Moments of Permanence - NBA update: this season goes out on shocked gasp noises

From: fred_mouse Date: April 12th, 2019 10:58 am (UTC) (Link)

I really want to know the back story on Davis -- how pissed off do you have to be to do that?

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From: sami Date: April 14th, 2019 04:23 am (UTC) (Link)

Dude has not been making friends.

It's actually kinda weird.

He was drafted first overall by the New Orleans Pelicans, and... they haven't had that much success, but a lot of it has actually been bad luck. They've been trying really really hard to put a good team together, but more than anything their problem has been injuries.

Last season DeMarcus Cousins was playing for them when he had his Achilles tear. They still made the playoffs and the second round of the playoffs at that, so the team hasn't actually underperformed, he's just apparently developed some serious resentment in the last year.

Where things got particularly sour is that earlier this season he demanded a trade. The demand was public, which is already a bad look, but then his agent made it known that he wanted to go to one team, specifically - the LA Lakers - which badly depressed his trade value.

The Lakers offered about half their team for him, but the trouble is those players were all various kinds of not that good, and it's pretty much only Lakers fans who thought the offer was worth it, especially since if the Pelicans waited until this offseason, they'd have a decent shot at getting *better* players for him from the Boston Celtics, who could really use him and have a surplus of young talent.

This ruined team chemistry for the Lakers at the same time as the sullen presence of Anthony Davis hasn't been great for the Pelicans, although the Pelicans not named Anthony Davis look like they're coming together anew, so there's that.

The best guess anyone has for what got Davis so incredibly sour is that he switched agents to Rich Paul of Klutch Sports, an individual and business very strongly linked to LeBron James, now of the Lakers. The theory is that Rich Paul convinced Davis that as a Laker he could be living the LA high life and winning championships with LeBron James.

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From: fred_mouse Date: April 14th, 2019 06:42 am (UTC) (Link)

That sounds like the change of agents was a really bad move!

Thanks for summarising this for me, because I really didn't have the brain space to go and look it up for myself.

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From: sami Date: April 14th, 2019 07:02 am (UTC) (Link)

Any time. I honestly wouldn't know where to look to start collecting all the disparate threads of the storylines in the NBA, for the most part.

There's just been *so much*.

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From: lazulisong Date: April 12th, 2019 04:27 pm (UTC) (Link)

Amy says the Blazers tried to deliberately lose the last regular game they had (to improve their matchup?) and STILL ended up winning by like six points.

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From: sami Date: April 14th, 2019 04:24 am (UTC) (Link)

Amy is almost certainly correct, given that they played only six players from the very deepest end of the bench, and one of them for less than fifteen minutes. Three dudes who normally only play in garbage time played all 48.

However, it turns out that one does not out-fail the Sacramento Kings even on purpose.

Edit: By way of explanation in case you were wondering, the matchup part is that if they dropped to the fourth seed, they'd play the Utah Jazz, whereas at the third seed, they play the Oklahoma City Thunder, and Portland could expect to have a better chance of winning against the Jazz than the Thunder, who match up REALLY BADLY for them, especially since Nurkic got hurt.

Edited ( ) 2019-04-14 04:26 am (UTC)

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