Wow. Thanks for checking. I knew it would be rare, but wasn’t sure it would be one of a kind.
What the fuck is wrong with people?
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Mavs v rockets 2005 one of my favorite series all time for the mavs. Was so much fun versus McGrady and Yao.
what was he playing for?
So Nuggets are gonna ship and Jokic is not gonna be the MVP?
jokic is so awesome and always reminds me of what a monster preNBA arvydas sabonis must have been; daddy sabonis was also a basketball genius but at 7’3" 300 with bonus grr. I’d love to see the nuggets win it all
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Hot take: If Sabonis joined the Blazers in 1990, Bulls don’t win any of those first three rangz. Putting prime Sabonis on that pretty stacked Blazers team is too much even for the GOAT.
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I love sabonis and I love what-ifs but I fear the sheer heat of the take has melted some of the load-bearing parts of your noble basketball brain. IIRC prime sabonis vanished in the mid/late 80s in a pile of injuries including two major achilles tears. It’s true that earlier in his career he couldn’t come to the NBA bc of iron curtain horseshit but by the early 90s he was waiting because he didn’t think he was athletic enough anymore.
biased bulls fan here but I really liked those blazers teams and totally agree that in 91-92 if sabonis was getting some of buck williams’s / duckworth’s / young cliff robinson’s minutes then that’s obviously a better more balanced team and hey who knows. But for me the real what-if is what if young sabonis could have come to atlanta when they drafted him in 1985? Those Hawks teams were super fun but if prime baba yaga hadji murat sabonis was gobbling minutes from tree rollins / jon koncak / kevin willis then ok yeah I do think the Celtics/Lakers axis gets at least wobbled
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Fair enough. But if we’re pretending, lets also pretend he is healthy and without significant prior injury.
That’s also a fun one to think about, but he’d still have had Kareem and The Chief to deal with. What would the Bulls have thrown at him? Bill Cartwright?
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yep that was always the main worry with those bulls teams. The second threepeat only had the three-headed eighteen-foulgiving monster (longley+wennington+whoever like bison dele) but the first threepeat the bulls had bill the manyelbowed cartwright and will the shoulderless perdue and stacy king, announcer. In theory those teams couldve have gotten wrecked by really big big men and they did have problems with especially laimbeer/salley/mahorn but other than that, idk, the theoretical threat never materialized, not vs ewing not vs old kareem not vs really anybody. Wait hang on that’s not true, olajuwon for example just killed the bulls. And sorry but since this is looks like my annual night when I’m reminiscing about the Jordan bulls online and also high I’ll add that when people say if Jordan hadn’t taken the baseball years off then those Bulls wouldve won eight straight…I mean nope, that’s just wrong; at the time it was clear that the first threepeat team was cooked. Sure Jordan is one of the most monomaniacal psychos in recent world history but even he couldn’t have menaced that team into winning five more straight (while turning over the entire roster. I always thought it was crazy that those two threepeats were just jordan+pippen+completely different rest of rosters).
anyway if prime sabonis had played the bulls then artis gilmore would have evolved into his final form and LORD TAKE COVER
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It kinda makes sense that the day in day out grind of a regular season MVP performance is counter-productive towards winning a title. Giannis’s ring came in a non-MVP 61 game season, Dirk famously won his as part of the most embarrassing moment of his career, and several other recent winners underperformed in the playoffs like Jokic and Westbrook.
That’s brutal. There’s no way I would have been able to coach a series.
Tbf, neither did he
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The winner of this season’s MVP award will be revealed on “NBA on TNT” at 7 pm Eastern Time May 2, the league announced
It’s gonna be awkward cutting to Embiid accepting the award from a hospital bed with his team down 0-1 and +5,000 and Jokeman dominating both the regular season metrics and the odds favorite team to win the WCF.
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Unreal, the Heat manage to pull away in the last five minutes basically playing four-on-five.
GSW/SAC already delivering, this is the good stuff
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