Cifer

Some interesting quotes from @Sam_Vecenie on the latest episode of the Game Theory Podcast: 🎙️ "A piece that people are missing with the Charlotte conversation is that they're just missing threes. And it's not like they're missing contested threes because LaMelo Ball isn't there to create open shots for everybody... Charlotte is currently taking the second-most wide open threes in the NBA, 6 ft of separation or more, and they're making 31% of them. They're making 29.6% from three right now on the season." "I would be really staggered if the Hornets front office felt like they weren't gonna take a step back this year, given that they are a very data-driven and analytics-driven front office that knows all of these things, and knows all of these numbers... and that that was gonna suck for the fan base. [...] But they just didn't even look close to the mark in terms of playoff basketball." "You can come up with the case that, 'Man, the Charlotte fan base, it's just been so starved for having a winning team. Why wouldn't you just keep this rolling for another year?' That kind of thinking is exactly what happened to the Sacramento Kings in 2022. They won 48 games, they took the Warriors to 7 games in the playoffs... and as the rest of the West around them got better and better and better, they stagnated. And do you know what they did that summer? They decided to lock into that team for the next few years." "I personally don't really believe that this Hornets team, with LaMelo Ball, Brandon Miller, Kon Knueppel and those guys, would have competed near the top of the East... I think that the Hornets decided to make a move to basically mitigate risk with LaMelo Ball. That's really what the deal was about to me. It's not that he isn't a great player. It's that, 'Oh, we have a real deal on the table here for him. Let's make sure and maintain that asset into the future by getting three pick swaps, a first-round pick, Naz Reid, who we're gonna be able to trade.'" "That might not sound sexy to Hornets fans. I get that mitigating risk is not the coolest outcome for everybody, especially for a player in LaMelo that's so cool and so fun to watch, and when he's healthy he's amazing, but I think that's probably what it was about. Now it all comes down to what their next moves are to me. This deal will be the wrong deal if they screw up this next little bit here. It's not that I don't empathize with the fact that this fan base has been incredibly starved for a winning organization for a while. I just think that this front office with some of the moves they've made, including the entirety of the 2025 NBA draft, probably deserves a little bit of grace here to see what the plan is." "This is definitely not an incompetent front office. You can disagree with the plan, and you can disagree with the ideas that they had about LaMelo and trading him and everything, but they do very clearly have a plan here to accumulate future assets, to continue to stay flexible, and hopefully be able to find that star that works next to Kon Knueppel and Brandon Miller... in order to have a chance to build the team that they want to build instead of potentially maxing out with a team that doesn't really have a chance at a title, because I don't think a LaMelo Ball, Kon Knueppel, Brandon Miller core really had a shot at a title." Definitely worth listening to the full 21-minute segment: youtu.be/CeMTlzKLvEM&t=2120s