I figured we should have a thread to celebrate Dennis Smith Jr. in the dunk contest this year (they’re still in the three-point contest).
Let’s go, DSJ!
I figured we should have a thread to celebrate Dennis Smith Jr. in the dunk contest this year (they’re still in the three-point contest).
Let’s go, DSJ!
33 replies on “2019 NBA Slam Dunk Contest Thread”
Diallo is gonna be tough to beat.
Oh well…
That Shaq dunk was pretty cool
The dunk over J Cole ended up looking really cool, but as soon as Diallo dunked over Shaq it was over, really.
Yeah, they both peaked with those dunks.
Still, good showing by DSJ!
Nothing like the Aaron Gordon-Zach Levine duel
They should put the dunk contest on ESPN The Ocho.
They have to fix the skills challenge. Maybe they should require two 3 point shots. That would take some of the luck out of it and also make it foolish to shoot from half court trying to get REALLY lucky.
The 3 point contest is far and away the best event and should come last.
I don’t knock anyone for enjoying this weekend’s events, but shit bores me to tears. In a league where this can happen between a middling team and the league’s worst, I don’t see the point of watching a game whose intensity stands just above the Pro Bowl, nor a glorified obstacle course. 3PT shootout is fine and the dunk contest has its moments, but the rest of the thing is just a big, overlong TV commercial IMO.
I don’t know how many of you guys are old enough to remember back to the 60’s and 70’s when the all-star game was taken very seriously by all players from the opening tip, but I can’t even remember the last time I watched more than a few minutes of the game. It’s been at least at least 20 years.
They should add a 3 on 3 event to all star weekend so more Knicks could excel.
Good showing by DSJ. Wade was praying he didn’t get clocked in the head before the dunk.
Continuing the last thread because I agree with Jowles that all-star weekend mostly sucks…
First of all this is one of the great posts in KB history and I can’t let it go ignored at the bottom of an abandoned thread. I’ve probably read it 10 times and I’ve laughed every single time. It is both entirely accurate and hilarious. It is the perfect post.
Serious question for the “at least Phil wanted two-way players” crowd; what do you do about the fact that your boy made Carmelo Anthony the highest paid player in the NBA and gave him a full no-trade clause? Do you just pretend the move that defined Phil’s tenure didn’t happen in order to improve your fan fiction? I mean, Carmelo Anthony is currently the 15th highest paid player in the NBA, and he can’t get a team to sign him for free.
Of course there are other examples of Phil acquiring one-way duds, but feel free to ignore those because I’m mostly curious about how you square the Carmelo fucking Anthony circle. The guy is pretty much the go-to example when someone wants to bring up the concept of one-way chuckery. It’s like saying “at least Bush administration nailed disaster relief” because you’ve decided to give them a mulligan on Katrina.
This might make sense if we weren’t talking about someone who played 1,324 minutes as a rookie and undoubtedly improved his stock doing so.
Again, it’s quite possible the Willy trade doesn’t come back to bite us. Maybe he really is that bad on defense, I’m not going to claim I know for sure either way. I still don’t see how the process of playing impending free agent KOQ and impending waiver wire fodder Enes Kanter over a guy we had on a 4/$6M contract can be defended. It’s very simple asset management to not do that even if he’s sitting on the floor every defensive possession.
Or like arguing that Ringzo was the best Beatle.
I really don’t care about the all-star weekend, but I do think the league is doing something nice by appreciating old legends and other players who were very good but aren’t immortalized in its history. Just yesterday they had the event with Dell Curry, Mark Price, Ray Allen and Glen Rice, then they talked to Dominique during the dunk contest. It’s a nice way to show young fans the history of the NBA and some of the players they might be less familiar with, outside of the Jordan’s, Bird’s or Magic’s. In general it’s just ad filled bullshit, and the competitions are boring and uninspired, but it can be turned into a nice appreciation for the league and the players.
If there’s an unimpeachable argument that Jackson was inept, it’s this. Shades of Allan Houston, except Carmelo has no injuries to speak of. He’s just bad.
It’s a fun event to hang out in. I got to stand next to Shaq and Barkley one time in Phoenix many years ago. They were chatting and I had to walk 3-4 steps just to get around them. Shocking how huge they are.
But yeah the games themselves are boring as hell.
I’m sorry that I doubted you,
I was so unfair.
You were in a car crash,
And you lost your hair.
You said that you would be late
About an hour or two.
I said, “That’s alright, I’m waiting here,
Just waiting to hear from you”.
Yes, he improved it to being worth 2 #2 picks instead of one. Never more than that, would you agree? And since then, he has gotten older but not better. Would you agree on that?
It certainly can be defended. You are just unwilling to buy the logic of the defense.
The logic is:
-Willy was so bad on D that it was disgraceful to play him, and playing him more might have actually decreased his trade value. (exhibit a: his play since being traded and his current trade value)
-O’Q (who had a player option, not a sure-fire FA) could have been traded before the deadline because his play proved that he was actually good
-Kanter could have been traded before the deadline because his play proved that he was actually good
Again, this is not as much to defend Phil’s logic as to refute your insistence that the trade was a bad idea (especially after Willy asked for one) or that Willy was mishandled. At the end of the day, he sucks and we got the maximum value he would ever had brought whether we played him or not. But tell you what: I’ll only bring it up again if you or someone else brings it up as a knock on Phil. There are plenty of reasons to shit on the Phil regime; the handling of Willy isn’t one of them.
PS Willy whined about not playing and asked for a trade so that he could play more. How did that work out for him?
-If you think that Willy’s value went up after 1,324 career minutes, but would have gone down if he reached, say, 2,000, then sure, I can see how you might like the trade. Perhaps you can tell that I don’t find that all that plausible. He had actually made meaningful improvements during his second season (obviously SSS, because of our choice to make it that way), and I’ve never found the data behind the “he’s so abhorrently bad on defense he needed to be traded ASAP despite being good at other important things” idea all that convincing.
-I really hope the front office was projecting a KOQ opt-out, because everyone on this internet forum was. I also disagree with the idea that it was fine to marginalize Willy because of the mere possibility of getting a second rounder for KOQ. I’m not sure how to respond to it because it’s a little ridiculous.
-See my second point. Willy was young, on a great contract, and has proven to have some important skills. I don’t think we should’ve thrown that all away because someone might have given us a second rounder for Enes Kanter.
It was the kind of trade that would’ve made sense if Willy was an upcoming RFA and we were worried about someone overpaying him. On the contrary, he was signed for 2.5 more seasons on pretty much the cheapest contract the NBA has to offer.
Considering that we played Enes Kanter, Michael Beasley and Emmanuel Mudiay I think it’s safe to say the team had a high tolerance for embarrassingly bad defense
Yeah, that’s the argument that least convinces me about the Willy trade. The Knicks have been terrible at defense with and without him, and the stats we have show him to be a mediocre defender every year. He was a very bad shot blocker, yes, but so is Al Horford and no one would call him disgraceful on defense because of that.
I’m not even going to get into this whole argument again, but he was not traded because of being a poor defender. Unless the management is really that stupid and feels that it’s ok to trade a guy for being a poor defender while keeping equally bad defenders or worse on the roster.
Also, if you have a young player who is good at some things but bad at some others, isn’t that the kind of thing your entire coaching/developmental staff is dedicated to dealing with? Is the upside to trying to fix his defensive issues not higher than two second rounders that project to be in the buyable range?
Like I said, it’s totally possible that the trade winds up looking like a net gain in hindsight. That won’t change a thing about the shitty process.
Thankfully this front office has been much better about managing potential assets since the the Willy trade, so hopefully they learned from the mistake.
No, he was
primarily (but not only) because he was a poor defender. Hornacek said as much. I don’t see anything wrong with telling a developing player, “Hey, if you want to get on the court in front of better players, show me something in practice on the defensive end.” (As an extreme case of that, Atlanta sent TH2 down to the G-League to work on his D, and he came back a much improved player.) He was traded because he asked to be traded and Charlotte made a very generous offer for him. If he was traded for a single second rounder, or was kept and not played after the deadline had passed, then I would see the point. It’s just nitpicking to the nth degree to portray it as some kind of bumbling move. The best GMs and coaches in the league might have done exactly the same thing. And now, a year later, it’s pretty clear that they got that one right. We have Mitch and Kornet, both of whom are better two-way players, for one 2nd round pick.
As to Kanter, now there’s a guy you want to showcase in order to trade him for anything in that rapidly closing window before the trade deadline. Now once the deadline passed, if Willy was still on the roster, then by all means, play him.
What’s funny here is that many voices were thrilled with O’Q’s increased role and were hoping that we re-signed “on the cheap” for like double of what he could have opted in for or got from IND. I don’t remember anyone saying that he would not get an offer significantly higher than what he opted out of.
“Efficient Scoring Big Who Gets Rebounds But Is Not A Rim Protector And Is Too Slow To Guard Stretch Bigs” is not a valuable player profile these days. Willy was fungible. You can get guys like him for a song if you are so inclined.
I get that folks want the Knicks to run an impeccable process of asset management, and we’re trying to dig out of the #lolKnicks era. That said, no team nails every single move. And I don’t even consider trading Willy a mistake; the league has gone away from his and Kanter’s ilk of centers – you can argue the Knicks got decent value from him in that light.
Sometimes in sports, the results matter more than the process. That said: I’ve always believed a team should put itself in position to benefit from a lucky break, not rely on one. Like everyone here, I desperately want Zion. But the team isn’t SOL if they don’t draw the top pick because the Knicks are competently carrying out a feasible rebuilding plan (with a lot of upcoming cap space).
Well, it was a minor move. We’re mostly talking about it because generally you can imply from a number of minor moves that a front office isn’t all that great at talent evaluation and asset management. But yeah, it was minor and admittedly, aside from the Mudiay trade, there isn’t a comprehensive enough list of bad moves that can make us determine for sure Perry and Mills have been terrible at their jobs. I’d say it’s been more of a mixed bag, which I’m decently happy with, as the Knicks standard is generally “unacceptably bad”.
All about our evaluations of Perry and Mills will hinge on the next offseason and what they do (or don’t). So there’s also not much more to talk about until the season it over, which means it will be a long 4 or so months for this blog.
Well, if Willy went on to set the world on fire in Charlotte, we’d be having a different conversation. But in terms of talent evaluation (he sucks) and asset management (2 Charlotte 2nd rounders is probably the best offer we will ever get for him for the life of his contract and we can easily replace him with even cheaper, better assets) Mills and Perry were spot on.
The Mudiay trade was a clear reach, and we all knew it at the time. Also a minor move, but clearly on the side of bad player evaluation and asset management.
Overall, the Perry regime has made more good moves than bad, and even on what looks to be their most serious blunder (picking Knox) the jury is still out and the draft as a whole was a win. The most critical moves are still ahead, and luck will play a major part in how things turn out. But a year and a half in, I have less reason to be pessimistic than at the same point in any regime going back to when I had hair, which I can assure you was a LOOONG time ago.
It’s a bit like the Porzingis deal where the trade itself might actually be good, but the process that arrived at the trade is not optimal. Getting something for a guy who has no value to your team is good. Taking a guy who was perceived to have a promising rookie season, deciding he’s no good and burying him and then trading him is bad. Giving a max contract to a guy when you don’t even know if he’s any good is a bad idea, so trading Porzingis for some picks and to get rid of the terrible contracts you already handed out is good, but handing out terrible contracts and spending 3 years not developing a promising young player are bad.
I don’t understand the love for Willy. He was like Kanter-lite. Both have good stats, but didn’t help the Knicks win. Of course Willy was much cheaper, but what is the difference if you lose cheaply or lose expensively? You don’t want players who don’t help you win, no matter what the cost.
The fact that he’s not playing in Charlotte does make it seem like Mills and Perry made the right move, yes. My line of reasoning against the deal is more that well, we didn’t know he would suck in his new team and he was a young player in a very favorable contract. But yes, at this point it doesn’t matter and the two 2nds are a good return, the type of return Charlotte would not be able to get if they try to flip him now to another team.
@28 the real question is: how did the team make out as a result of the process, whether it ended in a trade or non-trade? For example, it doesn’t matter much if it was a bad idea to draft Knox based on the available evidence if he turns out to be better than any player drafted below him. It doesn’t matter if we drafted the riskier KP over the safer WCS if KP netted us two first and a get out of jail free card for bad signings and turns out to be not worth a max deal.
This is different than no-brainer good/bad moves that don’t/do work out. If you draft Zion and he either underperforms or is catastrophically injured, it was still a great move to draft him. If you pass on Capela and Jokic with the top 2 picks in the 2014 draft, you did the right thing and just got unlucky.
Kind of tangential, but KOQ’s agent/team thought that he was going to get a lot more than he did as well. After he opted out we offered him more or less what he ended up with. If nothing else, Perry seems to have a pretty damn tight handle on the valuations of the rest of the league.
And in 600 some minutes this year Willy has been replacement level, just like previously. Maybe an added 3 point shot that’s unreliable. That’s worth more than 2 second rounders since those usually bust, but not so much more that you’d hesitate if you thought he wasn’t a good fit or prospect for whatever reason. Like, literally any reason. Shit, we snagged Mitch and Mudiay for the price we got for Willy. We came out way the fuck ahead.
I think the one thing that is out of the blogger’s purview is to comment on someone who is not playing. It’s one thing to comment on data that’s there, it’s another to comment on data that isn’t.
Wily lost his job….To Luke Kornet.
I agree that the Carmelo max / ntc was why Phil failed and the major cause of our pain to this point.
Hopefully one day we’ll look back on this and it will all seem funny. Sad to see NO NYK PRESENCE IN THE ALLSTAR GAME AGAIN. That’s why you watch, “Hey, Michael Ray had 14 points!”