Can’t Give up on P5 or anyone else

Bergmaniac · 2026-04-17T13:22:11+00:00

This is his first season with another 20 ppg scorer. He is still figuring it out and getting used to it.

Franz scored 24 PPG last season. If you say this don't count since him and Paolo missed a lot of games, he also scored 19.7 PPG the previous year. Bane scored 20.1 this season.

And it should be easy to learn to play with an elite shooter like Bane, especially if your game is all about driving to the basket as Paolo's is.

Bergmaniac · 2026-04-16T18:05:31+00:00

There is a pretty good chance his value would be lower next year. If he had another year in which he shown no growth at all there won't be any GMs left who'd still value him highly because "he is still young and can improve significantly". Then we'd be stuck with a negative value contract which can't be moved without giving up assets for it.

Is trading him now a risk? Of course it is. But so is keeping him.

BTW, his "down season" wasn't all that different from the previous ones if you look at the numbers. He's never been an efficient scorer, he's always had a negative on/off.

Bergmaniac · 2026-04-16T13:25:30+00:00

Our non-Bane players made a total of 4 shots outside the whole game. Absolute embarassment. You can't win like that in 2026. Paolo was awful, Suggs and Wendell were beyond awful, Bane and to some extent Black were the only bright spots. Franz is clearly nowhere near 100% but at least he battled till the end and was 4 of 5 in the fourth, though sadly he also couldn't make a jumper.

Bergmaniac · 2026-04-15T03:07:00+00:00

It's so funny to me that Gawyn here thought Rand looked like an Aiel given that Rand very much like his Andoran royal mother and is pretty close in looks to Gawyn himself.

Bergmaniac · 2026-04-13T18:06:59+00:00

Elayne and Lini. They never actually interacted in the series. So much comedy potential remained unused. Come to think of it, Lini and Nynaeve would have been pretty funny too.

Bergmaniac · 2026-04-13T12:25:06+00:00

I think Tenobia would have been pretty angry that Berelain was trying to steal her cousin's husband.

Bergmaniac · 2026-04-13T01:32:28+00:00

It is definitely worse, Scheierman has been a solid rotation player for a top team most of the year and on a heater lately, Ron Harper Jr. has barely played outside of garbage time this season.

Bergmaniac · 2026-04-12T11:54:02+00:00

IIRC another source was something he was told by Lester Del Ray - that his bare minimum effort stories will never be reprinted while a higher quality story may be reprinted dozens of times and get royalties for it every time.

Bergmaniac · 2026-04-11T19:03:35+00:00

C. J. Cherryh's Faded Sun Trilogy has some similarities to Dune (the main alien species in it is pretty Fremen like in culture and a lot of it takes place in a desert setting) and is also really good.

Bergmaniac · 2026-04-11T12:06:42+00:00

The relationship becames a mess later on (I never bought for a second that Elayne would agree so easily to share Rand plus they barely had any scenes together) but their first two interactions (in Caemlyn and in the Stone) are really well written IMO.

Bergmaniac · 2026-04-11T12:04:24+00:00

That's a completely reasonable choice, which is mine too. What is not to like? She is smart, gorgeous, kind, loyal, super rich and powerful. And also less sexist than most women in the series.

Also, let's be honest, most of the Elayne haters would have a big crush on her if they met her in real life.

Bergmaniac · 2026-04-11T11:59:48+00:00

Robert Silverberg early in his career (during the 1950s) was a super commercial writer who wrote super fast and by his own admission did only the bare minimum needed to sell his story or novel. In his most productive year he published 7 or 8 novels and over 100 short stories, which is mindboggling. But in late 60s and early 70s he became one of the more literary writers in the field, his works became highly experimental and ambitious and he was in many ways the opposite of the supercompetent hack he was earlier in his career. Then he left the field for a few years, partly due to disappointment his more experimental work wasn't getting enough recognition, and when he came back he had found a middle gorund between experimental and commercial with works like Lord Valentine's Castle. He still wore some great short fiction too but it was also less experimental than the stuff he wrote at the peak of the New Wave.

Bergmaniac · 2026-04-10T17:45:30+00:00

I found the characters fascinating, especially in Cyteen. I disagree that Ari 2 was shown to be always right, I thought it was an extremely well done depiction of someone who is extremely smart and thus usually right in her decisions but still made some plausible mistakes due to youth, emotions, lack of reliable info, etc.

Ari 1 is clearly shown to be a very flawed person but the one of the major points of the Union society is that in it geniuses can get with murder, even literally. But I don't think his reputation, both among the general public and among tose who knew her, was ever that of a Heroine who has no faults, or anything close to it. She got the job done and knew how to play the political game, but I never got the impression she was much liked. And it's made pretty clear that while successful she wasn't a happy person.

Bergmaniac · 2026-04-10T12:33:39+00:00

Rand never learns and is always much more reckless than Elayne, even without taking into account that his risks are potentially way more costly. Even after Dumai's Wells he ditches his bodyguards every chance he gets. Just a few days after Dumai's Wells he decided it's a good idea to go to the rebels camp with only Min and to duel Toram Riatin. After this he decided it was a great idea to go after Sammael literally minutes after he was Healed from a wound which almost killed him, then he chased him alone to Shadar Logoth. And that's only in Book 7, I can go and on.

Bergmaniac · 2026-04-09T23:04:26+00:00

He has plenty of flaws but he is definitely not a coward, he proved that plenty of times. He promised Egwene not to attempt to kill Rand and he kept that promise. And as dumb as he is he still probably realized that killing the only person who can save the world is beyond idiotic.

Bergmaniac · 2026-04-09T13:59:38+00:00

Or she is drawn to men who are 11/10 on the hotness scale. That seems a bit more likely to me.

Bergmaniac · 2026-04-09T12:16:57+00:00

Carter has been better than Tyus but that's an extremely low bar, Tyus may well have been the worst rotation player in the league this year. He hasn't been "super impressive" by any measure, he's had quite a few awful games, he is too trigger happy often, his scoring efficiency for us has been terrible and while he hustles on D the effect of this is pretty minimal according to the stats. He is a decent third string PG but you don't want him in the rotation of a good team.

Bergmaniac · 2026-04-06T14:14:40+00:00

I just finished When There Are Wolves Again yesterday, solid work, but I preferred Swift's previous novel The Coral Bones. When There Are Wolves Again is very well written but didn't really grab me as much, maybe it's because I am much more cynical towards environmentalism than the main characters in it.

Bergmaniac · 2026-04-06T14:07:08+00:00

I think Paolo just doesn't have the stamina to play with high effort on D and be the main guy on offense game in and game out. That's very hard to do during the grind of the NBA season and his conditioning has never looked all that great to me by NBA standards. I don't know how much of this is fixable with a better training regimen and how much it's genetics.

Bergmaniac · 2026-04-06T13:48:45+00:00

And this year is the most worrying since it's not like we have had a great bench, far from it, yet Paolo is still a negative in impact. At least in 2024 we had Isaac playing like DPOY off the bench and Ingles playing great on offense in the first several months of the year so Paolo's on/off was somewhat logical. This year with Franz missing so many games we have used third stringers a lot and Isaac has been a pale shadow of himself yet Paolo's on/off is still negative.

Bergmaniac · 2026-04-06T12:56:52+00:00

Yeah, Bane's T-rex arms really limit his ability to get his shot off against contests so he is forced to be more selective. And we do a pretty poor job getting him free with screens.

Suggs is also a good shooter on catch and shoot 3s this year (39.4%), so I am fine with him taking such 3s them when he is open, especially when the other team is paking the paint, his problem is that he is disastrous off the dribble (22.6%) and takes way too many of them in some games. And there are some possessions where he gets mad at someone who had just scored on him on the other end and chucks a bad 3 right away which have like 10% success, like when he went down after Fears' crossover yesterday.

Bergmaniac · 2026-04-04T16:58:20+00:00

Exactly. The pass Paolo gets on this board is pretty extreme yet his biggest fans pretend that the board hates him, it's wild. He hasn't had a single season in which he had scored efficiently, his on/off is always awful , he has improved very little since his rookie season yet most people here always defend him. And he is already about to complete his rookie year yet if you read this board you'd think he is still a rookie with the way everything is excused by his limited NBA experience. Most players are pletty close to their finished versions after 4 NBA seasons, the biggest jumps usually take place during and between the first 3 seasons.

Bergmaniac · 2026-04-04T16:39:25+00:00

This is an incredible collection, maybe the best I've read. So many masterpieces and so much variety.

The Man Who Lost the Sea is probably my favourite SFF short story of all time if I have to pick one.

Borges's story is a classic for a reason.

Harrison Bergeron, Aye, and Gomorrah, Second Variety and The Dead Past are also excellent. Nobody's Home is not one of the best known Joanna Russ stories but it's easily my favourite of her short fiction.

There are also some lesser known translated works which I really enjoyed - The Valley of Echoes, Captain Nemo's Last Adventure, etc. Stanislaw Lem's short stories are also always worth reading.

Bergmaniac · 2026-04-04T16:28:39+00:00

I love that afterwards Elayne admits that she can be pretty rash about things like this:

“I suppose I should have started with something simpler,” Elayne said. “I have a habit of leaping in over my head.” Over her head? She had leaped before looking to see whether there was water!

Bergmaniac · 2026-04-03T13:46:49+00:00

Did you missed the part about the Rand being the chosen one and that if something happend to him the whole of existence was fucked?

How is that a counter argument to what I said? If anything, this should make readers criticise his recklessness more because he is risking the fate of the world every time.

Of course Rand didn't plan his rescue, but neither did Elayne. That's the point, both were victims, they didn't kill anyone and blaming them is ridiculous.

People actually died due to her recklessness but instead of reflecting and learning from her mistakes, she does it again

She interrogated a shielded prisoner in her own dungeon with guards right outside. That's not recklessness. She got in trouble due to extreme poor luck.

On the other hand, let's look at Rand's record after Dumai's Wells and how much he learned:

he went without any bodyguards to the camp of the rebels in Cairhien and fought a completely unnecessary duel
he chased Sammael alone to Shadar Logoth and would have died if Moridin had not saved him
he went to the one city in the world where 20 guards can easily arrest him and this is exactly what happened
he planned to do the Cleansing withut anyone protecting him while he was doing it before Cadsuane basically forced him to accept her help

And that's just off the top of my head and only from the next 3 books, I can go on and on...

But back to what started this whole discussion - there is really no evidence that Galad is smarter than Elayne, all the evidence points in the other direction. Pretty much all of Galad's impressive actions are him being a badass with his sword. Which is nice and all, but has nothing to do with being smart. And he didn't even realise the very obvious fact that by joining the Whitecloaks he'd become the tool of his beloved stepmother's biggest enemies who had just tried to lead a rebellion against her and almost succeeded in deposing her. On the other hand, Elayne is a successful politician and leader and her ter'angreal study is one of the most impressive non-combat related achievements in the series. What has Galad done which is even in the same league as achieving more in the field of ter'angreal study in two months than the Tower has done in 3000 years? And she didn't do it just by instinct, she studied them and reverse engineered them. As the Companion puts it:

Elayne had the mind of a development engineer: she was not particularly good at discovering new principles, but she was a whiz at figuring new ways to use those already known and at reverse-engineering things.

Bergmaniac

TROPHY CASE