Editorial
Editorial / Pacers Tuesday

The Pacers’ Point Guard Options Are All Terrible

- by Fox Doucette

The Indiana Pacers have so many trade and free agency rumors swirling around who is going to start at point guard when the 2019-20 season tips off that you could plug any name from the entire NBA into a Mad Libs and send it off for editing and readers would tweet it far and wide with no regard for its credibility. Part of this is because every offseason for every team at every position of need is like this and part of it is the simple fact that the Pacers, by virtue of Darren Collison being about to turn 32 …

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Editorial

NBA Awards and the “Media Doesn’t Watch Games” Argument

- by Fox Doucette

Every time the question of analytics and the “eye test” comes up, someone starts in with the “these media guys never played the game” argument, suggesting that you have to play the game at a high level to fully understand it. Now, I don’t buy that argument for a variety of reasons. For one, most former NBA players who get into coaching tend to be awful at it. Sure, they’re great at the management of egos and the team cohesion side of the job, but when it comes to the Xs and Os, most former players revert to the style …

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Editorial

Point Guards and Supermax Contracts Don’t Mix

- by Fox Doucette

The 2019 All-NBA teams came out Thursday, and the biggest winners out of all 15 players included on the list were Damian Lillard and Kemba Walker. By virtue of their second and third-team selections respectively, both are now eligible for the NBA’s “supermax” extension in their next contracts. If your first reaction to the term “supermax contract” is “oh gods, no”, then you’re probably a Wizards (John Wall), Rockets (Chris Paul), or possibly even a Thunder (Russell Westbrook) fan. Each of those players will be making well over $40 million by 2023, and each one of those players has either …

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Editorial

Is Zion Williamson Already Better Than LeBron James?

- by Fox Doucette

Tuesday morning, an interesting question came over the wire on Twitter. Who is the BEST FORWARD currently in the NBA that Zion will instantly be better than once he gets drafted. — Justin Grant (@ThePackageJG) May 14, 2019 “Who’s the best forward that Zion Williamson will already be better than when he gets drafted?” And I thought about it for a minute. Because Zion is, of course, so obvious a lock for Rookie of the Year that they might as well just engrave the trophy now and hope he doesn’t blow out his ACL like Blake Griffin. And then I …

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Editorial

Frank Vogel and Jason Kidd to Coach the LOLakers

- by Fox Doucette

Women with children across Laker Hater Nation got a great Mother’s Day gift from the NBA’s most verklempt franchise—move over Knicks, at least you guys have a fighting chance at getting Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving on your team. Frank Vogel is reportedly going to be the new head coach of the purple-and-gold Dumpster fire in Tinseltown, and Jason Kidd is going to be one of his assistants. This is the same Frank Vogel who got himself run out of Indiana for failing to adopt anything remotely resembling modern offensive principles—even Nate McMillan looks like Mike Budenholzer compared to him—and …

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Editorial

The NBA has a Baseball Problem

- by Fox Doucette

With the Houston Rockets and Milwaukee Bucks shooting three-pointers in the playoffs like there’s an invisible electric fence installed in the arc that will shock anyone who shoots the ball between it and the restricted area, Gregg Popovich’s comments about how the NBA has devolved into a three-point shooting contest have once again been all over Twitter. To wit (and hat tip because it inspired this article)… More efficient basketball does not equal higher appealing basketball. Whoever makes the most 3’s wins. Fun sport — Billy Cliff 🏆 (@BillyCliff4) May 6, 2019 You’ll notice that the objection isn’t about analytics. …

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Editorial

Should the Indiana Pacers Trade Victor Oladipo for Bradley Beal?

- by Fox Doucette

The Indiana Pacers badly need to shake things up this offseason. They’ve got millions in cap space, millions more under the luxury tax, plenty of expiring contracts, and one superstar whose injury sealed their fate fully three months before the Boston Celtics finally made it official and swept the Pacers out of the playoffs. Now, the Pacers could go the sensible route. They could ride with Victor Oladipo, re-sign Thaddeus Young (the glue that holds the team together) and Bojan Bogdanovic, fire Nate McMillan and bring in a legitimate head coach who can actually run a modern NBA offense, and …

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Editorial

Pace And Space 2018-19 Predictions Revisited: How’d I Do?

- by Fox Doucette

There are two types of people, broadly speaking, who read my work. There are the people who arrive here via Google search or Basketball Reference or some random social media link and who tend to read what they came for and move on. Then there are the fans, those of you who come here every day, say nice things about the Breakfast Special on Twitter, livetweet with me during Pacers games. This column is for you. Because it’s the people who read me regularly and put some stock in what I say that are going to have the most fun …

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Editorial

The New Orleans Pelicans Should Hire Dave Joerger

- by Fox Doucette

Because the Sacramento Kings are a Roland Emmerich movie of a franchise and because Vlade Divac is as power-hungry as he is incompetent—and why do those things always seem to go together like ketchup and french fries?—Dave Joerger is set to get his walking papers in a face-to-face meeting that was leaked on Twitter way in advance. This leaves Joerger as a free agent a year after taking a Kings team that was languishing in NBA hell and leading them to 39 wins, a legitimate playoff run that ended only when the insane West got away from them (if Sacramento …

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Editorial

Every NBA Team’s Greatest Player Ever

- by Fox Doucette

The debate over who is the greatest player in NBA history involves a very short list. For some people, that list is Michael Jordan, Michael Jordan, and Michael Jordan. For others (me, for example), the top three goes LeBron James and MJ followed by some either fan bias or stat superlative (again, my guy’s Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, but plenty of Lakers fans too young to remember the sky hook or the passing wizardry of Magic Johnson would put Kobe Bryant in at the 3 spot.) Point is, it’s not a very interesting list. LeBron or MJ, MJ or LeBron, like Catholics …

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