good GM who happened to talk in an annoying…

I don’t think Okafor is much good. Obviously, Porzingis has turned out to be a better player. But logjam issues would have been a problem with drafting any big man in that draft for the Sixers - whether it’s Okafor or Zinger or Myles Turner. And if Okafor had red flags as a prospect, so did Porzingis. He was really…

Myles Turner is really good and definitely better than Okafor but yeah, mostly just a lot of crappy options to choose from. 

It feels to me like you’re holding Hinkie to a completely ridiculous standard here. Most of the picks he made were extremely reasonable at the time and frankly pretty reasonable in retrospect. You can nitpick a million things but he did a good job given the resources he had available to him. If you think he should…

Please don’t try to set the world on fire if Perez wins though

Because Deadspin is incredibly good at being contrarian. All the blogs and smart basketball outlets were really positive about the process; therefore the contrarian thing to do was hate it, which is what they did. They’re really on the next level when it comes to this stuff.