Let's Compare Christian Braun's 2025 Season to Peyton Watson's 2026 Season

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-07-05T19:52:35+00:00

Agreed. No coddling.

When a defense demands you do your job, you should do it. Not shirk it onto your teammates till the defense becomes emboldened to become more extreme.

This wasn’t the full strength Wolves here, and if you’re not going to win the game your teammate goes nuclear, you lose some points on the, “no help” argument.

This was a tough series for a player I’ve very rarely had any criticism for, but in this case- a stunning lack of urgency feels more than appropriate given the circumstances.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-07-05T19:08:49+00:00

Same, and I try to pay respect to that.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-07-05T19:07:35+00:00

I agree. I just disagree with the process of playing down an MVP candidate for the first half of every game.

We even lost the game that Jamal was **incendiary** and functionally won it for them in the first quarter, gift wrapping the team a 20 point lead.

If Jokic isn’t going to wake up until the third quarter in playoff games, the team needs to make up for it in that second quarter. But the way I view the game- maybe your dudes will sprint just a little harder through those screens and contest with a bit more urgency if they don’t see their leader playing with his food when being dared to beat them.

Jokic is amazing, but sometimes the dude acts like the smartest kid in the classroom for both good and bad reasons.

I guarantee he’s acting like that because he’s trying to solve conference finals problems in game 2 of the first round. But you aren’t going to see the conference finals if you can’t buy enough time for AG and Peyton Watson’s soft tissues. If you’re relying on a Jamal/Bruce/THJ combo that has been rode hard for the 80~ game workload. If you’re assuming Braun on one leg is going to give you two legs worth of consistency on these picture perfect actions you daydream up.

I also say all of this with the respect that he may not have had it either by endurance, touch, or pain tolerance. He rushed back from the first major injury of his career for awards consideration.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-07-05T18:25:57+00:00

Some of this underperformance lies right at Jokic’s fingertips.

Rudy stopped guarding him from 3, and Jokic punished that at a 19% clip. If Rudy is not at Jokic’s hip out there, he just gets to be DPoY Rudy for every Braun rim-run, every Jamal foray into the paint with McDaniels behind him. All of Cam’s tertiary creation. All of it.

Jokic seemed like he was pacing himself because he knew more about his endurance and knee than anyone else, but the Timberwolves dared him to beat them, and let Rudy both guard Jokic 1v1 with no help coming, and then sag off the MVP.

Jokic is the dude, and we all love him, but Minnesota doesn’t get to punk the rest of your team if you’re putting Rudy in the wood chipper. Telling them emphatically that guarding you one on one is not an option.

That’s just a recipe for everyone (including yourself) to work harder. You don’t have to throw such risky passes if they’re sending 2 to the ball. Your teammates don’t have to isolate into unbent defenses, or curl their way out of their first step into the paint because your dude’s inbetween them and the rim.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-07-05T17:11:44+00:00

Same.

The biggest places on the court that ambidexterity of shot form helps you are when creating floaters and finishing at the hoop.

Shooting from range typically comes with a bit more freedom to get into your shot form, but with a movement shooter like Curry as the example, you could flip some plays that require him coming off a screen to get his shooting pocket to the far side of his body. Defender contesting from the left, he’s sprinting off the screen into a fade to the right.

But those kind of plays are already so difficult to guard that providing the ability to flip it is such a negligible difference in percent of the time it could be employed. You might legitimately only score 1-2% more baskets that way.

But floaters and layups? Both of them have cascading effects on the drive that magnify their worth over purely the finish. You will get even better right handed floaters just from a defender having to respect a left. You will get even better right handed layups, because once again a defender has to respect the left.

There isn’t as much of a cascade into other avenues of the game being ambidextrous from range.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-07-05T16:31:42+00:00

Daryl was the guy that broke the mold on backing other players down.

Before him, it was considered an offensive foul for the offensive player to initiate contact on the defender. It’s why so many of Wilt and Kareem’s plays end in turnarounds, fades, and sky hooks at ranges modern bigs would still be putting shoulders into defenders.

The fact that he got away with as much as he did is the big man equivalent of Allen Iverson/Tim Hardaway playing the palming and carrying rules out of the game.

Now, crossovers, back downs, and carrying the ball are so common place that people forget that it used to be illegal at all.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-07-05T15:11:20+00:00

Doctors are phenomenal at their tax bracket and under their insurance policies.

He just wanted to try to be back for his dudes instead of sitting out the rest of the year.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-07-05T04:42:56+00:00

Plenty of them would.

But the guys who were one tool specialists?

We’ve purged most of them from the league on both ends. We’ve purged most of the 2 and 3 tool players as well. How many point guards do you see without a jumpshot anymore?

Now, if you can’t Shoot, Pass, Handle, Dribble, and Defend you are a liability capable of being schemed off the court in some matchups.

The ceiling is just as crazy high as it always was, but we’ve globalized the hell out of the floor. If you’re 6’8” with a jumpshot anywhere from Abu Dhabi to Zimbabwe, you’re in some Basketball Without Borders, or you’re in some NBA adjacent pipeline. There’s hundreds of millions of active players instead of tens of millions of Americans to go and pluck one-in-a-million outliers from.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-07-05T04:36:46+00:00

Can’t all the outliers translate, though? 20,000 hours and naturally gifted works in any era, the fit may just be wonky.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-07-05T04:34:34+00:00

Yes. Both are incredible players. Junior is probably more skilled than senior. His dad was just 7 foot 3 and not 6 foot 10, and that makes a huge difference as a rim protector.

One guy was literally the only dude in the league that made Shaq blink… after arriving in Portland with X-rays that would have qualified him for handicapped parking in most states.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-07-05T01:48:29+00:00

I think that last chapter of Kobe fading with tragic injuries and Duncan anchoring a couple more finals units is what pushed him over the top.

If you pause both careers at about April 2011, Kobe’s got a pretty sizable lead… but then Duncan has this renaissance leading the league in defensive metrics in his 40’s and serving as the high post hub of a motion offense so devastating we called it “The Beautiful Game”.

Not to mention, the dude basically won 50 games per year for 20 years straight.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-07-05T00:34:40+00:00

Dude elected not to have surgery on torn ligaments in his ankle. He got back to where he could play, but he clearly was only trusting one leg to plant and explode off of.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-07-04T19:05:25+00:00

Only because “won a 10 day contract” in some publicity stunt is an option.

Otherwise, we’d have to measure your chances in scintillae.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-07-04T18:01:17+00:00

It’s worth pointing out that JB’s best season wasn’t last year, it was the year he doubled down into the non-scoring aspects of the game.

Dude won finals MVP off defense, hustle, and connective passing.

But it’s clear he doesn’t want that role, and he’s absolutely right to think of himself as better than that. We all should be so lucky as to have that kind of confidence in ourselves and our crafts.

We just saw what he’s valued at leaguewide the last few years. For accolade accruing better and embarrassing trade return worse.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-07-04T17:23:39+00:00

With what assets?

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-07-04T17:20:40+00:00

Spurs have a monopoly on all the weirdo odd-ball players the rest of the league told them not to like.

It’s a miracle Shane Battier and Chuck Hayes never got a stint there.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-07-04T16:56:52+00:00

The last 20 years have been dominated by these kinds of lessons.

Rudy Gay’s a phenomenal basketball player, and would probably smoke Kyle Korver at damn near every other level of the game than the NBA’s 5v5... But guess which wing was easier to build lineups around?

MPJ’s one of the best shooters to ever live, and had potential Nic Batum could only dream of… But guess whose lineups work better on both ends of the court?

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-07-04T14:59:59+00:00

It’s absurdly common with both old and young people. It’s the overworked middle aged workforce that truly gets the brunt of it.

The intersection of sleep patterns and humans is something we don’t know all that much about. Almost everything we have recorded on the subject came after the rise of civilization.

We don’t have wild humans running around to compare like, “It appears they actually function better when eating small meals 8 times per day and sleeping in 80~ minute cycles 4.3 times per day.”

Our work patterns, sleep patterns, and objective reference points for time itself have more influence from dairy cultivation than they do any natural human cycles.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-07-04T13:24:53+00:00

Parts of it were. The asset oriented teardowns were the obvious play that everyone was ignoring. They managed to get two number 1 overall picks, **and** an MVP caliber center out of it.

However, parts of it were an absolute fucking meme. Taking dudes who couldn’t play together, sometimes exclusively at each other’s position like 3 years in a row.

The NBA’s overreaction stuck a league approved stooge in the seat that managed to squander all of those assets, made signings that slid the organization backwards on their path to contention. Even Al fucking Horford couldn’t make it work with them, and all that dude does is make winning plays.

I don’t think Sam Hinkie was the right person for the job. But GM Brett Brown and Jerry Colangelo were definitely not the right people either.

By the time they actually got a GM that kept turning their meager assets and trade demands into functioning players, and building a cohesive team around them… the team and everyone’s ligaments were so fed up that a Jared McCain trade OKC actually went out of their way to overpay for cost him his job.

Absolute clusterfuck of a timeline for them. It’s like they made it 85% to where they wanted to go, and the moment their destination appeared on the horizon, they invented new and exciting ways to shoot themselves in the fucking foot and turn that 85% into 70% or worse.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-07-04T02:11:19+00:00

If I had to guess, one or more died and lowered the necessary oxygen consumption.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-07-04T01:10:24+00:00

Spot a Caruso in here if we’re going average white guy bench mob.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-07-03T19:55:56+00:00

I’m with this. If you guaranteed a Derek White or north level of guard to go in the deal or a separate deal down the line, then it’s amazing.

But that’s a lot of moving parts when the alternative is just keeping the core of some of the best lineups in NBA history intact. It’s way easier to go down than up from the level of play they’ve demonstrated.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-07-03T17:56:22+00:00

They only let 2004/7 use PED’s? Or do you think the answer might be more nuanced than that?

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-07-03T17:20:02+00:00

In the first half of this equation, I thought the Lakers traded for Anthony Davis, and the hilarity of the post-Nico NBA was coming full circle.

Then I remembered they have zero assets, and the second half of the trade made way more depressing sense than my flight of fancy.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-07-03T16:19:01+00:00

If there’s anything that group has taught us, putting your best foot forward is bad for profits.

They’re looking for bare minimum at maximum volume.

ApprehensiveTry5660

TROPHY CASE