re: ScoopB: All of the Brandon Ingram offers are “crap”

Now that we no longer have that 1st, they'll finish bottom 5

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It will take a lot of hard work to finish that low this season.

Teams with their own picks will be tanking hard and some teams, like Washington and Brooklyn, will be truly godawful.

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Yeah 100%

I do'nt think there's a circumstance where the Lakers finish below Detroit or Brooklyn. It's highly unlikely the Wizards or Blazers aren't bottom 6 teams, same with Utah. Charlotte and Chicago can maybe be decent, but i doubt it.
I don't see any of those 7 teams winning more than 34 games.

Only way the Lakers could end up being that bad is if Lebron or AD gets a season ending injury early in the season, as in the first 15-20 games.


The Lakers are likely to finish anywhere from 8th, if they have lots of missed games from AD/LeBron, to probably 14th at best. It's going to take the Lakers being really healthy, and at least 3 teams outside of the Jazz/Blazers to have enough injury issues for them to be a below .500 team.
Let me remind you all that only 4 teams had a losing record in the west last year. You can pencil in one of those 4 in the Grizzlies to have a winning record, and no one would be surprised if CP3 can make the spurs get close to 40 wins. They won 22 games last year, and half of those came in the last 23 games. They got better, and their team got better this offseason. It's very likely 2 maybe 3 teams will struggle b/c of injuries or what not and wont' be as good as expected.
It woudl take catastrophic early season ending injuries to star players for the lakers to finish above the top 10 West teams, and some of those teams could still finish ahead while losing their star.

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The catch 22 for the Lakers is that, with Atlanta owning the Lake Show’s pick, there is no reason to wave the white flag even if Douche Flavored Ruffles and LeGM go down.

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Well if either of them go down for a long period of time, they won't have much of a choice b/c they will be severly outmatched most nights.

and LeBitch doesn't a give a shite about the Lakers. He's going to do what's best for him, always. If he doesnt' feel like playing the last 20 games of the season b/c they have no shot at the playoffs, then he won't. He doesn't give a shite if they finish 5th to last or 12th last.

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They get no benefit from tanking, draft-wise, and for a big name franchise they are a family-owned business which can’t afford high priced ticket holders getting pissed at phoning it in.

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The Lakers will always make money. Having a bad season this year isn't a big deal at all to them when it comes to high priced season ticket holders. Same goes for the Knicks. Those are two arenas that are packed everynight no matter what.

Look at this chart from B-Ball Index, with individual perimeter defense performance last season on the vertical axis, and overall defensive impact on the horizontal axis.




Lu Dort was the very best perimeter defender in the NBA last season -- better then Caruso, better than Jrue, better than Herb, better than Dyson. It's so easy to forget that and conclude that BI is a crummy player simply on the basis of Dort's shutting BI down in last year's playoff series. That's really not a fair way to judge BI or his value.

Correct, this just shows that BI is not the player that he values himself as. The questions on BI’s fit, especially with Zion, were there before the playoffs. His playoff failure in one on one situations was so glaring when the spotlight was on him. It wasn’t that Dort was able to win the war, it was that BI didn’t win a single battle throughout the whole series. I don’t know how much that series should have hurt BI’s value but I know it absolutely had a huge negative affect.

A multiplayer scheme stopped Dame. He basically ran into Jrue and Davis/Mirotic every where he turned.

Lu Dort stopped BI by himself for the most part because BI's handle wasn't good enough to beat Dort's point of attack defense. That doesn't mean Ingram is garbage, and if Zion had been healthy that series goes completely different because you can let whoever Dort isn't guarding run the offense. The fact that BI didn't find a way to beat Dort's defense says he isn't the $50 million player he thinks he is.

Is anyone arguing that we should give BI $50 million per? Or is this a strawman that y'all are arguing against?

I’m really warming up to a BI for John Collins and Kessler trade. Maybe we also get some 2nds but Collins would be a great backup big who can shoot and Kessler would be our starter.

Next offseason you have 57M in expiring contracts between CJ and Collins to go shopping with