NBA 2022-23 Part 2: Everyone Scores 50

[M2]

Giddey and SGA are Swiss Army pieces who can play with just about anyone. Siakam is a fantastic fit, but they have to have shooting. Neither Giddey nor SGA are great from distance-- in order to keep teams from packing the paint against them, they need marksmen. Siakam, for all his talent, is not that.

Neither is Anunoby. OG's job in the Toronto offense is to stand out by the line and be a release valve. He's solid at it, but he's in the Dort neighborhood in terms of marksmanship. Siakam would give them a second volume scorer and another on-ball playmaker (plus even more length). I get the focus on shooting, but as R4B mentioned, there's other ways to get that. Anunoby's a medium play. He's a guy who can help a team. Siakam's a big play. He's an All-NBA player. For OKC, I'd take the bigger swing.

[M2]

Kyrie has asked the Nets to trade him before the deadline.

Wow. I did not see that coming. This seems like it would be contract/free agency related.

Classic Kyrie, making it impossible to trade him by being the guy who demands to be traded off of a playoff team. Who'd even want him for the stretch run? Maybe the Clippers want to gamble. Perhaps Minnesota could give D'Angelo Russell and Taurean Prince a Brooklyn homecoming. Maybe Washington could try to get out from under the Brad Beal contract. It's not a long list.

[BuckeyeRed27]

Classic Kyrie, making it impossible to traded by being the guy who demands to be traded off of a playoff team. Who'd even want him for the stretch run? Maybe the Clippers want to gamble. Perhaps Minnesota could give D'Angelo Russell and Taurean Prince a Brooklyn homecoming. Maybe Washington could try to get out from under the Brad Beal contract. It's not a long list.

Brooklyn has at least 2 firsts they can attach, so they could potentially get something from what is a large expiring and a couple picks.

[Bourgeois Zee]

Classic Kyrie, making it impossible to trade him by being the guy who demands to be traded off of a playoff team. Who'd even want him for the stretch run? Maybe the Clippers want to gamble. Perhaps Minnesota could give D'Angelo Russell and Taurean Prince a Brooklyn homecoming. Maybe Washington could try to get out from under the Brad Beal contract. It's not a long list.

Guarantee the Lakers would do it.
Great idea on Minnesota.
Beal's a good pick too.

How about Atlanta? Collins and Bogdanovich for Irving and stuff?

[M2]

Brooklyn has at least 2 firsts they can attach, so they could potentially get something from what is a large expiring and a couple picks.

The 1sts would open it up a bit, though I'm not sure how many selling teams are out there. For Kyrie and the 1sts:

Chicago - DeRo and Caruso
New Orleans - CJ McCollum
Detroit - Bojan, Burks and Kevin Knox

[M2]

Guarantee the Lakers would do it.

But LA's got nothing to offer. It would have to be Russ (which opens up the Russ-KD can of worms too), which means Brooklyn would have to add ~$11M in salaries just to make the trade work. Maybe if the Lakers put their 2027 and 2029 picks on the table that could swing it, but if they were willing to do that I feel like the deal would have happened this summer.

How about Atlanta? Collins and Bogdanovich for Irving and stuff?

Can't imagine the Hawks want to run 3 PGs, two of them being on the small side.

Just spitballing, would Kyrie and 2 1sts (unprotected) for Trae work? Hawks get $40M off their cap next year and they don't have to build their team around him in the future. Murray runs the show. The picks help replenish what they traded for Murray. And they can sign-and-trade Kyrie for something in the summer.

[BuckeyeRed27]

Paul and Crowder for Kyrie and a 1

That’s the trade.

[M2]

Paul and Crowder for Kyrie and a 1

That’s the trade.

I'd hate to see the Suns go out like that, but it would give them a chance to retrench for next season. On the flip side, sounds like Booker's back next week so they might not want to retrench.

[SteelSD]

Paul and Crowder for Kyrie and a 1

That’s the trade.

That's better than what I've been reading around the rest of the interwebs, which generally include Lakers fans thinking they can unload Westbook and junk for Irving and Joe Harris AND Steph Curry, or Nets fans creating alternate dimensions where the Bulls will just trade Zach LaVine straight up for Irving.

Edit: Ok, not Steph. LOL. But Seth? yup.

[BuckeyeRed27]

That's better than what I've been reading around the rest of the interwebs, which generally include Lakers fans thinking they can unload Westbook and junk for Irving and Joe Harris AND Steph Curry, or Nets fans creating alternate dimensions where the Bulls will just trade Zach LaVine straight up for Irving.

Lakers almost have to be a 3 team.

Utah could get involved and take picks from both, Kyrie in LA, Westbrook in Utah and like Conley and Beasley in Brooklyn. Something like that maybe works.

[Kingspoint]

Trading Hart and eventually getting Vanderbilt strikes me as a backwards move, at least for this season, for Portland. Hart's ball movement and shooting would be missed. Vanderbilt is a bit redundant with Grant. And none of this fixes how teams are hunting Dame and Simons.

If you understood the team, you'd know the obvious that they went into the season extremely unbalanced and that the next move was to swap Guards for Forwards/Centers. They have more Guards (Hart is a Guard) than they know what to do with, while they lack quality depth at all three front line positions.

Dame was the first player to score 40 points against MEM this season the other night. He wore them down and by the start of the 4th Quarter, they weren't gaurding him as closely.

Going to be tough againts the Wizards tonight, winners of 7 in a row and 13 of 19. They are going to sit Nurk and try to get that leg healthy that he's been playing through injured all season long. He'll come back after the All-Star break.

Ideally, they make a trade that nets them both Olynyck AND Vanderbilt, and they will finally have the balance they've missed all season. Without Payton tonight, too, it's going to be very difficult, but he had his highest minute total of the season against MEM by about 10 minutes, and they have a back-to-back tomorrow in CHI, so he'll probably play that game instead. He hasn't been playing back-to-backs, yet, as it is. So, extremely short-handed Defensively (Nurk and Payton are their two best Defenders by far. Nobody else on the team makes the impact Defensively like these two do), winning tonight will be very difficult. We beat MEM because we had Payton to fall back to when Nurk, and then Grant, left. Hart does nothing to fix this problem, while he's major hole Offensively. Vanderbilt is no worse Offensively than Hart, but Vanderbilt would fix the hole Payton would have filled tonight, while giving support along the front line to help Eubanks and Grant, along with helping to fix the mistakes Defensively created by Dame and Ant.

[M2]

If you understood the team, you'd know the obvious that they went into the season extremely unbalanced and that the next move was to swap Guards for Forwards/Centers. They have more Guards (Hart is a Guard) than they know what to do with, while they lack quality depth at all three front line positions.

If you understood the team, you'd know trading the guy with the second-best +/- invites some peril. Hart also ranks second on the team with a 3.7 RAPTOR. Vanderbilt is rocking a 0.1. So I question whether that makes them better.

[Kingspoint]

What a great win tonight for Portland!!!

Again, extremely short-handed w/ Drew Eubanks in foul trouble the entire game forcing huge minutes from Trendon Watford, who came through big with 21 points, a game-high +19 +/- to lead POR from a deficit of 20 for most of the 1st half to an 8+-pt win again on the road.

Simons, who helped bury POR into that 20-pt deficit in the 1st Half had one of his uber hot quarters with 20 in the 3rd, the 4th time in his career of 20+ points in a Quarter. He also moved up to 5th All-time in games w/ 9+ "3"'s in a game with 5. Dame is 2nd with 12. Curry has 38 (despite those 38, it's Dame who has 3 of the top 5 most efficient 3-pt shooting nights in NBA history of 11+ makes. Curry, the volume shooter that he is, only has one).

This brings POR back to .500 on the season with the likely return of GPII tomorrow night in Chicago.

Simons was 9-12 from "3".
Watford was 9-12 from the floor (2-2 from "3") w/ 5 Assists and a Steal.
Hart was 8-8 from "2" w/ 9 Rebounds.
Dame had 29 pts.

Blazers starting to close games in the final 5 minutes (ATL, MEM, WAS).

They came back from a win-probability of 4.1% in the 3rd.

[Kingspoint]

If you understood the team, you'd know trading the guy with the second-best +/- invites some peril. Hart also ranks second on the team with a 3.7 RAPTOR. Vanderbilt is rocking a 0.1. So I question whether that makes them better.

Without a doubt, there's loss to trading Hart, as you mentioned. Among Wings, I believe he's Top-10 in the NBA in on-floor/off-floor +/-. I think Hart gives that to any team, but he's gone this Summer anyway. We can't resign him. We have to get something for him. He makes the team unbalanced Defensively. Winslow is identical to Hart. Payton is better, so those two can do what Hart does, while we are simply way too small up front. The playoffs revolve around the rim, and that's our weakest area Offensively and Defensively. We need help there, and Hart offers us the most in exchange, especially with us unable to resign him this Summer.

[Kingspoint]

Hart had mentally lost it shooting from "3". His percentages went down and down the last 8 weeks, until the last three games, he wasn't coming close, bricking every attempt. It continued tonight missing his first four, and then he finally hit one. You could see the relief in his face that he finally hit a "3". Grant's 3-pt shooting has been getting worse, also the last five weeks, while Simons' has, too, the last three weeks. Nice to see Simon get off tonight. Importantly for Simons, is that this was the 4th game in a row where he's been distributing much better. He led the team in Assists two of those games and had 6 of them tonight. His 5 Rebounds were huge against a very good and tall rebounding team in WAS.

We ended WAS's 7-game win streak and tore them apart in the 2nd Half, limiting them to 47 second half points while putting up 73 ourselves. WAS had been averaging 120+ points a game over this 7-game stretch, while limiting opponents to 29% shooting from "3". POR finished 41.7%. Their 132.6 Offensive Rating tonight ranks in the 94-Percentile in the league this season.

The last 2 weeks POR has gotten control of the turnover issues that had plagued them all season. That issue is solved. The careless turnovers are rare now, when they used to be regular.