The biggest stars tend to make much more money off their shoe deals and other various endorsements anyway. Overall, I agree with you. Parity leads to more fan interest, which leads to higher revenues for the league, which leads to more money for the players.

In the playoffs, which is really all the Warriors care about, Iggy usually guards the toughest matchup when it’s needed. And I don’t really care how you define “great shooter”, but Klay Thompson is not nearly as good of a player as Ray Allen was in his prime. He is an elite movement shooter who benefits a lot from…

Rodman was good until he was like 36. Dray is 28 right now, and he has maybe the best basketball IQ in the league. Calling him a hustle guy sells him short. A hustle guy is someone who can provide decent minutes off the bench in a few short spurts. Dray is one of the best players in the league.

Their best wing defender? Iggy still plays for the Warriors. And Klay is just not as good as Draymond Green at basketball. Not even close. Sure, Dray is a hothead and by all means comes across as a shitty person. But he is the best defender in the league, and that is much more valuable than all but the best offensive…

Oh I know Jordan was way way way way better. But you don’t have to shoot over 50% to be a good player. Melo was always around league average TS%, and better in his best years. He wasn’t exactly inefficient. Pretty much every metric agrees that Melo was a positive player on offense. You want a guy like that on your…

How is them trading Green the nightmare scenario? Them losing one of their best players for a draft pick makes them substantially worse, not better.

they will try to replace their and Green’s production with younger and/or cheaper players

Nah, this is not true. Jordan was a volume scorer. Melo was never great, but he was certainly a positive offensive player who played an important role on many very good offenses.

I’m no Melo defender, but nah

I disagree that he took ill-advised shots. His efficiency, while nothing spectacular, was certainly never poor, and the optimal way to use talented volume scorers is to give them the ball and let them score. He was a decent player for a long time. Now, is he a HoFer? Of course not, at least not if you go purely by his…

T-Mac had a better career. His peak was significantly higher than Melo’s and also lasted longer. Melo’s “peak” was essentially two seasons: 13' and 14'. His Denver years were really nothing special at all compared to most HoF’s.

I really disagree with a lot of this. Melo has always been one of the most overrated players to set foot on an NBA court, admittedly through no fault of his own. He had one really great skill - volume scoring on average efficiency - and fortunately for him, that skill is tends to be incredibly overvalued, leading to…

I mean, this is how the process was supposed to work. Accumulate assets in any way you can (Cov and Saric), and then figure out how to turn those assets into pieces on a championship caliber team later. The second part of that went pretty poorly because of Bryan Colangelo, but Butler is absolutely the type of player…

Mine didn’t either, but he said as much (about defense not mattering) in a reply to somebody else who (rightfully) questioned why Ntilikina was on this list.

Damn, almost the same not-butt list as I had. I added Tyus Jones (who is quite good) but didn’t have Trey Lyles (because he’s shooting 18% from 3 this year).

Individual defense accounts for way, way less than half of the value a single player can bring to the court

Any team built around Jokic is gonna be way more fun than the Rockets last year, in my humble opinion. Also, had Denver kept the pick they probably would have taken OG Anunoby, who is pretty much exactly the type of player they desperately need right now. Instead, they ended up with Trey Lyles and Tyler Lydon. Whoops.

AG is debatable, he’s borderline. Barnes isn’t terrible for what he is, but he’s playing the wrong role on a Mavs team. Your most egregious mistake is still all the times you called Robert Covington butt. Anyway, here are the guys you are wrong about this year:

Not that it’s all that important to your point, but you know the Knicks have won NBA titles, right? There have been plenty of times where they were good, although those times have not exactly been abundant recently.

He was supposed to have been. He was not better than Chauncey Billups, bot by a long shot. In fact, the year the Nuggets went to the WCF finals, Melo finished fourth *on his own team* in OBPM, if that tells you anything (Billups, J.R. Smith, and Nene were ahead of him). If you’re looking for an actual good Melo year,…