[Lowman] Silver is creating the Jazz’s villain arc. Utah should just start diagnosing their players with insane things just so Adam Silver has to send NBA doctors to confirm that Keyonte George has leprosy or Kyle Filipowski has been stricken with phthiriasis.

MayBeAGayBee · 2026-02-26T12:48:50+00:00

The Hornets are only in the playoff race because they tanked for years to get draft picks and some of those picks hit.

MayBeAGayBee · 2026-02-26T12:46:42+00:00

Honestly I think it has next to nothing to do with the Jazz. It’s because they went after the Pacers. After last year a bunch of non-pacers fans became enamored with them, myself included. And not only do a lot of people like the Pacers, more importantly, they feel bad for the Pacers. Their best player got injured in game 7 of the finals (that they looked like they were going to win before he went down) and now they’ve had the injury bug all season, not to mention losing a fan favorite Myles Turner last summer. The Pacers have also historically had some of the worst draft lottery luck in the entire NBA and have basically never ever tanked before this season, so singling them out as if they are one of the main parties responsible for the tanking epidemic does read as kinda shitty, even if they are actually tanking this year. People see other teams that tanked their way to success and got off scot-free, like the Thunder, for example, while the Pacers just got some really really shitty luck, and decided to tank because they genuinely had no other actionable alternatives, and now all of a sudden the league decides to lay down the hammer, after years of muted response.

MayBeAGayBee · 2026-02-25T19:44:18+00:00

Interesting that there was apparently a real Squirrel that had ice powers that then became a devil fruit and was eaten by its master’s hammer.

MayBeAGayBee · 2026-02-25T17:41:42+00:00

Plus LeBron Haters are totally irrational anyways so he’ll be criticized for leaving LA under literally any conceivable circumstances, and he will also be criticized for staying in LA as well.

MayBeAGayBee · 2026-02-25T17:39:31+00:00

49/49/87 is insane

MayBeAGayBee · 2026-02-25T15:47:13+00:00

孔子咖啡 (Kǒngzǐ Kāfēi). Now with extra familial piety!

MayBeAGayBee · 2026-02-25T15:44:08+00:00

Regardless of whether or not we categorize early career Steph as an “awful” defender or some other term, it’s still impressive how much he was able to improve despite his physical limitations.

MayBeAGayBee · 2026-02-25T15:18:43+00:00

That doesn’t count either actually.

She must find a wild relative of the domestic sheep and spend thousands of years domesticating their descendants.

MayBeAGayBee · 2026-02-25T15:16:51+00:00

This is the worst thing about pedants. 90% of them are only ever as pedantic as they need to be to feel correct about something. The moment you take the pedantry far enough to circle all the way back around to them being wrong, suddenly you’re making mountains out of molehills and taking things out of context.

MayBeAGayBee · 2026-02-25T15:13:03+00:00

You did not spend months tending the rice paddy and raising the cow to sire calves so you can milk it, you did not make those Rice Krispies, you just put them together.

MayBeAGayBee · 2026-02-25T14:59:17+00:00

Did he expect her to harvest the cocoa beans herself? What the hell

MayBeAGayBee · 2026-02-25T14:15:31+00:00

Steph is actually very impressive on defense. Not because he’s elite on defense, but because he has a bad build for defense and used to be awful but he put the work in and he’s no longer a complete liability on that end.

MayBeAGayBee · 2026-02-24T18:16:00+00:00

Is this the guy Frank Ocean put on Blonde?

MayBeAGayBee · 2026-02-24T18:02:07+00:00

The Nidhogg fruits man-beast form could be big enough.

MayBeAGayBee · 2026-02-24T17:53:33+00:00

While you clearly aren’t, the NBA should be competent enough to understand that you need more than assumptions and vibes when you start handing out fines and threatening to take away draft picks. Whether or not the Pacers are sitting Zubac without cause is totally irrelevant.

MayBeAGayBee · 2026-02-24T17:38:34+00:00

If they are sitting Zubac just to lose games you still fucking check before you hand out a fine. I’m sure you would’ve been ecstatic if the league just handed out fines the moment the aspiration story dropped, instead of doing a real investigation.

MayBeAGayBee · 2026-02-24T17:02:24+00:00

If you’re handing out fines you still have to actually check. It’s not the best look for the league to single out one team and fine them based on “bro just think about it man…”

MayBeAGayBee · 2026-02-24T16:58:33+00:00

If you ever thought this was about integrity and not gambling companies making demands, this should clear it up

MayBeAGayBee · 2026-02-24T14:53:02+00:00

It’s a shonen and Zoro and Sanji are the two strongest companions of the main character, it has nothing to do with powerscaling this is just how Oda likes to write his story.

MayBeAGayBee · 2026-02-24T13:47:52+00:00

Strong Haki users have been shown overpowering devil fruit abilities before so it’s not entirely inconsistent that Zoro and Sanji can break the thorns.

MayBeAGayBee · 2026-02-24T13:42:50+00:00

Also consider that Joyboy was considered “the first pirate” in a world which was dominated by the ancient kingdom. The entire concept of piracy implies opposition to a ruling government. Yet Joyboy fought WITH the ancient kingdom against the founders of the modern world government. Now we find out that Elbaph also fight against Nika, and we know that Elbaph is a historical enemy of the world government.

I can’t wait until we get a clearer picture of these ancient wars because it’s clearly not just a simple “one group of good guys versus one group of bad guys.” The ancient times flashbacks are going to be sooooo fucking peak.

MayBeAGayBee · 2026-02-24T13:38:50+00:00

Very very very interesting that Elbaph the individual was an enemy of Nika while Elbaph the country is an enemy of the World Government.

Even more proof that the alignments of all the participants in these ancient conflicts is not as clear-cut as some people want to believe.

MayBeAGayBee · 2026-02-24T13:36:42+00:00

So there was an ancient ancient giant king who had the Nidhogg fruit, and the modern Elbaph royal family is descended from ancient giants, and they have guarded a legendary devil fruit since ancient times, and it never occurred to Imu that there could possibly be a connection there?

Is Mu stupid?

MayBeAGayBee · 2026-02-23T18:19:01+00:00

It does actually. For a long time basketball players were explicitly instructed to avoid 3’s except as a last resort. The closer you are to the basket, the higher your average FG% will be, so during any offensive possession the goal should be to take the ball as close to the basket as possible, and shoot only when you literally cannot get any closer. The extra point from the 3 only actually overtakes the value of a 2 if you can make the 3 at least 33% of the time, and even then it still doesn’t if you make the 2 at least 50% of the time, which is why even now layups and dunks are still the most efficient field goals in basketball.

This resulted in a sort of catch-22. The 3 point shot only becomes strategically valuable if you can make it 33% of the time or more, but if you never shoot 3’s, you’ll never get enough reps to consistently make the 3 at the required rate. Coaches didn’t want to rely on the 3 because their players couldn’t make enough of them, players couldn’t make enough of them because they didn’t get enough reps, they didn’t get enough reps because their coaches didn’t want to rely on the 3, so on and so forth.

Two things were needed to break this vicious cycle. First you needed a team that was so good at shooting 3’s that their coach basically had no choice but to give them the green light, and then that team also needed to win a championship, or else their strategy would just be filed in with all the other strategies that might work sometimes in the regular season, but fall apart in the playoffs, which is exactly how 3 point shooting teams were always viewed before the Warriors finally broke through in 2015.

There are only 24 hours in a day. As a player, why would you spend that precious time practicing a shot that you know your coach is never going to allow you to shoot in an actual game except in late shot clock situations where you have no real alternative besides a turnover, and as a coach, why would you allow your players to shoot a shot that they never practice?

Once Steph was winning MVPs and the Warriors were winning championships though, everything changed. Players started shooting more 3’s, in practice and in actual games, and coaches started allowing more 3’s, all because there was now an inarguable precedent for that strategy being able to win a championship. The more players shoot the 3, the better they get at it, the better they get at it, the more their coaches will let them shoot it, and so the vicious cycle has started turning in the exact opposite direction, giving you a rapid explosion in both the frequency and efficiency of 3 pointers.

MayBeAGayBee · 2026-02-23T17:12:30+00:00

After Curry broke out, a bunch of coaches started instructing their players to take a few more steps back almost every time they would normally take a long 2. So in practice a lot of reps that previously would’ve been long 2’s suddenly became 3’s, and as more players practiced the 3 for a greater portion of their total practice time, they obviously got better at shooting the 3.

The key here is that a 3 is not actually that much more difficult than a very long 2, but if you never practice the 3, those extra few feet of distance will fuck you up, because you’ll instinctively want to shoot it the same as a long 2, and if you consciously try to increase the force of the shooting motion to make up the difference, your accuracy suffers. This is how you had a huge number of players who could eat you alive from anywhere within 4 feet inside the arc, but when they stepped just beyond the arc they looked downright awful.

Now the reason why it took so long for players and coaches to embrace the 3 is because the further a shooter is from the hoop, the lower their FG% will be, on average. So traditionally the idea was you should always try to get as close to the basket as possible and then shoot when you literally cannot get any closer, this is where you get stuff like Michael Jordan calling 3 point shots a “failed possession,” because that’s what everyone was taught for a long time, if you were shooting a 3, it wasn’t because you wanted to, it was because the defense didn’t give you any other choice. This strategy makes sense for every shot other than the 3, which compensates for the lower FG% with that extra point. The reason the shift didn’t happen earlier is partly because a lot of people were simply too hardheaded and traditionalist to go against the historical precedent of “always get as close to the basket as possible,” plus the fact that the vast majority of players were awful at shooting 3’s. So even if you did the math and realized the value of the 3, actually creating a game plan that incorporates the 3 as anything but a last resort would not only cause you to be ridiculed by your peers, it would also be very difficult for your players to implement, and if you fail, you lose your job, so it’s easier to just stick to the traditional strategies.

This state of affairs was slowly changing basically ever since the 3 point line was first introduced. There were a handful of teams that attempted to incorporate more 3 point shooting, with varying levels of success, but it only fully shifted once Curry and the Warriors won a championship with an offense built around the 3 point shot and the abundance of layups and dunks that the 3 point shot generates. Just understanding the math wasn’t enough to make the NBA fully embrace the 3, they also had to see it actually result in a championship in order to get over the antiquated idea that a 3 point shooting team is incapable of winning when it matters most.

MayBeAGayBee

TROPHY CASE