Head Coach JJ Redick Discussion: Spazzing Out

accomplishment is winning the chip, someone told me. sorry, lebron did NOTHING! NOTHING!

lol, yeah, same thing...mid 30s kyrie and 40 year old lebron vs. both wade and bosh at career apex. it's like i'm seeing double!

well, yeah. one of your two new favorites won't have a ring this year and may never get one, either. i'm not sure what the point is.

well, luka played a historically good boston team, and SGA is about to play the 4 seed in a weak conference. again, not the same shot. luka did beat SGA's a** head to head, though.

this thread's about jj, and you're declaring him a failure after one season.

you can't possibly know the circumstances of a loss next year, so no, i cannot accept this ridiculous premise.

 

BS..barring a major injury there isn't any excuse. You win or get fired here, why should it be any different for Redick?

I didn't say he was a failure yet, but the clock is ticking.


The Bulls won 6 titles from the weaker Conference too. 9 Finals in 10 seasons is no trivial accomplishment, who has repeated such a feat? Perhaps James was just that good?

Ant just beat Luka head to head, he's only 23. What's your point again?

One of them WILL win the chip this season tho, Luka has not.

I don't know who Luka will be paired with at 28, we haven't gotten there yet. Dallas had a better team than Cleveland had, when Lebron was 22 though. You disagree?

Lebron James has 4 rings. And played some of the best teams in NBA history in the Finals, on multiple occasions.

We shall see what Luka ends up with. TBH..there isn't this huge gap between a 40 year old Lebron and Luka right now. IMO.

Hell I did say Luka was top 5 currently..what's the problem?

 

i'm not the one who started poopooing and redefining accomplishments.

luka waxed his a** last year, too--ant admitted it.

i forgot, though, the previous 7 years didn't happen or something because fat.

no, their teams will. jayson tatum won a ring last year. he's not better than luka, either.

no, but their conference was also MUCH tougher.

you're not going to find a lot of company on that island. in luka's worst year since his rookie year due injuries and conditioning issues, he was still substantially better than lebron last year. in his last healthy year, the year before--he was basically as good as apex lebron (2015-16 advanced stats for him compared to 23-24 for luka--coincidentally, those are akin to SGA's numbers this year and jokic's last few).

my point is that you keep underrating luka, almost like you've only ever watched him play since february? which was still good--top 5 as you say. but historically, we're talking about all-time great stuff. unless you truly believe he just fell all the way off a cliff at 25 in a way nobody else ever has, the plan going forward needs to be around luka and not lebron.

anyway, this is the jj thread. my hope is that he and rob are listening to luka first from this point forward. they never listened to AD. and fine, maybe AD never quite surpassed lebron (i disagree, but whatever, it's over now). let's just not make the same mistakes again here, prioritizing what works best for lebron on and off the court when he's no longer the franchise centerpiece.

 

Meh..You are flip flopping all over the place now. James going to 8 straight Finals was " in the weaker Conference " that was your original comment. It's a common anti Lebron James statement.

Didn't you just say that he beat SGA head to head? Now it's the team? If he loses that doesn't mean anything , he's still the better player? If his team wins, that means he's the superior player?


Luka can't guard a f***ing tombstone, that alone closes the gap IMO. I noticed that every single time I've watched him play. He's a phenomenal offensive talent, but he is not close to a prime Lebron period. On one side of the ball, he's comparable.

 

JJ was great during the regular season.
JJ was horrible in the playoffs.

I think both can be true. Regardless JJ needs to make sure the playoffs were a one off.

 

false and hyperbole. lebron's best seasons still didn't have him as the stopper people imagine, and luka's worst still don't have him as the traffic cone/useless guy. you know who luka's a better defender than? tyrese haliburton. i don't care if your eyes say he's thin or whatever, his team is worse off with on the floor--on defense--than luka's team is with him. same with lebron on the lakers this year, and pretty close to the same with anthony edwards any year.

athleticism does not equal good defense. but then again, i'm talking to the guy who's convinced marc gasol was a defensive liability and thus sort of has no idea.



still the jj thread; you're still way off on several non-jj things, though.

 

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FOH...Gasol was washed here man.He had a good 3 or 4 minutes on occasion. Our best Center since Shaq, was slow as an iceberg, didn't board, gunshy, but he passed the ball around the top of the key, like it was a hot potato. Lol.. Analytics can be overrated. So says your boy Frank btw. JJ wouldn't have played him, back then either. It's still a bunch of nothing, about a dude that played less than 20 minutes a game IMO.

Haliburton is still playing, we'll see how his story ends this season. I know he hits big shots, I haven't paid attention to his defensive stats.

Back to Luka..lack of athleticism doesn't equal good defense either. He gets blown by off the dribble a lot, he gets caught watching the ball a lot too. These things I noticed when he was in Dallas. Lebron does a lot of the same s*** but he's 40. And even at 40, he can crank up the D, to a higher level than Luka now. But you say that Luka was hurt, we shall see what's what this season.

Peak Lebron, could lock in and affect a game defensively, playoff games, a playoff series. Those two are not similar on D at all.

Luka gets buckets, for himself and others, he gets board too. He's top 5, but he's no Peak Lebron James. I haven't seen that, I would love to see it, in this next season.

 

i'll ignore your gasol takes like you ignore the statistics.

so defense doesn't matter now, just because your new favorite is worse than the guy you're attacking?

teams didn't have great luck attacking luka off the dribble until the calf injury. helps that he wasn't being put in position to guard the other team's top options in space. when okc got jokic out to the perimeter, they ROASTED him. made gobert look mobile out there. but nobody talks about it cuz denver won a ring once, i guess. it's jj's job to keep luka out of those situations. the fact that we allowed luka to be put there may speak to how we felt about lebron or reaves being put there, because i'm sure minny would have attacked any of the three the same way and prioritized luka because they still have nightmares about him kicking their a** the year before when they weren't able to tire him on on defense.

if lebron's the defender you say he is, we can construct a system on d that doesn't force luka to guard the other team's top options in space. again, like denver has for years with jokic.

this is probably true. i picked the wrong stat comp for peak lebron (because my favorite stat doesn't track back that far). his best years were probably 2009 and 2011, not 2015. but 24 year old luka was a better offensive player than lebron ever has been, imo. i see no reason why he won't be that again, and probably for a few years, at least. hence, we need to build the team and the system around the guy who is our best player and will be here for the next several years, not the guy who isn't and will be retired within a couple.

 

back to redick: i've been watching a few plays from the wolves series, and man, we really need to get back to off-ball movement. watching reaves trapped in the corner by a more athletic defender with gobert just parked on the strong side and guys all spread out beyond the three point line posing zero threat and nobody cutting...like, who decides to do this on purpose, multiple times?

players need to move off the ball. and if jj really wants to impress me, one of those players needs to be doncic.

 

Yes. Needs to happen … DUH!! As badly as Bronny needs to get his ******* hands up and active on D like any good defender ever …. DUH!! Come on staff! Come on Pops! Come on teammates!

 

I really don't understand what you're trying to argue Slick? Your arguments really make little sense, you use Luka's European career before 19 as some sort of negative? Instead of playing high school and college basketball, he was playing and dominating in the second best league in the world. If Lebron was born in Europe he would of done the same exact thing.

I'm not sure why you're bringing up Lebron going to the finals at 22 like it's some definitive point. We all know the East was weak for most of the 2000s. Once Lebron got to the finals he got pub stomped by the Spurs in a 4-0 sweep - he only broke through when he stacked the deck with another MVP caliber player and an all star on the side.

Luka has a similar career trajectory as Lebron. At 22 made the WCF and just came up against a far better team in Golden State who won the ring that season. It's hard to go against Curry, Green, Klay, Wiggins and their supporting parts of Poole, Otto Porter Jr, Looney, GP2, Kuminga and Iguodala.

Then last year at 24 he made the finals, lost to the Boston superteam that had Tatum, Brown, Horford, Jrue, Derrick White with Porzingis, Pritchard, Kornet and Hauser.

Lebron would have had the same result facing either of those teams with Luka's supporting cast. It's not some kind of indication that Luka isn't a top all time player that you think it is.

 

NO! Stop with this madness. Luka is Luka, and Lebron is Lebron. You have absolutely no idea, what Lebron would have done in Europe, just like no one else does. These guys are themselves, I never liked this habit, of trying to make anyone, the next someone else. They are who they are. After 21 years in the League, you can compare the numbers and see, who had better stats,accomplishments, career etc.

What I was referring to, was that Luka turned pro at 15, that isn't some knock, it's reality. It shows that he is a great talent (who else has done that?) Pro level European ball, is a higher level of basketball, than US HS or college hoops. Those teams would be routinely massacred by a professional European club.

That's a phenomenal accomplishment, it also means that he's been a pro for 11 years, and along the way, you can develop some bad habits, along with the success. The conditioning thing, has been a question mark with him for awhile. The Mavs shut him down before his calf injury last season, for two weeks, so he can get in shape. Coming off a Finals appearance, heading into a historic extension? That's concerning to me, maybe it's irrelevant to you. However it wasn't irrelevant to Dallas, the team that had him for his entire career. So this leads me, to knock down, this weird Lebron comparison, that Abeer seems to be obsessed with making.

Lebron James at 25, was a back to back League MVP, and runner up DPOY, 1st team all Def, and 1st team All NBA. They are not the same. Maybe some of you guys forget how great Lebron James was in his 20's. You put that guy on the Mavs last season, and you don't KNOW the Mavs couldn't beat Boston. The Mavs had the best team in the West, Kyrie isn't some kind of damn scrub, the rest of that team wasn't a band of fluff, like Cleveland had in James 1st Finals appearance either.

Where the f*** did I say, that Luka wasn't a great player? I said he's top 5 right now. I did say, that he was NOT Lebron James, He is not, and he is NOT similar to Lebron either. He's a future HOF in his own right, but he has a long way to go, to be sitting at the same table with James.

Abeer is determined for some reason to make him a Lebron equivalent at his age. I categorically reject that BS. That doesn't mean that I considered Luka trash. The bar is just set extremely high.

Lastly f*** that weak conference bs. Name a guy that went 6-0 in the Finals. With two 3peats, or lead his team to the Finals, 8 seasons in a row. Both came out of the East, and nobody has duplicated either feat to date. Maybe Jordan and James, were just that good? GOAT level good? Luka doesn’t have to be either of them, and we can win chips, with the Luka we have, thank you. That part of my comment, routinely gets overlooked for some reason.

 

Lol...Hell yeah, because Gasol was washed! Analytics can be overrated as hell sometimes.

Peak Lebron was 08-12 age 24-28. Put up Luka's stats after 28. He's a good clip behind Lebron's pace right now. He will never be the defensive player Lebron was at that age. I thought defense meant something to you?

 

I find this whole discussion strange. Of course Luka isn’t LeBron. But LeBron is a top 3 player of all time alongside KAJ and Jordan. Maybe Luka is on track for only a top 20-30 career. Still means he can be a MVP and multi ring winner.

Lebron is great. Truly. But we can’t rely on him anymore and I think the basis of this whole thing stems from the fact that moving forward we need to build around Luka.

I have said numerous times that Lebron will be the best second option Luka ever places with (if he can stay healthy for a run or two). It’s also why I’m open to trading everything to try to compete for the next two years - we have a shot at a ring or two. That doesn’t come around very often.

 

Lebron is 40 years old. Of course we aren't going to build around him. He's not going to be around much longer. I still say that right now, there isn't a better player, that we can have around Luka. James is still All NBA, that's it, it's not complicated.

I was just pointing out that it's totally unnecessary, to try and knock James, in order to prop up Luka. Luka doesn't need that, he doesn't have to be similar, trajectory or otherwise to James either.

We can win with him as is. I find the logic that, there is really nothing wrong with Luka's defense(he was just hurt!) However we can't really hide the 26 year old on D, because we need to hide the 40 year old! Who is still the better defender today. That is what's weird.

 

you struggling with the logic doesn't mean it's not there.

we'll be slow on the perimeter defensively because our three best players are all slow on the perimeter defensively. this is a tough thing in the current nba. especially when you also have no reliable back line defenders.

i'm not even sure what the argument is anymore, tbh. my whole point is it's quite clear who our best player is, and the coach and gm need to be operating with that front of mind. the guard has changed. all choices need to be made with optimizing our current mvp candidate in mind. lebron is the one who has to find a way to fit in. and he's said as much, really. i need to see rob and jj follow that lead.

 

You have presented any logic. Lebron James is friggin 40 years old dude. WTH are you even talking about?

How are we building the team around Lebron? It's the GM'S job to get backline defenders isn't it?