change, then a rant about basketball (UPDATED)
and by that, I mean "seasonal change". Though according to KMT Bus TV, it's still spring, I've had to run my A/C at night to clear some of the humidity out of the air in my room. Which means it's only a matter of time before I have to run the A/C at night because it's not only humid but also hot.
That means that I've now been here for all of the seasons of HK: air conditioning, pleasant, heater (may be omitted some years, apparently), dehumidifier. Meanwhile, apparently Denver is due for eight inches of snow today -- they've already had to close Loveland Pass. So perfectly normal spring weather back home, too (perfect for the baseball season, which has started).
Even just listening to the Nuggets on internet radio is driving me crazy. The sane part of me is thankful I'm not in the US to watch the games, because it would probably result in me becoming either completely listless with disillusionment or completely volatile with frustration. Such awful, predictable (except maybe the sacto one, even a fan-cynic like me couldn't have seen that one coming) wrenching losses to generally not-that-good teams. I'd like to call it inexplicable, but it's hard to grow up watching the 1990s incarnation of the team without developing a streak of basketball fatalism, and so in some sense, it's completely explicable. I'm not completely ready to count us out of the playoffs yet, although tonight/tmrw-morning-my-time's game against the Warriors should determine that rather neatly. But even if we do make the playoffs, I expect we'll manage to add another 1-4 first-round loss to Melo's already stellar 4-16 playoff record (including at least three years of taking game 1 on the road only to lose four straight).
On the other hand, if we miss the playoffs (since we won't win a championship this year anyway), we should be more motivated next year, maybe lead to a personnel shakeup, and certainly we'll have a shot the draft lottery and an ok pick. Now, granted, other than 110%-sure-thing-Melo in 2003, our draft history is pretty awful all the way back to Antonio McDyess (who, I just looked up, was actually part of a draft-day trade). So maybe since Dikembe, back in 1991. The last few years have been characterized by drafting promising guards and then trading them away immediately, and then failing to sign any of the veteran guards we target during free agency. Huh. ((examples: Jameer Nelson, Jarrett Jack))
Meanwhile, the bandwagon post-Iverson nuggets fans (even the post-Melo fans) will demand stupid trades that aren't possible under the collective bargaining agreement / make the team worse. And lambaste the Kenyon Martin sign-and-trade from summer 2004. Which means they don't remember the emotional roller coaster of that summer. The team had come off a season of dramatic improvement, Melo barely losing out to LeBron for rookie of the year, and a first round playoff exit against the peaking T-wolves, in KG's one good year there. The Nuggets had a lot of cap room, but, guess what, when the team is awful for a decade and trades big-name players on a revolving door basis, free agents had no interest in coming to Denver, much-heralded rookie or no. We pursued Ginobili, who looked for a while like he might sign (he eventually took less money to stay with the Spurs). We pursued Brent Barry, coming off a statistically unremarkable but clearly team-chemistry-relevant season in Seattle, and I'd even talked myself into being happy about signing him instead of Ginobili, but he also signed with the Spurs (for less, I believe, than we were offering, again). So it was a summer of frustration: in a sport with a tightly-controlled salary cap, we had money to spend and nobody wanted it.
Then, the K-Mart signing. An All-Star! A real power forward (allowing Melo to play more outside)! A former number-one pick, former consensus College Player of the Year! A guy people hadn't even thought could possibly be available, a guy the reigning Eastern Conference Finalist Nets were loathe to even consider parting with! Stolen because their owner Bruce Ratner wasn't willing to frontload the money in the contract the way we were! I was ecstatic: it was a chance to contend, immediately. So admittedly, since then, K-Mart had two microfracture surgeries and is only now playing at the level he was at when we signed him. This was not something anybody could have forseen. Nor could we have seen the way K-Mart's swag twisted around unhealthily and caused him to rush back too soon, to feud with his coach, etc. Hey, it happened to Gil Arenas too. Anyway, it was a good signing when it happened, and I think the team has to look in the offseason to fill in the holes with NBADL/CBA/undrafted euroleague players, rather than with a splashy trade or big signing. And hope that some personnel consistency next year leads to a team with defensive energy and offensive consistency (no iso, please, for all of our sakes).
----------------------------------
EDIT: so we made the playoffs. with a lot of help from the Warriors, I gotta admit, and, pending this first round series, we'll see how meaningful of an appearance it is. I remain skeptical about our postseason success.
ALSO: we also drafted Leon Powe, who has turned into a reasonably good backup PF for the NBA-best Celtics.
That means that I've now been here for all of the seasons of HK: air conditioning, pleasant, heater (may be omitted some years, apparently), dehumidifier. Meanwhile, apparently Denver is due for eight inches of snow today -- they've already had to close Loveland Pass. So perfectly normal spring weather back home, too (perfect for the baseball season, which has started).
Even just listening to the Nuggets on internet radio is driving me crazy. The sane part of me is thankful I'm not in the US to watch the games, because it would probably result in me becoming either completely listless with disillusionment or completely volatile with frustration. Such awful, predictable (except maybe the sacto one, even a fan-cynic like me couldn't have seen that one coming) wrenching losses to generally not-that-good teams. I'd like to call it inexplicable, but it's hard to grow up watching the 1990s incarnation of the team without developing a streak of basketball fatalism, and so in some sense, it's completely explicable. I'm not completely ready to count us out of the playoffs yet, although tonight/tmrw-morning-my-time's game against the Warriors should determine that rather neatly. But even if we do make the playoffs, I expect we'll manage to add another 1-4 first-round loss to Melo's already stellar 4-16 playoff record (including at least three years of taking game 1 on the road only to lose four straight).
On the other hand, if we miss the playoffs (since we won't win a championship this year anyway), we should be more motivated next year, maybe lead to a personnel shakeup, and certainly we'll have a shot the draft lottery and an ok pick. Now, granted, other than 110%-sure-thing-Melo in 2003, our draft history is pretty awful all the way back to Antonio McDyess (who, I just looked up, was actually part of a draft-day trade). So maybe since Dikembe, back in 1991. The last few years have been characterized by drafting promising guards and then trading them away immediately, and then failing to sign any of the veteran guards we target during free agency. Huh. ((examples: Jameer Nelson, Jarrett Jack))
Meanwhile, the bandwagon post-Iverson nuggets fans (even the post-Melo fans) will demand stupid trades that aren't possible under the collective bargaining agreement / make the team worse. And lambaste the Kenyon Martin sign-and-trade from summer 2004. Which means they don't remember the emotional roller coaster of that summer. The team had come off a season of dramatic improvement, Melo barely losing out to LeBron for rookie of the year, and a first round playoff exit against the peaking T-wolves, in KG's one good year there. The Nuggets had a lot of cap room, but, guess what, when the team is awful for a decade and trades big-name players on a revolving door basis, free agents had no interest in coming to Denver, much-heralded rookie or no. We pursued Ginobili, who looked for a while like he might sign (he eventually took less money to stay with the Spurs). We pursued Brent Barry, coming off a statistically unremarkable but clearly team-chemistry-relevant season in Seattle, and I'd even talked myself into being happy about signing him instead of Ginobili, but he also signed with the Spurs (for less, I believe, than we were offering, again). So it was a summer of frustration: in a sport with a tightly-controlled salary cap, we had money to spend and nobody wanted it.
Then, the K-Mart signing. An All-Star! A real power forward (allowing Melo to play more outside)! A former number-one pick, former consensus College Player of the Year! A guy people hadn't even thought could possibly be available, a guy the reigning Eastern Conference Finalist Nets were loathe to even consider parting with! Stolen because their owner Bruce Ratner wasn't willing to frontload the money in the contract the way we were! I was ecstatic: it was a chance to contend, immediately. So admittedly, since then, K-Mart had two microfracture surgeries and is only now playing at the level he was at when we signed him. This was not something anybody could have forseen. Nor could we have seen the way K-Mart's swag twisted around unhealthily and caused him to rush back too soon, to feud with his coach, etc. Hey, it happened to Gil Arenas too. Anyway, it was a good signing when it happened, and I think the team has to look in the offseason to fill in the holes with NBADL/CBA/undrafted euroleague players, rather than with a splashy trade or big signing. And hope that some personnel consistency next year leads to a team with defensive energy and offensive consistency (no iso, please, for all of our sakes).
----------------------------------
EDIT: so we made the playoffs. with a lot of help from the Warriors, I gotta admit, and, pending this first round series, we'll see how meaningful of an appearance it is. I remain skeptical about our postseason success.
ALSO: we also drafted Leon Powe, who has turned into a reasonably good backup PF for the NBA-best Celtics.
posted by sam at
11:30 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home