If Porzingis has a good day, he is hard to stop. If Curry locks in, it is pointless to defend him because his aimbot will curve the ball into the hoop. The Warriors will have a chance to win some games. It is likely that they will get 1 or 2 wins in series and might even win more.

Also, you cannot discount Playoff Fouls Draymond Green. It is possible that he goes off and has a Lamello Ball type game.

That statistic does not show that AAA games are not dominating. It could just mean that there are more than 20 AAA games selling well. From the article, they note that “the top 79 games to account for 80% of total PC playtime”.

If the Celtics win or the Knicks lose tonight, the Celtics still secure the 2nd seed and can sit the playoff rotation against the Magic on Sunday.

If the Celtics drop both games and Knicks win both of their remaining, the Knicks will get the 2nd seed and push the Celtics to 3rd.

Coincidentally, Thinking Basketball just posted a video about players playing fewer games. He thinks it is because players are running around the court more and having to make more sudden changes in direction, putting too much wear on their legs.

I would go so far as to say it may be worse.

For example, there are certain people on Lemmy who hold very strong opinions on subjects and try to shoehorn in that opinion even where it is not appreciated. There are even more of those sorts of people on Reddit, but they are diluted by a much larger user base that knows how to act right.

With the Mid-Season tournament and Play-In round, teams are playing more games without extending the season, leading to more back to back games. Players are not getting a chance to rest minor injuries before they get worse. In general, the scheduling seems so bad. One week a team will play 5 road games then the next week they will have 1 game, at home. I don’t like the fact that most back to back games tend to be away games. If the league needs to schedule back to backs, they should be home stands. A team should not be spending the few hours they get off between games traveling.

As for players not playing 82 games anymore, I think it has less to do with players not being able to play and more with teams realizing that it is better to get a couple less wins in the regular season than to enter the playoffs with an exhausted superstar.

As someone who only pays close attention to the Celtics, I am surprised that people expect them to make it to the finals. I am guessing they will get knocked out in the second round or conference finals. They have a lot of wins, but it is because they take care of business against lesser teams. When facing another top team, they fall short. They are 0-2 vs the Spurs, 0-2 vs the Nuggets, 1-2 vs the Knicks, and 1-3 vs the Pistons, though they are 1-1 against the Thunder.

They should be able to dominate a play-in team in the first round but after that, they are going to face strong competition and they have not shown the ability to rise to the occasion.

Obviously, most of those games were without Tatum, but he is not fully back either. His scoring is great but his accuracy is abysmal. He is missing badly on shots he expects to be automatic, likely because coming back from his injury took a toll on his body and he is still getting used to his limits.

I hate the conspiracy theory that big pharma could cure cancer but they are covering it up because cancer treatment is such a profitable business. This makes no sense if you remember that big phara is a bunch of companies each of which is trying to maximize its own profits. The first company that can cure a cancer will make so much money, the Ozempic racket will look like chump change.

Not every company out there makes cancer treatment, so why don’t the companies outside the cancer racket cure cancer?

Well, only companies that specialize in cancer treatments could find a cure. If that is the case, why would a company want to be a small part of the cancer treatment market when they can have a monopoly on the cancer curing market?

Well, only the company that has the market leading treatment for a cancer can cure it. If that was the case, they would still want to cure it and sell the same amount of money as 10 years of treatment. Insurance would still cover it because it is saving them money in the long term and is, technically, better for the patient. It would immediately make the pharmaceutical company an obscene amount of money. Sure, once they cure all the existing cases, their revenue will fall off, but by that point, upper management will have cashed out.

I like the proposals. Assuming the league defines a “winning team” not as the team that wins a game but as the team that wins the championship (or the Emirates™ NBA Cup), it makes sense that the 10th worst team and worst team have the same lottery odds, since both have a 0% chance of winning. It also makes sense to let play-in teams randomly move up in the draft, since it can pull a team out of endless mediocrity. I don’t like that the 11th worst team is likely going to have much lower odds. I imagine teams that are headed for the 10th seed in their conference will try to tank down in the standings. A 5% chance of getting the first pick in the draft is probably better than getting to be the visiting team in 1-2 playoff games.

Remember, only shop on Bandcamp Fridays, when all the money goes to the artists. The corporate owners are not playing nice with the employee union.

I have not been following the Pacers this year, but how are they this bad? They made the finals last year. I know that Hali is out for the year, but he doesn’t seem to be a great enough player to turn the worst team in the league into a playoff favorite.

Did I miss the news when they sold off all of their rotation players or is the coach intentionally throwing games?

That is not sufficient cootie protection. A properly trained physician will follow it up with

Circle circle, square square,
Now you have it everywhere

A lot of the Lakers luck has nothing to do with league tampering and everything to do with the fact that players’ licensing income does not count against the salary cap. Do you think a guy would rather make $1,000 shooting an ad for Big Bill’s Discount BBQ or get $5,000 to make an appearance on opening night in Dr. Dre’s new club? Do you think a player prefers to spend his day off shoveling snow from his driveway or go swimming on Venice Beach in the morning and then film a fight scene in the next Fast and Furious? Do you think his wife would rather shop at the mall or Rodeo Drive?

The Lakers don’t get players gifted to them, they sign big name free agents at a discount and trade for expiring contracts knowing that the player will take an extension. They get traded so many players because they are on every players’ preferred list of destinations because every agent makes sure it is there because the agent wants a cut of any Hollywood cameos and rap album features their player gets.

The Pau Gasol trade is a perfect example of this. He did not get traded for nothing. He got traded for his brother, Marc. Pau wanted to get out of Memphis, so the teams made a deal with him: if he could nag his baby brother into moving from the Euroleague to the NBA, Pau would get to win a ring with Kobe.

I like the idea of allowing more teams to be draft eligible, since it gives hope to teams stuck in purgatory, not good enough to seriously contend for a title but too good to draft guaranteed talent in the draft.

I don’t like the idea of limiting the lottery eligibility of a team that finishes at the bottom for consecutive seasons (if they are not already ineligible for getting a high pick). It seems like unnecessary cruelty for a team to finish in the basement (because their best players all got old or left in free agency or something), then they lose the lottery despite good odds, and get told that next year they won’t get a good pick either. At that point, the team would have to spend 2 years with a roster of bench warmers.

Hopefully, if there are more strict anti-tank rules, they can get rid of the rules against resting star players. The restrictions are arbitrary and enforcement is random and unpredictable.

It is rated as water resistant, capable of withstanding a jet of water.

Repairability depends on what breaks. If water getting into the phone fries the CPU, it does not seem fixable. Glancing at the site, I could not find a part on sale, probably because the cost of a replacement part would cost almost as much as replacing the phone.

In the US, libel requires you to prove that the writer knew that what they were writing is not true and that they did it to hurt you. Doing lazy research and trusting an AI is not going to meet that standard.

I would hope, but I would want to check reviews to be sure.

I have, but decided against it. I am clumsy and my hands are big enough to barely use my phone one handed (but not hold it securely when I do).

I will have to consider Fairphone when I am looking for my next phone. Looking at their site, my only hesitation is about water resistance. I understand that repairability comes at the cost of making everything glued and sealed shut, but I drop my phone in water once every couple of years. If that risks killing it, it is not going to be a phone that will last long in my hands.

The issue with that phone (and seemingly everything coming from HMD) is that it only gets 2 major OS upgrades. Also, it launches a major version behind, so it is actually only a single upgrade.

I am quite upset about it. I had a Nokia 6 (made by HMD) and loved the well made, durable hardware and very clean no-bloat software. I have been saddened to see that while most phone brands have been extending their OS support window, HMD has been shortening it.