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[Nash]

Bargnani has had a few nice games of late. He started getting good mins only in the past few games. A few days back he had a 20 pt game. Today he had 18 pts, 10 rbs, 6 (!!)bs in their win against GSW.

 

[Nash]

John Salmons has been looking good of late. He exploded for a triple double against the Nuggets last night.
21/11/10

 

[sunsfn]

Last night the 76ers beat the Knicks 98-77.

Miller had 9 points 11 assists and 5 rebounds.
Iguodala had 20 points, Webber had 18, Carney had 9, Dalembert 11 with 8 rebounds, and Korver had 16 points.

I believe the 76ers will be a better team without Iverson.
They will share the ball, Miller will get assists, and I look for Iguodala to show his value, now that he will get the ball more.

The 76ers should have traded Iverson in the off season and resigned Salmons. (who wanted to resign with them)
Willie Green was all set to sign a big contract last year and had an injury, he seems to be getting his game back, and they expect him to be a very good player. Carney is a rookie and they will have a couple first round picks in this years draft.

After Iverson was traded, one of the players said that it is hard to play with a guy that needs the ball 16 seconds out of every 24. I think that says it all!

 

[boisesuns]

The Grizzlies suck again. What a Shocker!

 

[sunsfn]

I do not like this! The Hawks are going to lose a bunch of games now!
--------------------------------------------------------

Updated: Dec. 24, 2006, 9:06 AM ET
Hawks' Smith to miss up to 4 weeks after surgery

ESPN.com news services

Injury woes continue to hit the Atlanta Hawks.
According to a report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, third-year forward Josh Smith will have hernia surgery Tuesday and could miss as many as four weeks.
Smith joined starting center Zaza Pachulia (sprained elbow), reserve swingman Josh Childress (foot) and backup point guard Tyronn Lue (groin) on the bench for Saturday night's game against the Pistons. Starting point guard Speedy Claxton (back spasms) didn't even make the trip.
"I've played through it for the past two months," Smith told the newpaper. "I was pushing through it, trying to the best I could to help my team. But I've got to shut it down now."
Smith told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution he hopes to return sooner than expected.
Every Atlanta starter has a missed at least one game due to injury this season.
Atlanta's injured players -- Smith, Childress, Claxton, Lue and Pachulia are averaging a total of 59.7 points, 62 percent of the Hawks' offense this season. Smith, Pachulia and Claxton were all injured in Friday's loss to Indiana.

 

[myrondizzo]

say good bye to the pick

 

[slinslin]

Its getting close, we would have the #4 pick right now.

 

[JCSunsfan]

They will tank this season. They have every reason to do it. Our only hope is that they have competition and one of the other lotto teams will get lucky and bump them out of a top 3 spot.

 

[Folster]

They will tank this season. They have every reason to do it. Our only hope is that they have competition and one of the other lotto teams will get lucky and bump them out of a top 3 spot.

I got a bad feeling about the pick. Somehow the Suns will get screwed. I have visions of the Hawks landing the #1, picking Oden and then sticking us with a crappy pick the following year.

 

[elindholm]

Back when there were 13 lottery teams (before the expansion addition of the Bobcats), the #3 team in the lottery had only a 47% chance of landing a top three pick. The #4 team had a 38% chance. (These probabilities were based on the actual distribution of the so-called ping-pong balls, not the results of what actually happened. Someone posted the numbers once and I saved them.)

Now that there are 14 lottery teams, the league has adjusted the percentages a bit, but it's probably not a big difference from how it was a few years ago. So the point is, it's really not a big gap between #3 and #4 in terms of the likelihood of landing a top-three pick.

I wouldn't sweat it. We won't know anything until lottery day. In some ways, we'd rather see Atlanta at #3 than #4, because at #4, there's a pretty good chance (52%, based on the old numbers) that they'll get bumped to the fifth pick or lower.

 

[Errntknght]

According to my calculations our chances come out thusly - the first column is Atlanta's finish in league wide standings, the second column is our chance of not getting their pick this year.
Atl _NP _4th _5th _6th _7th 8th 9th
30 64.3 35.7 00.0 00.0 00.0 0.0 0.0
29 55.8 31.9 12.3 00.0 00.0 0.0 0.0
28 46.9 22.6 26.5 04.0 00.0 0.0 0.0
27 37.9 09.9 35.0 16.0 01.2 0.0 0.0
26 29.1 00.0 26.2 36.0 08.4 0.4 0.0
25 21.5 00.0 00.0 44.0 30.4 4.0 0.1
24 15.0 00.0 00.0 00.0 60.0 23.2 1.8

Its a surprisingly even progression - there's no big jump if they finish fourth worst as opposed to finishing third worst. Depending on your assessment of the draft it might be reasonable to hope for them to finish as high as 25th or 24th, because 27th is far from a cinch.

(Dang, its hard to get those columns to line up when it goes from the type in window to the actual message...)

 

[elindholm]

Errntknght, where did you find the updated ping-pong ball counts? Can you post them?

 

[Errntknght]

I found the basic data in Wikipedia. They give the number of combinations of four balls chosen from 14 numbered ones allotted to each position in the lottery. There are 1001 such combinations and one of them is not alloted to anyone. So it works out the same as having 1000 balls allotted among the 14 teams participating with the same count as the # of combinations. It baffled me for a minute, why they were talking about combinations instead of ball counts...

Aha, I remembered I put the counts in the program I used to calculate that table... so here it is: int co[14] = {250, 199, 156, 119, 88, 63, 43, 28, 17, 11, 8,7,6,5};

 

[elindholm]

Excellent, thanks. In case anyone is interested, the 13-team version was

250
200
157
120
89
64
44
29
18
11
7
6
5

In other words, they took one chance away from each of the teams #2-9 in order to generate 8 "new" chances for team #11, then left the final three teams the same (except now they are #12-14 instead of #11-13).

The 13-team profile looks like it would roughly fit a bell curve, but I'm not good enough with statistics to tell whether they really derived it from one. The 14-team profile looks improvised, like they wanted a simple modification from the 13-team version that "would work" without requiring too much reconfiguring.

 

[Errntknght]

Maybe you are thinking of an exponential distribution - a bell curve that peaked at 250 and was down to 5 twelve steps later would start with steps 250, 243, 224, 196... It doesn't fit an exponential too well either but any mathematician looking at a plot would guess that. The best fitting simple fcn to the first ten points is a described as a falling ratio between consecutive terms - beginning at .8 = 250/200 and dropping .02 for each subsequent step. It goes to pot for the last three steps as the ratios jump around. I'd guess they just started with the ideas that the worst team should have a 25% chance and no team less than .5% then filled in numbers in between that dropped from one to the next and added up to 1000.

The only theoretical distribution I can make a case for is a constant drop off factor because that makes every team the same relative to the one ahead of it and behind it. The constant drop of factor that goes from 250 to 5 in twelve steps is approximately .72180380364566. Of course it would be slightly different for 14 teams - 13 steps. About .7401333942188...

 

[slinslin]

Damn Memphis starts winning, Philly starts winning some more and so does Charlotte.

Atlanta is on a 7 game losing streak on its way to the worst record in the league.

 

[elindholm]

Spurs lose again, woohoo!

 

[ArizonaSportsFan]

Damn Memphis starts winning, Philly starts winning some more and so does Charlotte.

Atlanta is on a 7 game losing streak on its way to the worst record in the league.

Should the Suns take a dive against them in their two games this season?

 

[mribnik]

I'm watching the Lakers/Kings game on TNT tonight and it's just terrible. The Kings might be the least exciting team to watch in the NBA. Every player on their team looks extremely slow for some reason, and their offense has been dreadful to watch IMO (how the hell did they score this many points). Ugh.

 

[slinslin]

Watching Memphis-San Antonio right now..

Man Memphis has quite a lot of players that would fit so well with us.

Damon Stoudamire would be about the best backup PG we could have realistically have for Nash.
Stromile Swift looks like a real player on a team that doesn't play as slow as possible, at least 4 or 5 blocks on the Spurs in the time he played in the first half.
Hakim Warrick a lot like Swift just skinnier but quite a good medium range game.
Mike Miller, such an active player off the ball and simply good all around offensive player.

 

[D-Dogg]

Lakers beat Dallas, snap their streak.

 

[mribnik]

Lakers beat Dallas, snap their streak.

The Lakers always seem to play Dallas well.

 

[MigratingOsprey]

timberwolves making a nice run against some good teams - all OT games, back in the playoff picture

 

[Nash]

woot! Lakers getting their asses handed to them by Mememememphis. The Grizzlies have been on a tear ever since Tony Barone took over. They had that 144 in regulation last week and now have 110 with 8:55 left in the game.
110-86

 

[Suns_fan69]

Memphis had 46 pts in the 3rd quarter alone! Lots of teams struggle to score that in a half (including memphis before Fratello got canned). They currently remind me of the Warriors during the last 20 games or so of the 04-05 season when Baron came back and they played nice and loose with nothing to lose and tore up the league.