The NBA Preseason is, in many ways, the most irrelevant thing in basketball today this side of the WNBA. The final scores don't matter, the record bears no relationship to the regular season, and I would be very surprised to see any correlation between regular season success and pre-season success. The good teams use the pre-season to try some funky things to see what works and for little else.
From that standpoint it is very much like Texas Hold 'Em. For example, suppose you pick up pocket Jacks. You raise it, get 2 callers, and flop a set with no straight or flush draws. You raise it, get a caller. The turn is a 10. The river is a 9 and someone wins who stayed in with a 7/8. Even though the end result is bad, you still like the hand because you know you will end the day with all their chips in your possession because you know the percentages are so vastly in your favor.
The NBA preseason is the same. You might win or lose a game by 10, 15, 20 points or more and in the end, it doesn't matter. Far more important is learning how the game is played by your guys, whether frontline, second line, or borderline. That is why I found myself much more excited about a 13 point loss to the Jazz than about a 33 point win over the Kings.
The Portland Trailblazers enter the 2008-2009 season as a good team. They do not need confidence boosting win totals, they simply need to know who can help them this year and to get Greg Oden back into game shape.
So now that we have seen them three times live, it is time to give them mid-preseason grades, with the grades not being tied to statistics but rather to how they accomplished what they needed to accomplish.
Greg Oden
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about 1 month ago
The NBA is very high risk just like hold em, you could be the chip leader and go all in with your top draft pick or you could start panicking and start moving and doing with emotion or desperation in the back of your head......and accqure J. Kidd midseason......just as easily as you would with pocket deuces going all in with a withering chip stack or have a five game losing streak and drop to 8th place in the west...
about 1 month ago
but I would be so pissed if someone beat me with the low end straight, QK would be a little more tolerable....lol
about 1 month ago
Worse yet, he stayed in against a preflop raise/reraise and a flop raise/reraise...at least in basketball that can't happen. Now if I could figure out where the other 2/3rds of my piece went, it would be a wonderful thing...
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