With the 56th pick in the 1999 NBA draft, the Golden State Warriors selected Tim Young, a 7-foot Bay Area kid who grew up in Santa Cruz and played college basketball at Stanford.
"Tim's a presence," said Warriors head coach P.J. Carlesimo. "He's got good size, he does a little bit of everything — passes the ball well, shoots the ball well, he can block some shots. He worked out very, very well for us. Obviously, we know him very well. He's absolutely a first-rate person."
During his brief 25-game NBA career, Young made 13 of his 39 shots and logged a total of 137 minutes. But this was not a horrible draft pick; many players taken at the bottom of the second round never see the light of an NBA court. However, the very next pick in that draft would prove to be one of the best second-round picks in NBA history.
By Mark Titus at
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This year, like every year, I found myself thinking about the NCAA tournament during the first round of the NBA playoffs. It’s no secret that I love March Madness so much that I use the event as a bookmark for other memories in my life.
(For example: If you were to ask me how old I was when I broke my leg, my thought process would be: “Well, it happened the year Rick Pitino won the national championship at Kentucky, which was 1996, so I guess I must’ve been 8 or 9.")
What might be a secret, however, is that I think the NCAA tournament is far from perfect, and there are aspects of the NBA playoffs that I wish were more common in the tourney. With that in mind, throughout the rest of the playoffs, I will be conducting an intense debate with myself — March Madness or the NBA postseason.
Today, I start with one reason why the NBA playoffs are better than the NCAA tournament.
By Grantland Staff at
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So much amazing is happening, and the Shootaround crew is here to help you keep track of it all. You'll find takes on moments you might've missed from the previous night, along with ones you will remember forever.
He Ate the Bones
Bucks coach Jim Boylan on LeBron James: "I mean, what can you do?"
Not much has changed for the Spurs in the past year. After steamrolling through last year’s compressed scheduled on the backs of their aging stars, only to fall to Oklahoma City one round short of the Finals, the Spurs' brass opted not to make any significant changes to their roster. In some ways, that decision seems to be paying off.
Much like last season, San Antonio is cruising through the regular season, with a 29-11 record and the league’s third best scoring margin (+8.1). Just like it’s been for more than a decade, the Spurs rarely beat themselves. They’re 14-1 against sub-.500 teams, playing the same mistake-free game that led them to four championships between 1999-2007. The difference is that, back then, not beating themselves was enough. Now, the Chris Pauls and Kevin Durants of the world have changed things. With this roster, in this NBA, the Spurs just aren’t good enough.
Here’s a sobering thought: The Spurs are 8-2, with the fifth-best point differential in the league, and they are basically screwing around.
OK, that’s an exaggeration. Gregg Popovich rarely screws around, even though it’s delightful when he does. But the Spurs are clearly experimenting, with an eye on reinventing themselves on both ends of the floor by the time the playoffs come around. It seems strange to redesign a team that went 31-2 in the 33 games before the Thunder rallied for four straight wins in the conference finals, but the redesign is happening, and it’s Popovich’s way of recognizing that the team got as far as it could with its pick-and-roll-all-the-time offense and just-above-average defense. The Spurs ran into a more athletic team that did enough defensively to at least limit San Antonio’s pick-and-roll devastation, and they found they didn’t have enough on either end to compensate. The Thunder are still there, the Lakers are a powerhouse-in-waiting, and the Heat should be monstrous in the spring.
In this year's Olympic basketball competition, there are several teams that are a threat to medal, and maybe even contend with Team USA. As the Games ramp up, we’ll be providing looks at the strengths, weaknesses, and medal chances of these possible contenders.
Argentina has been a force for years in international play, and their success has set up a rivalry with the U.S. that has a tendency to get a bit chippy (something we saw during their “friendly” in Spain). With both teams in the same group, they’ll be facing off during seeding and could face each other again in the medal rounds, which could make for even more fun.
So much amazing is happening, and the Shootaround crew is here to help you keep track of it all. You'll find takes on moments you might've missed from the previous night, along with ones you will remember forever.
When You Were Young
One of the narratives that's emerged in the Western Conference finals is that the Thunder are "growing up." Really, the question of the Thunder growing up — whether it's happening, when it will happen, what it might mean for Russell Westbrook's glasses — has been part of just about every conversation OKC has figured in since the Lakers series two years ago, maybe even before. And that's only natural; in a lot of ways, our modes of interpreting the NBA are still dominated by the '80s and early '90s, when, the story goes, the Pistons had to grow up to get past the Celtics and the Lakers and then the Bulls had to grow up to get past the Pistons. Watching young teams mature, toughen up, and dethrone the older teams that once kept them down is part of the expected order of the NBA. And the Thunder — a very young, very talented squad whose potential path to the Finals happens to run through the three franchises that won the West every year from 1999 to 2012 — are just the latest chapter in the story.
The only problem with this version of events? Through Game 5, it's not really happening. OKC has now beaten the Spurs three straight times, but the wins haven't fit the mold of NBA maturation — everyone knowing their roles, the superstars reliably taking over during important stretches, the team collectively showing mental toughness and taking care of all the little things. Instead, the Thunder have been winning in the most insane ways possible. They've totally changed identities, going from the team with the lowest assist total in the NBA to one that routinely dishes out 20-plus assists per game. (Westbrook had 12 on Monday night, despite playing the fourth quarter like he hadn't ever met Durant.) Apart from Durant's sublime fourth quarter in Game 4, the superstars have been erratic. Durant, Harden, and Westbrook were 18-for-42 in Game 3. Westbrook and Harden were 6-for-23 in Game 4. All three of them had ruthless-genius moments in Game 5 — the Westbrook Destroys the Universe dunk, the late Harden 3, Durant's little shiv of a got-his-own-rebound putback — but they also made inexplicable mistakes, missed big shots, turned over the ball, and passed to the wrong teammates. (Guys, meet Kevin. He's here to help!)
The Thunder have been winning these weird, frenetic games partly because they've been doing a few extremely big things right (the underrated "hit a dramatic 3 right when it seems like the Spurs are about to tie it" strategy), but also because they've been getting preposterously great contributions from unexpected sources — Kendick Perkins's offensive explosion in Game 4, Serge Ibaka's 11-for-11, Daequan Cook's eight points in four minutes Monday night. Instead of playing like a grown-up team, in other words, they're winning by harnessing some kind of childlike chaos. They're harrying the Spurs on defense and getting steals (fun!) instead of crashing the boards and getting rebounds (boring!). They're coming up huge in all the big moments their own maddening mistakes have created for them. They're doing what you're not supposed to be able to do in this league of playoff fouls, mental toughness, and murderous competitiveness. They're winning like kids.
— Brian Phillips
So much amazing is happening, and the Shootaround crew is here to help you keep track of it all. You'll find takes on moments you might've missed from the previous night, along with ones you will remember forever.
Five Lingering Thoughts From Game 1
1. Here’s what scares me as a Celtics fan: The Heat didn’t even play well. They got a killer performance from LeBron James (32 points, 13 boards), a half-decent Wade showing, a few hustle plays from Battier, a couple of damaging keep-the-possession-alive offensive tap-back rebounds from Haslem/Anthony and that’s about it. Do you realize the Heat missed 20 of 25 3s? And that just about all of them were wide-open? And they still won by 14???
2. Flipping that around: It’s not like the Celtics submitted the most stellar all-around effort, either. Other than KG’s quality performance (23 points, 10 boards), everyone else played like they had just finished a grueling seven-game series against Philly … which raises the point: “This is why you can’t waste seven effing games trying to beat a team as limited as Philly.”
Some of the lowlights from Game 1: a predictable worn-out-from-the-Sixers-series-and-now-I’m-covering-LBJ stink bomb from Pierce (5-for-18), a classic “my stats looked much better than the actual performance” game from Rondo (12 missed shots, four turnovers, some bad defensive gambles), four missed free throws from Ray Allen (and that’s just the start of how excruciatingly awful he played), nothing from anyone else (save for an inspired Steimsma effort off the bench) and some WWE-level officiating (including two head-scratching technicals) just to make sure they had no chance. It’s safe to say that Boston will play better in Game 2 (especially Pierce) … but Miami will play better, too.
3. I'm only allowing myself one short paragraph to complain about the execrable officiating in a game that Miami would have won anyway, but here we go. It's the Conference Finals. There's only one playoff game every night. You'd figure the NBA had whittled their already shaky officiating workforce down to a select few at this point. How was Monday night's crew the best we could do? How? How have things gotten NOTICEABLY AND UNDENIABLY worse in the three years since I wrote this column? At what point does a "crisis" just become a permanent albatross? I think we're there.
So much amazing is happening, and the Shootaround crew is here to help you keep track of it all. You'll find takes on moments you might've missed from the previous night, along with ones you will remember forever.
The NBA Playoffs: Where Inept Happens!
And where are your Chris Bosh jokes now, America? Just one night after the flaming car wreck of offensive ineptitude in Boston, we were presented with something truly ghastly. After a graceless first half, typified by their 24 percent shooting and a desperate turn to Dahntay Jones to spark their game, the Pacers bounced back in the third quarter of Tuesday night's 78-75 win over the Heat. Scoring 28 points — nearly matching their first-half total of 33 — Frank Vogel's crew of crazy kids got everyone involved by evenly spreading shots among their slew of rangy guards and forwards. The Heat? Not so much. The Big Two (RIP this) plus their band of merry scrubs mostly wilted in the harsh glow of a staggering 20-4 run. The Heat scored just 14 points in the third on three field goals. Yikes. Without Bosh rolling from the high post, the Heat's spacing was disastrous, compounding a torrent of errant jump shots. For stretches on Tuesday night, there was little to enjoy, just an endless loop of clanged iron — the two teams finished a combined 4-for-31 from 3-point land. And while LeBron and Wade combined for 52 of their team's 75 points, they were out of sync most of the second half. No other Heat player scored more than five points.
