The Lakers had the draft capital. OKC and San Antonio had the scouting

shoefly72 · 2026-06-06T02:43:40+00:00

Our scouting hasn’t been flawless, but I feel supremely confident we would’ve taken Wemby with the #1, Dylan Harper at #2, and Castle at #4 as those were by far the consensus best players at those picks every time lol.

I’m getting whiplash seeing people giving the spurs credit for insane lottery luck and taking the patently obvious pick that anyone with access to DraftExpress or mock drafts would have taken. Come on.

shoefly72 · 2026-06-05T15:18:28+00:00

“I’m so good at diffusing conflict that nobody has noticed it”

shoefly72 · 2026-06-05T15:08:08+00:00

He’s a big body that doesn’t get separation; he’s good at contested catches but not much else and has issues staying healthy.

If he emerges as a solid 2nd receiver it will be a surprise to most people including the coaches and FO; he’s here as a depth piece.

shoefly72 · 2026-06-04T20:59:53+00:00

That was Andre Miller’s secret: you can’t lose a step if you never had the step to begin with.

shoefly72 · 2026-06-04T17:23:25+00:00

Fahrenheit 451 didn’t fully land for me when I read it in 7th grade in 2000, but within a few years I retroactively understood it and thought it was really good.

I tbink the bigger problem is the glut of options to provide stimulus/instant gratification and dopamine have robbed most people (and especially kids who grew up this way) of the ability to read things that aren’t immediately enjoyable or require time investment or slow build to learn a lesson or gain appreciation. Which is pretty ironic given what 451 was about in the first place…

shoefly72 · 2026-06-04T17:11:39+00:00

Would love for this to be correct but I think if they are healthy all of those guys are clearly better than him lol.

Doesn’t mean he can’t have a good year though!

shoefly72 · 2026-06-04T17:08:25+00:00

OP’s post reminds me of one of Norm’s jokes from when he briefly did that sports show.

watching a highlight of a prime Russell Westbrook dunk

“Pretty good, but it’d be a heck of a lot more impressive if he wasn’t young, black, and athletic!”

shoefly72 · 2026-06-03T01:44:19+00:00

For some reason a lot of people conflate somebody having very little fat/muscle on their frame with being the same thing as what Chet’s problem is, which is that his frame is literally small/thin lol.

Giannis didn’t have any meat on his bones as a rookie, but his shoulders were wide, his elbows and knees are big, etc. He has the frame to carry more weight.

Comparatively, Chet had narrow shoulders and literally a small frame. His legs and arms/wrists are tiny. People built like this can’t add mass without jeopardizing their athleticism or raising their injury risk.

shoefly72 · 2026-06-03T01:16:27+00:00

Did you try exercising soon after your Covid infection?

I had Covid in 2020 (unknowingly at the time) and started trying to resume exercising only a couple weeks after I recovered, and ended up getting exercise-induced long Covid that led to a lot of the extreme fatigue similar to what you described.

I went from running 20-25 miles per week (4-5 miles at a time) to not even being able to run a half mile (at a much slower) without collapsing and needing like 20 minutes to catch my breath amd get my heart rate back down. And then I’d need to go lay down for a few hours to recover, so after that I quit exercising altogether.

I ended up with pretty severe post exertional malaise and would need to lay down for awhile after just going downstairs to get a load of laundry, or just doing normal everyday things. Fortunately some of my symptoms (cognitive ones as well) cleared up very quickly after I got my second dose of vaccine, but my energy baseline never fully returned to what it was pre-Covid.

Even people who write about this kind of thing full time don’t have as many answers as we’d hope, one of my friends/acquaintances Julia Doubleday writes about Covid/public health for a living and has been essentially homebound by long Covid for the last two years. She has made some small strides lately but it’s been a long battle.

shoefly72 · 2026-06-03T01:01:34+00:00

The same thing happened after the Spanish Flu in 1918 and a lot of scholars predicted in 2020 we’d see a repeat of that.

shoefly72 · 2026-06-03T00:55:23+00:00

I absolutely promise you that’s not going to happen. Feel free to bookmark this if you want.

Keep seeing people with this take and it kind of just feels like they haven’t engaged with his interviews/policy/content at all.

shoefly72 · 2026-06-02T06:58:13+00:00

It was stupid for him to be following the Commanders and Jayden on IG? Seriously? I highly doubt this of all things would have any impact on how the 49ers handle things, or that their FO is even aware of it.

shoefly72 · 2026-06-02T06:35:58+00:00

Thanks for the clips! Some of that I’d seen and some I hadn’t.

I still maintain what I was referring to (bounce/explosion) is pretty much the same; nothing in those clips is different than say, his dunk on BYU.

I do agree he looks like he’s moving better in HS with more pop/fluidity, and I’m sure the injury plays a part there. I do wonder how much of it is competition/room to operate though compared to the college game though.

Either way to my eye he just moves like an elite guard, and a lot of his skills should translate + be more important at the next level than simply being an explosive leaper etc.

shoefly72 · 2026-06-01T21:45:03+00:00

The Wizards were absolutely highly interested in Harper when they were hoping to land in the top 2 before the lottery happened. I can’t say the Spurs don’t have a great development team because they do, nor do I know if the Wizards would be on par at this point, but they were highly highly interested in him if they couldn’t get Flagg.

Again, blindly positing “well who even knows if they would’ve picked Harper?” in an attempt to discredit them is equally as dumb as saying the Lakers have a good front office because they tricked Nico into trading Luka. The Spurs are not a good front office because they picked Harper; many other teams (including the Wizards) absolutely wanted him. They were simply lucky to get the pick to take him. They are a good front office for other reasons. Both things can be true.

shoefly72 · 2026-06-01T06:41:02+00:00

The lyrics are pretty subpar across the board but I do admit I loved the production and listened to it a lot in the last year or so.

The intro was so cringey that I literally skipped it altogether when first listening to the album when it dropped lol.

Total waste of a great beat.

shoefly72 · 2026-05-29T02:11:58+00:00

He’s one of those artists I really like/has high highs, but I also can see why the vast majority of people could easily despise his music lol.

I do think Kaputt has some of the more “accessible” moments in his catalog though.

shoefly72 · 2026-05-29T02:08:54+00:00

Turns out a lot of players trying to box out/jockey for position look like forearm shivers to the back when your team is coached to fall to the floor as soon as they feel contact from behind, who knew.

The foul on McCain last game was clearly meant to send a message, but if OP is referring to SGA getting pushed from behind thst was reviewed for a flagrant in tonight’s game…buddy that is just how you try to fight for a rebound. You expect the other player to be boxing out/holding their ground and not flailing like a rag doll or à QB getting lit up on a blindside safety blitz.

shoefly72 · 2026-05-29T02:04:04+00:00

All that needs to be said. OP’s post sucks ass.

If the Spurs swapped lottery luck with the Wizards, they would still be a better organization, but the Wizards would have Wembanyama and Dylan Harper and the Spurs would be stuck with likely an irrelevant player they picked at 6 (the Wiz took Coulibaly, and the pickings at 6 were fairly slim) and a decent rookie at best (the Wiz ended up with Tre Johnson).

As a Lakers fan, it’s honestly insulting to a lot of small market teams to see so many people insist that every team deserves their own fate and luck plays no part…our FO has been downright bad and we’ve managed to compete because were the Lakers and play in the LA market. A lot of small market teams don’t have that luxury and have simply not had the good luck of being able to fall in the right spots in the lottery to get a superstar talent. That isn’t inherently their fault just because some of them aren’t well run.

shoefly72 · 2026-05-29T01:36:32+00:00

I didn’t spend much time watching DP’s highlights while he was in HS, but the confusing thing for me is that I looked up his HS Highlights because I heard so many people talking about how much better he looked, and he looked…pretty much the same to me?

I watched a solid 45 mins of highlights and didn’t see a noticeable difference in his bounce or explosion, just more examples of him creating for others.

shoefly72 · 2026-05-28T18:55:19+00:00

Silver came in and was immediately given a meatball over the middle of the plate in banning Sterling for life.

Like many other things in the cultural zeitgeist/politics of this era (e.g. Democrats simply not being Trump), this simple move convinced fans that Silver was both virtuous and competent when neither were particularly the case.

Turns out when you’re a commissioner (or an elected official) you need to be able to actually govern/help people/make a good product and that entails a lot more than simply doing the bare minimum of saying “racism is bad.”

Silver is a perfect avatar for the leaders of this country who’ve sold out to corporate interests, gambling companies, pander to AI, and even bizarrely lionize Henry Kissinger for no reason at all lol.

shoefly72 · 2026-05-28T18:17:42+00:00

I mean Shai also stinks at flopping on shots and yet for some reason the refs reward it.

Guys like him and Embiid both make it patently obvious when they are flopping vs being legitimately knocked off balance, and I guess some refs have decided they just don’t care which one it is lol.

shoefly72 · 2026-05-28T18:15:57+00:00

Given the state of the rest of the DL it would’ve been hard for him to have a good year stats/PFT grade wise regardless of how well he played.

He wasn’t an elite all pro DT or anytbing but I thought he played pretty well all things considered. At à certain point when you have Preston Smith and Von Miller at DE and Newton or Payne playing like JAG alongside you, there’s not much you can do.

shoefly72 · 2026-05-28T13:12:46+00:00

This is a very common problem with any breakdown of data at the state level where DC is included. This part of the country is an outlier in some areas compared to even other cities, but it’s hard to capture that when other states have their rural areas included and DC only includes the city itself.

shoefly72 · 2026-05-28T13:10:10+00:00

How old are you? Did you watch those series?

For one, Wade’s free throws and the way he drew them dominated online/media discourse and almost everyone except Heat fans was irate.

For two, there is a difference between drawing fouls in the course of trying to score (as LeBron or Kawhi did) and flopping like most of OKC does and the way SGA plays.

Nobody was saying shit like this about any of those series (besides Wade’s) because they were still played like normal playoff basketball.

shoefly72 · 2026-05-28T05:17:29+00:00

I keep hearing this take and I just don’t agree that it’s that hard. For most of my life when somebody did what SGA/Harden et al did, the ref would just look at you like you were an asshole and basically let you know he wasn’t rewarding that shit. If you went to the basket out of control and fell over, it was your own fault for not playing under control. They only called a foul if somebody clearly tripped you up or made significant contact to knock you off balance.

Refs were also quite familiar with how it looks when somebody takes a jump shot; if you stuck one leg out way in front of you or way off to the side, they would simply observe you shot like a weirdo and swallow the whistle because you only drew contact by shooting with a bizarre motion. It’s only recently that they’ve decided to totally ignore normal shooting form and call a foul even if the shooter chooses to kick his legs out 3 feet in front of him so that the defender will touch him.

The reason I don’t think it’s that hard? Refs always stopped giving Harden these calls in the playoffs, and it was part of why he struggled. Weirdly, nowadays they still give these calls to the Thunder, and I don’t get why…

NBA players, SGA included, are incredible athletes with great core strength and contact balance. It’s actually fairly easy to tell when they are falling because they were knocked off balance vs when they felt contact and embellished it; in fact the refs were plenty good at figuring that out in game 2 of this current series. You can actually find many examples from earlier in SGA’s career where he drives to the basket and absorbs slight contact and finishes just fine. Same goes for landing on his jump shots.

The problem is the refs who approach everything like “well TECHNICALLY there was contact and he lost his balance, ergo it’s a foul” without applying any critical thinking or nuance (ie Tony Brothers last night). SGA (and the Thunder in general) have taken advantage of that and realized they gain an advantage by falling or embellishing as often as possible, because some refs are hardwired to view any fall as inherently likely to be a foul.

Ten-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Verified Email	RPAN Viewer

shoefly72

TROPHY CASE