Hello fellow Stiffs and fellow basketball junkies. Welcome to my new weekly column "Random thoughts from Basketball Oblivion". These will post on the weekend and wrap up some thoughts that I have that don't need a whole column.
Lets get started
Have some professional pride!
Last week, after he made a three point basket, Golden State Warriors superstar Stephen Curry turned to the Atlanta Hawks bench and did his patented “shimmy”:
Curry stated that was for his good friend Kent Bazemore who was seated on the bench. For whatever reason there was no response from the Hawks. No hard foul. Not even a verbal confrontation with Curry. Zilch. It leads me to wonder why on earth players in the NBA have some professional pride? If Curry is clowning you, in a close game, why do you just sit there and take it?
Nuggets fans. Can you imagine what Kenyon Martin would have done if Curry showboated in FRONT of the Nuggets bench? Let alone Dahntay Jones? Hell, even Chauncey Billups would have had something to say to Curry. It’s perplexing to me the way OTHER teams in the NBA (with MAYBE the exception of the Los Angeles Clippers) just let the Dubs clown them at every turn. Why does this happen?
This is why I was kind of happy when Danilo Gallinari mocked Curry after he tried to hot dog it against the Italian Forward and lost the ball at the end of the Nuggets victory over the Warriors in January:
The responses, like that from Gallo, have been few and far between. Raja Bell and Rip Hamilton spoke about what they would have done to Curry if he had done that to them (HT: Matt Moore of CBS Sports). Have some professional pride. If you don’t have some respect for yourself, why should the Warriors have respect for you?
Speaking of Gallo
Danilo Gallinari’s injury and it’s impact on the Nuggets
In Overtime of Friday night’s loss to the Dallas Mavericks the true affect of Gallo’s injury (ankle, which occurred in the third quarter of the same game) was seen in boldface fashion.
An extremely underrated and under the radar aspect of Gallo’s game is his ability to get this young Nuggets squad into the correct play. Often, you’ll see Gallo pointing out where on the court players should be in order to run a certain play. You can hear Gallo shouting to a certain player and indicating where they need to be at the beginning of a play. Gallo has been doing this for several years now, going back to the 2012-13 season when Gallinari took Corey Brewer and shoved him to the right place.
Losing their quarterback on the floor meant that the Nuggets lost a bit of their on-court structure in crunch time and couldn’t find their way. It was left for a Will Barton improvisation far too many times in OT, and it was shambolic at best. It’s right there where the loss of the Rooster will be felt the most. We can debate about his stats this year (considering his shooting and isolation statistics are poor this season) but his value as a second voice in addition to Malone’s will be felt depending on how long the Nuggets leading scorer is gone.
Mark Cuban's idea for the three point line
This morning, Tim MacMahon of ESPN.com wrote about Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and his concern that the NBA is becoming a bit overreliant on the three point show and that other aspects of the game are getting lost. Here was the crux of his idea which is … move the three point line back:
"It's getting too close," the Dallas Mavericks owner said Friday night of the 3-point arc, which is 23 feet, 9 inches at the crest and 22 feet in the corners, where there is no room to move it back. "Guys are shooting a foot behind it anyways. … That's something we should look at. It's worth looking at."
While I agree with the enigmatic Mavs owner in principal, I feel his actual idea wouldn't produce the results he is looking for. It would only serve to lessen the role of big men in this league who would have more space to cover, and teams would just expand their offense outward.
If you want to lessen the impact of the three point shot, and have it regress back to the mean (the freaking Clippers shot 46 three pointers against the Nuggets earlier this week) you have to eliminate the corner three. Be it from cutting off the three point line at the place where it starts to go straight along the sideline or widening the court. These are pretty much the only functional ways you can begin to bring the focus back towards the paint.
The corner three, much more that Steph Curry shooting from 45 feet away, has fundamentally altered the NBA and the way teams approach the game. It's use, more than any defensive rules has gone a long way toward making the true big man an extinct species.
I've felt, since teams discovered corner three "value" a few years ago, that it's overuse would result in a correction by the NBA. Now, any change the league makes won't suddenly make things late-90's sluggo basketball, but it may serve to focus basketball skill back to to centers with post moves. It remains to be seen if the NBA has the stomach to make this change.
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And I will answer at the end of each of the Random Thoughts column
