See the additional editorial notes at the end for more details about late postings and how they are not going to be a problem any longer.
FROM APRIL 30, JUST BEFORE THE EARLY MAY 2009 WEST SEMIFINAL SERIES BETWEEN THE DALLAS MAVERICKS AND THE DENVER NUGGETS
A few random points:
The easy Nuggets win over New Orleans means very little or nothing, because the Hornets were very dinged up. Byron Scott pointed out that only one of the starters (Butler) was healthy. Dallas is the first real test for the Nuggets in the 2009 playoffs.
Billups can beat the Mavs if and only if he is shooting and making threes. Sometimes he doesn't even hardly shoot them, in which case you have to worry about Carmelo Anthony and JR Smith. Billups gets first choice but he can pass off the shooting to Melo and JR if he chooses.
If the refs are not calling Nuggets fouls Dallas may have to get rough on the Nuggets so that the refs pay more attention to the Nuggets' fouls and call more of them. The Nuggets will beat down any team that does not stand up for itself.
Chris Andersen, Dahntay Jones, and Renaldo Balkman, if he ever plays, would be almost nothing on offense were it not for fast breaks. To stop players such as these from scoring, you need to keep the turnovers down. The Hornets made an insane number of turnovers.
To keep turnovers and the Nuggets fast breaks that result from them down, you have to avoid being intimidated and you have to avoid a lot of stupid, contested longer jump shots.
Dahntay Jones is a punk and he will play dirty if he thinks that will help the Nuggets get a win.
But Chris Andersen is more of a miracle pickup for the Nuggets than a punk, and if you don't keep track of him and keep boxing him out from under the rim he will burn you over and over again.
Dahntay Jones is a punk, pure and simple. Oh yeah, I already said that, laugh out loud.
FROM APRIL 30, JUST BEFORE THE EARLY MAY 2009 WEST SEMIFINAL SERIES BETWEEN THE DALLAS MAVERICKS AND THE DENVER NUGGETS
Posted by sefant77
Jones may be a punk, Paul is the bigger punk and little bitch. He started trash talking to Jones in that embarressing lost and Jones answered and Hornets got their asses kicked to the moon.
I hope and expect that CP3 has learned a valuable lesson. If you are a major star in the NBA there will be times when a defender's only purpose is to get under your skin any way possible. If you are CP3, and you encounter such a player, you say to yourself "What a damn punk" and then prove that you can still, punk or no punk, keep running the team without making a lot of stupid turnovers and without needing to do any trash talking.
But having said that, CP3 was boxed into a corner, because the Nuggets were dominating the paint and the whole damn Hornets team was dinged up. D West was atrocious. Still, I hope he learned the lesson anyway.
FROM APRIL 30, JUST BEFORE THE EARLY MAY 2009 WEST SEMIFINAL SERIES BETWEEN THE DALLAS MAVERICKS AND THE DENVER NUGGETS
This is the 6th season for Carmelo Anthony. This year his overall rating, according to both Hollinger at ESPN's and my own calculations, dropped back to in between what it was on average in the first two years, and what it was on average in the next three. But it was closer to the first two, so it was a substantial decline in the value of Carmelo Anthony to a basketball team this year, following three years at the highest heights of the League.
This year, although his assisting and especially his defensive rebounding were above career averages, his offensive rebounding was down and his accuracy inside the 3-point arc was down substantially. 3-point shooting was improved to what you might call the "almost dangerous from 3-point range" category. Overall shooting effectiveness was down substantially, as Carmelo Anthony dropped out of what I call the "power scorer" category of players.
As for the playoffs, it's a good start for him, but it's way to early to judge for this year, especially since the Hornets were the walking wounded. Looking at the first five years, in all of which the Nuggets were washed out in round 1, and everytime by 4 games to 1, Carmelo Anthony has had only 1 year in which he was in the playoffs about as good as he was during the regular season (2007).
And there was one year in which he was down but not by a large amount (2005). But in 2005, year #2, he wasn't great to begin with. In his first two NBA years, Carmelo Anthony was neither a superstar nor a star. He was a star or superstar, and one of the best 25 players in the League only from 2006 through and including this year.
In the other three playoff years (2004, 2006, and 2008) Melo was, in the playoffs, far worse than he was in the regular season.
In summary, as of this time, except for the Spurs 2007 series, the NBA playoffs have been miserable for Carmelo Anthony. He has not, except for that one single series, been even remotely as good as he has been for Team USA in the Olympics, nor as good as he was for Syracuse University.
In games in which Chauncey Billups can not hit threes, Carmelo Anthony may or may not be able to answer the call. It will be a roll of the dice, since in the playoffs, Melo has been almost as inconsistent and unreliable as JR Smith!
Carmelo Anthony is not even close to being the kind of go to guy that Dirk Nowitzki is. And he is less so this year than in the last three.
There are those, Jim Boheim and myself included, who blame the Nuggets' managers and coaches for the failure to make Carmelo Anthony all that he can be.
FROM APRIL 30, JUST BEFORE THE EARLY MAY 2009 WEST SEMIFINAL SERIES BETWEEN THE DALLAS MAVERICKS AND THE DENVER NUGGETS
Posted by CadBane
All I'm saying is that most Nuggets fans and NBA analysts (including myself as I watch a lot of Denver games) prefer his current play to his past.
The majority of Nuggets fans you have mentioned, and I too think it is a majority or close to it, do not understand that having a power scorer (like Dirk Nowitzki, LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and so on and so forth) and having a balanced, good chemistry offense are not mutually exclusive things. In other words, these Nuggets fans (and of course George Karl) think that having a power scorer means you can not have a good, balanced offense.
Unfortunately for them, they are wrong.
You will not be seeing a Nuggets-Cavaliers Championship this year, as you probably would if they were correct. After all, although they have no power scorer for this year's playoffs, the Nuggets have just about maxed out in terms of balance and chemistry. And their defense is ferocious. So they should be heading for the Championship this very year if they are correct about how to coach Carmelo Anthony.
I hope and expect that this series starting on Sunday shows them that they are wrong, long before the Championship.
Meanwhile, Carmelo Anthony is over there in the corner saying "It's alright with me if you don't ever need me to be able to score 30 or more in a game. Nooo problem man. I'll just spend less time practicing shooting and more time at my barber shop".
========== Editorial Notes ==========
--The above was written in late April, 2009.
--As promised, we are finally posting material written and posted on forums in the spring. Obviously, if you have your own site, you should be posting at least simultaneously on your own site when you for whatever reason post elsewhere. But there has been a bad habit of not doing so, a bad habit that is being beaten down due to new content sharing regulations that have teeth.
========== VIDEO PLAYERS ==========
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