The Portland Trail Blazers lost a narrow game to the Denver Nuggets last night. That event prompted one of our readers to submit a question to the Blazer\u2019s Edge Mailbag that turned out to have more facets than appear on the surface. Check out today\u2019s edition:<\/p>\n
Want to catch you while this is hot. After last night\u2019s game do you still think Denver is a contender in the West? Is Jokic your MVP this year assuming he makes the 65 game cut off?<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll take my answers off air!<\/p>\n
I laughed at your sign-off. It reminds me of the early days of sports radio in Portland. Tom Parker. Mychal Thompson. Greg Robinson. I loved listening to the medium when it was new.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll admit I hadn\u2019t watched Denver much during the mid-to-late parts of the season just because I considered them more of a known quantity. Any team with Nikola Jokic has a chance, but man, their defense was not playoffs-ready. They better turn it up a notch, two, really! If they don\u2019t, good teams are going to beat them. Since there are a couple good teams in the West, I\u2019d say that for now, based on what I saw last night, Denver is out of my championship equation. They\u2019re good! They\u2019re just not whole.<\/p>\n
Moving to MVP talk, Jokic is a sick, sick man. I think I know him, but then I watch him and find myself saying, \u201cOh yeah, THAT.\u201d He reads things in a way that makes you go, \u201cDuh. Why didn\u2019t I see that too? And why doesn\u2019t everybody?\u201d<\/p>\n
You can say Jokic\u2019s play is derivative, even predictable, the same way music from The Beatles was derivative and predictable. They were just taking basic chord progressions, adding lyrical bass, and borrowing from all kind of genres and artists that preceded them: R&B, Blues, Country, Shuffle\/Swing, music and instruments from India, and so on. You can dissect almost every one of their songs down to its constituent parts and go, \u201cOh. These building blocks are basic,\u201d the same way you can watch Jokic playing and say, \u201cIt\u2019s just basketball, man.\u201d But somehow The Beatles and Nikola Jokic put things together in a way that others can\u2019t foresee, let alone create. An internal chemistry turns basic, predictable parts into shining paragons. Ain\u2019t nobody else does it the same way.<\/p>\n
So yeah, I\u2019d say Jokic is my MVP. I always list him second until I actually watch him, then it seems obvious again that he\u2019s the clear frontrunner.<\/p>\n
With all of that said, the part that gets me most about your question is the end, the 65-game requirement for postseason awards. It\u2019s ridiculous that Jokic stands at 63 games now and we still don\u2019t know that he\u2019ll qualify. Cade Cunningham sits at 61, Luka Doncic at 64, but some of their outings might not count because of limited minutes. At least Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is past the mark now so the MVP discussion won\u2019t be a total farce. All-NBA awards may be borked this year, though.<\/p>\n
This league needs help solving their problems. That\u2019s clear from almost everything they do nowadays. They have a terrible habit of being basic, ineffective, and overbearing all at once. Honestly, it reminds me of the kind of American stupidity (sorry, we sometimes are) that says things like, \u201cThe way to solve crime is just to increase sentences for criminals!\u201d It doesn\u2019t work. It leaves hundreds of factors unaddressed. It has the sole benefit of allowing you to say you did something about an issue without actually doing anything meaningful. In fact, you may have just made it worse.<\/p>\n
This 65-game rule to qualify for postseason awards is a prime example. \u201cWe want to curb load management! We want our stars to play! So let\u2019s come up with an arbitrary line that will take away all postseason award consideration for anybody who doesn\u2019t meet it! That\u2019ll fix it!\u201d No it won\u2019t. Zero players were saying, \u201cI\u2019m going to sit out this game because I know I can win a postseason award anyway.\u201d It was a marginal factor, one that awards voters could consider, but not a central determiner. Now you\u2019ve set a hard and fast rule and put the might of the league behind it. Games played isn\u2019t a consideration, it\u2019s an absolute bar, not a thing, but THE thing.<\/p>\n
The league hasn\u2019t really fixed load management or stars being out. Injuries are still sky-high. Only four of the Top 20 scorers in the league this year have reached 70 games played. All they\u2019ve done is mess up the All-NBA selections, and maybe the MVP race, to the point of making them silly.<\/p>\n
If I was the NBA, you know what I\u2019d do? I\u2019d hire a consulting team of people who think about balancing systems and crafting cohesive rules day and night. I\u2019d go to Spiel des Jahres, BoardGameGeek, or wherever the epicenter lies for the board game renaissance that\u2019s taken over the world for the last 20 years. I\u2019d ask, \u201cWho are the best, most creative, most solid and smartest game designers in this industry?\u201d The goal would be retaining a small group of them, forming a committee. Their job isn\u2019t to solve my problems in the global sense. They don\u2019t have to know or fix the NBA Lottery as such. Instead I\u2019m going to put a narrow, game-design issue in front of them and ask for ways they\u2019d handle it.<\/p>\n
We have a draft system that\u2019s meant to favor teams who need help, defined by losing the most games. But some teams are losing intentionally to take advantage of the system. Let\u2019s pretend you were designing a board game with a catch-up mechanism for players who are trailing and the rewards for being behind are significant. What are some options for retaining that benefit while decoupling the direct, easy link between losing and reward? We need to value clarity and simplicity in the solution. No weird and artificial rules.<\/p>\n
That group will probably come up with a suite of options. Some will be predictable (nerf the rewards, change the odds of receiving them, etc.). But somewhere in there, as they drill down, they\u2019re probably going to come up with a better solution than the NBA has, in part because they\u2019re not bound by the presumptions that league insiders already carry. All they want to do is make the game work. That\u2019s exactly what they do for a living.<\/p>\n
(My suspicion is that they\u2019d figure out mitigating factors making losses weigh differently, or add in other factors in addition to losses that reduce the impact of a single game on the reward system.)<\/p>\n
After that we get to load management: encouraging teams to field complete rosters as often as possible without mandating artificial standards that ignore health and\/or take the individual decision away from coaches, players, and front offices. Maybe they create a higher cap ceiling or reduce luxury tax penalties for teams with better participation. I don\u2019t know\u2026I\u2019m not a game designer. But I bet they can come up with something better than a hard-and-fast 65-game rule that the NBA has to walk back a couple years after it was instituted.<\/p>\n
Hey\u2026how about examining how to keep the excitement of the three-point shot without having it dominate the game?<\/p>\n
How about a clear, streamlined process for instant replay reviews that people can actually stick to?<\/p>\n
Look, I don\u2019t envy the NBA. They\u2019re in late-stage professional sports the same way the United States is in late-stage capitalism. People have learned to game the system to their own advantage. They not only see that as desirable, but their purpose. Whatever rules you come up with, somebody is going to try to find the loophole. But increasingly, the league\u2019s solutions are solving a smaller and smaller slice of the issues while leaving a larger trail of complications and new fractures in their wake. It\u2019s time to tackle these problems from a systemic view\u2014even if that means tough overhauls\u2014rather than putting fingers in the dike each time, praying the dam doesn\u2019t break.<\/p>\n
You know we need this because we\u2019re nearly 80 games into the current season and what are we talking about? Comparatively little NBA discussion nowadays actually focuses on the sport. It\u2019s about things like the lottery, league rules, voting, salary-cap management, and the like. We don\u2019t talk about the game as much as we talk about how to game the game. That\u2019s a pretty good sign that something is wrong. And every adjustment the league makes compounds that issue instead of resolving it.<\/p>\n
So yeah, Denver is not a true contender, Jokic is the real MVP, and please can we get some clarity back in this league and try to refocus on what everyone is here to do, which is play basketball? That probably means more than tanking for lottery odds, manipulating the salary system, timing replays correctly, and, if all else fails, shoot from 30 feet. You just wouldn\u2019t know it by the way we talk about things.<\/p>\n
Thanks for the question! You can always send yours to blazersub@gmail.com and we\u2019ll try to get to as many as possible!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Portland Trail Blazers lost a narrow game to the Denver Nuggets last night. That event prompted one…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":591999,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,46315,51192,590,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-591998","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-blazers-analysis","11":"tag-blazers-mailbags","12":"tag-nba","13":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=591998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591998\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/591999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=591998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=591998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=591998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}