Well I wouldn’t say the wheels have fallen off for the Rockets. This year they were awesomely successful on offense against the Warriors - the problem was they couldn’t stop them on defense. Last year was a pretty poor showing on offense, but a lot of that was because Chris Paul missed the last two games.

A dealbreaker? For UEFA? You’re gonna need a reason a lot stronger than the potential for a little ethnic violence.

Lol just the fact that Magic didn’t realize that Pelinka was in fact orders of magnitude more qualified for the job that Magic had is funny. And Pelinka is not all that qualified to be running an NBA front office.

Football is hard. The great thing about baseball is that almost every event that happens in the game is really only influenced by one or two players. Baseball is trivially easy (compared to other team sports) from a statistics standpoint.

Uh, you know you runners can be disqualified for making contact with other runners, right? That argument doesn’t make sense.

Jokic could be blind drunk and stumbling around the court and he’d still be ten times as effective as Plumlee. I get why he played.

Should the powerlifting feds ban him?

So to you, it’s fairer to have Semenya take medication to slow herself down

Not at all. She has to take medicine to compete as a woman, but as far as I can tell she would be allowed to compete against men without taking medicine if she were fast enough (she isn’t). This is really no different than forcing a man to take medicine to be allowed to compete in the women’s division.

Running has divisions for men and women. Caster Semenya is a woman, therefore she runs in the women’s division.

This series is far from a formality. Boston will be extremely competitive.

Because many NBA teams are dumb and prefer gambles on young players instead of taking players who are obviously very good. Just look at White’s stats in college - they’re absolutely ridiculous.

In the playoffs, when it mattered, he really was. Love sieved value on defense and struggled to score efficiently.

Russell is an absolute lock to be disgustingly overpaid this summer. And I fear it is the Nets who will be the suckers (the Suns would be too perfect and too funny). So I would pump the brakes until the Nets prove themselves not to be those suckers.

It makes no sense that the 66 win Heat, who went 8-1 in the playoffs before meeting the Pacers that year, would just randomly “play down” to the Pacers for an entire series. That series was competitive because the Pacers were a great team.

Some pushback? They almost beat the Heat in a 7 game series, which is more than can be said for almost every other team over that span. They were better than the Grizzlies, whose fatal weakness of relying on Tony Allen would kill them more than once in the playoffs, and they were much better than the Clippers, whose…

The Pacers in the regular season were nothing special. If they had been in the West during the regular season, they likely would have been nothing special. But in the playoffs, their awesome size and athleticism combined with their lack of serious weaknesses anywhere made them one of the best teams in the league.…

The 2013 Pacers would likely have been the third best team in the West, behind only the Thunder and Spurs. They were one of the 4 or 5 best teams in the league. And George Hill was a huge part of that. Realistically he was better and more important than Hibbert during the playoffs. He was really good.

Green played only 115 minutes for Cleveland, not anywhere near enough to draw conclusions about his efficacy outside of the Spurs system. San Antonio was smart enough to know what they had in Green and put him in positions to succeed on offense, but even then, he didn’t play his first year in SA. And once it became…

Well Kawhi is the big one, but look at Danny Green - great in SA, still great in Toronto. Kyle Anderson wasn’t quite as good in Memphis this year, but Memphis was also not a great fit and he was injured, and he still had a decent season. Boban looked good for the Clippers and Sixers, at least for what he is. Aron…