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I've never been so genuinely relieved by a press release. 
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May 20, 2021 21:21
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Veryslightlymad posted:For Immediate Release Quoting myself because I didn't know it would be the last post of its page. If you only care about thread content, you can safely skip this post, it's largely an apology, a thank you, and a lot of venting. I debated saying nothing, since it's my private life and this is a silly thread on the internet and not a big creative project with millions of fans. However, after giving it some thought, trying to push through a drop in quality and then two hiatuses in rapid succession without actually acknowledging why felt "cheap". I have brought things up before, but never really elaborated. Why should I be trusted not to flake out again, if I flaked out twice before? ~~~~~~~~ Thank you, thank you, thank you, everyone, for being so understanding about my need for a long hiatus. The end of last year through now has been up there as far as worst years of my life, or at least adult life. Work got insane. I was pulling slightly overtime for an extended period, which isn't a whole big deal, but I also have Narcolepsy and doing it for a duration made things very, very hard. Essentially anything that would make someone tired tends to make me excruciatingly tired. This was before my Dad's Parkinson's got a whole lot worse and my Mom shattered her wrist bad enough to require surgery trying to break one of his falls. I spent two months helping her around her house while she recovered. Dad had to go into rehab which became an assisted living facility, because how do you rehab a condition that won't get better? I did not have a computer during this time. Any internet presence I had for those months was done from my phone. I went back to work, and it was bumped up from an unofficial 43 hours to "That's what is actually on my schedule now", with slight time past my schedule, wire to wire work, irate customers, and a snowballing cascade of idiocy. So that official number stayed steady, but the time of night I got out became later and later and later. And my Dad died. Because of COVID restrictions, I never got to see him in person again. And then the work hours went up and were, essentially, 50. They can put 43 on the schedule, but if you don't get paid for lunch, work an hour after your shift, and have to plan to get in a half hour early or risk being a minute late, you are working over 50 hours. You are physically at work for 50 hours. Which is fine, short term. This has been my life for the last month. From the end of the year until this month, it had been "only" a half hour before and after my shift daily, so about 48 hours. I went in last week to an E-mail telling us it's going to get much worse for the foreseeable future, at least the next few months. So anyhow, I am no longer employed, and will have plenty of free time going forward to work on side projects. I didn't have the time or energy or right headspace to spend hours of my week working on a silly game.
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May 20, 2021 23:33
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gently caress, I'm sorry that your father died and everything else went to poo poo for months. Glad you were able to get out of a toxic work situation, though. It feels kinda trivial to say this after that post, but I'm glad one of the best sports LPs since Pro Vercelli is back.
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May 20, 2021 23:57
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Chapter 25: 2039-2040 Part 2: Through Contract Extension Deadline We kick off the 2039-2040 NBA Season by handling the Warriors. Just like last season, the bulk of our contributions are coming from our two real stars, Hugh Morrison and Alain Sonnet. Any night we get 13 points from Payne is a really good night. He's out there to make opposing guards cry.  This is also the first NBA game for #1 overall pick, Max Steele, who comes off the bench and transitions seemlessly to NBA play. Golden State got a real good one here. Even if it was one of the old fart drafts. (Also shown: Charlie Keefe scoring 27 points. That is not making the opposing team's shooting guard cry, AARON.  Despite us having a really good shooting guard rotation (since Louie Morgan will play there too), basically the entire depth chart finds itself injured. The broken noses are things I can absolutely have guys play through, but since this is crazy early in the season and because they're also an injury that can be aggravated, I see no reason to, and activate Rubens Viana for the hell of it. He does absolutely nothing in his extremely limited number of NBA contests, but he's averaging 40% from deep in the G-League, so he might pan out. This might be his only couple of games in the league, though.  Morrison has by no means fallen off; his production at the time I stopped the update is almost equal to what it was last year, but last year he had an absurdly hot start. This year, Sonnet projects as our best player, and it's standout performances like this that emphasize that point. This is also a decent game to illustrate that Hugh Andersen's previous year definitely wasn't a fluke, and he's slowly turning into a double-double machine. Andersen is the PF of our future, I think (giving us a too huge two Hughs front-line) no one will ever replace Bol Bol, but this is the first time since Bol fell off that I felt really comfortable with our starter.  Most games, however, follow this pattern. Morrison and Sonnet do the bulk of the heavy lifting, Reeves and Morgan get the rest of our points, and the squad plays defense and chips in. I'm only mildly resentful of Jemerio Kraemer, who is back to kind of trashy again.  Here's some more praise for Andersen; we absolutely needed someone to step up in this game, and he did in a big way. Issuing the following correction regarding the statement: "Any night we get 13 points from Payne is a good night" Any night where Payne outscores both Sonnet and Morrison is stressful.  Not too many eye-poppers from Morrison yet this year, but this was a really nice, complete stat line that jumped out. He's just stellar on both ends of the court. Not to jynx it, but I think between him and Sonnet we might have a couple future hall of famers.  Spotted in the wild is a very rare game where BJ Lawrence leads the Honu in scoring. These trouble me a lot less than when Payne is one of our leaders. I do have the game set up to give extra touches to BJ so that he won't be upset, but it only takes a couple extra here or there. And, by and large, he deserves them. Managing his ego is absolutely no trouble.  The other big news around the league is that frequent MVP candidate Dakoulas Balidis tears his MCL early on. The Cavs have another player of that caliber in Darrel Logan, so they suffer a little, but should still be in the hunt for the playoffs by the time Balidis comes back.  Balidis' body is.... troubling for a 28 year old. There've been a lot of players over the years that have had their careers derailed by continual injury. I hope Dakoulas isn't one of them STANDINGS West    And the East    And now for decisions. OK, we're not at the top of the table like we were last year, and we still have last year's problem: Our roster is bloated and we have 3 first round picks plus one "euro" stash player potentially joining the squad. Now, a lot of our bottom of the bench players are either raw as hell or maybe just busts. So in theory, I could cut bait with a lot of them, but then, we also have some hefty finance considerations. I'll illustrate by posting our salary situation.     We have five small forwards and only one of them is any good.  Anyhow, with that 57 (it's actually 97) million figure in mind, we have some possible extensions we can offer.  And one of them is an absolute no-brainer. Morrison is an MVP potential player and is offering to extend with us for 5 million less than his player option. I guarantee you that if we don't extend him, he will exercise this player option, become an unrestricted free agent, and make a max contract. So much like I did for Alain, I'll try to squeeze out the best contract I can without pissing him off, but there is no universe where I am not extending him. The tricky two are Payne and Morgan. Payne's 18.14 is also a pay cut. Of about 4 million a year, which is pretty drat nice of him, considering I was worried the current contract might be an overpay and he's still actually getting better every year. Why he's willing to take a cut, I don't know. Payne does basically nothing for us on offense (though it's an extremely efficient nothing. He's an elite finisher at the rim, but that's his sole tool on that side of the floor, and he uses it sparingly.) but he's far and away our best perimeter defender. Mostly because mother loving Jemerio Kraemer is making GBS threads it up again, probably the biggest reason for our slower start than last year. This would be a good contract for Payne. Morgan, on the other hand, is asking for a pay raise. He's in a position where, on the right team, that figure of 27 million makes perfect sense, it might even make sense for us, since he gets a lot of buckets, but we need that skill less and less, so his numbers have been going down. They haven't been going down because of any kind of decline in skill, it's literally just usage. 27 is a fair, but not great contract for Morgan. Further complicating matters is Paxson, Andersen, and Reeves are all up for their first big-boy contracts this season, and will want about 10 million, 30 million, and 20 million, respectively. All of these numbers are subject to change depending on how their seasons go, but as it stands those are all fantastic value contracts (Andersen has high potential and plays good defense. He's almost certainly our third best player and that's a third best player kinda contract) I absolutely want to either offer those in the off-season or match if someone else offers that. Since they're RFAs I can do that whether or not I extend Payne and Morgan, but, to reiterate something I said earlier: We have up to 4 new players coming in next season, at least two of which will almost certainly be good. One of our 3 first round picks is Orlando's pick, which is looking like a potential 1-5 pick. The other two are ours and Golden State's. I don't have to pick up the option on all our small forwards, and possibly won't, because so far they're kinda trashy. This also applies to Macy. We've been striking out recently. (Hopefully Bol Bol does better when/if I move him to Scout.) If I hold off on extending them, either or both might walk. We're already risking Su Jung Wang leaving. (I suspect I won't be able to stop him, in fact) And if I do extend both Payne and Morgan, I would be more or less locked into that team for the foreseeable future, barring maybe some bad trades. So. I could trade one or both of them, but there's no trade I like for either one, adding any or all of our scrubs doesn't help. Adding picks doesn't help. But there's one enticing trade opportunity if we decide to part with both.  The draft pick here is GOLDEN STATE'S. You'll have to pry that Orlando pick out of my cold, dead hands. This trade would save me about 12 million dollars next year, since who gives a poo poo about Glen James. Winston Alexander is great. The former #2 pick from South Africa, Alexander is a strong perimeter defender, which we would absolutely need because we'd be giving up Payne and Kraemer fell off a cliff. He's also a good, but not great scorer, and a low-ego player that is one of the better players on his team and not complaining about touches but other players definitely could in his position. The argument against a trade here would be: 1)We'd have to part with Payne, who is willing to sign at value and is, again, easily our best perimeter defender and 2)We'd be giving our best perimeter defender to a conference rival. 3)We'd be giving a high scoring backup player to Minnesota to play behind Steve Dunn, which basically means they would absolutely torch us from outside if we meet in the playoffs. The argument for a trade here is: 1)Morgan doesn't have a lot of value for the Honu and this is the best we're likely to get outside just letting his contract quietly run out. 2)Reeves is a starter-quality SG and our third leading scorer. 3)We would get a competent, no-ego SF, which is like, my white whale (although, with my luck he would immediately develop an ego.) Another alternative:  This pick is also GOLDEN STATE'S Kraemer and a first is a lot to give up, but Kraemer just hasn't worked out for me, and Barbosa is definitely competent. He's a little older, but not horribly so. He's on a longer term deal for about as much money. It might work. It's a fairly low-risk move. If he doesn't fit or turns into a complainer, he's about as movable an asset as Kraemer is. The reason to do this deal would be 1)It gets rid of Kraemer while also 2)Giving us less new-player bloat in the off season. The reason not to do this deal is 1)We don't know if it'd work and 2)It's in Sacramento's favor, but at this point, I've basically accepted that all former Honu I can't make work are going to become all-stars. (I suspect a few will make the hall of fame.)  VOTING TIME What do we do at the extension window: 1)Extend Payne 2)Extend Payne and Morgan 3)Trade Payne and Morgan for Winston Alexander 4)Wait until the off-season and worry about things later. And for Kraemer 1)Trade Kraemer (if the thread votes to trade for Alexander, then I'll need to haggle to make this deal work, but I have enough "not Orlando's pick" assets and young players I can probably still swing the Barbosa trade. Not sure I'd need both guys. I would also do some digging for "Salary dump" trades.) 2)Wait until the off-season and worry about things later.
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May 21, 2021 07:58
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1) Extend Payne 2) Trade Kraemer
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May 22, 2021 16:35
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Livewire42 posted:1) Extend Payne
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May 22, 2021 17:12
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I’m gonna go with trade the two for one for the first question, and hold off on the other guy. So sorry to hear all that, hope your luck turns up. Life really isn’t fair sometimes, but I like to think it regresses to the mean. I hope the playoffs serve as some kind of escape, and I hope you get to do something to honor and remember your dad now that things are clearing up.
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May 22, 2021 17:13
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First off, I hope things settle out for you and sorry about your dad. I think I can speak for everybody in the thread in saying that "needing to take time for yourself" isn't "flaking out"; you need to take care of your real life and no sane person would blame you for that. Glad to see the thread back because it's consistently entertaining, but this is a hobby and it's totally understandable that life sometimes just gets too messy. As for voting, going to third this: Livewire42 posted:1) Extend Payne
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May 22, 2021 18:29
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Firstly, welcome back. Secondly, I would advise you to keep Morrison (of course) and Payne, and let the other three go. I see no real reason to make either trade, especially with a conference rival. Getting draft picks seems silly to me for a team with a surplus of them, and trading for more SF when you have too many seems redundant. All of these bastards are overpaid regardless. Thirdly, I wanted to mention that 2K21 is free on Epic this week.
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May 22, 2021 20:01
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So noted on 2k21. One thing I like about it is player development seems a lot less "ordained from God" than earlier versions. Dunno if I'll ever do anything with it, we'll see how long this LP takes me. I do have a plan in mind for a future LP, but that's way too far off for me to really think about. Chapter 25: 2039-2040 Part 3: End of Regular Season I got a better contract deal than I thought I would on Payne, and latch him onto a front-loaded (!) contract that has a starting point of a 5 million dollar pay cut.  The Last year of this deal is really supposed to have a team option, but either game game glitched or maybe I left the menu for some reason and forgot to add it back on. I'll keep the error though, as it's only a small difference and I'll chalk it up in story as "he'd take the back loaded contract but I had to drop the team-option" which isn't true, but we can pretend.  For some reason I can only extend Morrison for 3 years instead of 4, but I also convince him to take this front-loaded deal, instead of the 40 some million that his player option was worth. Morrison's going to have a weird career where he'll either challenge for MVP or struggle to make an All-League team at all, because right now, the Center position is profoundly stacked. The league is in something of a golden age at that position. I literally cannot believe I got a deal this good on Morrison, but maybe the League being so center-heavy is part of it.  This motherfucker right here. Top brass throws a party in Navarro's honor. What on earth would have happened if he had an A+ in contracts?!  I also pull the trigger on the Kraemer deal, and god drat, Golliver. I thought I was throwing shade at Kraemer. Remember, the game prioritizes OVR and Kraemer is literally a single point lower than Barbosa. Incredible.  There's a couple other interesting trades around the league. Niko Sankovic is traded off the struggling Magic and should be a solid contribution to a playoff rival. Though something just hasn't been clicking for the Nuggets this year. The other noteworthy trade is the incredibly baffling 76ers trading their second leading scorer for a big man that will not start in front of Dwight Dixon and get in his way if they do. In return the Nets get an excellent scorer they don't need and get rid of their best interior defender. Spoiler Alert: This trade removes both teams from playoff contention and is the sole reason why Dwight Dixon doesn't make MVP this year. He had an absurd 31 PER season and was far-and-away the best individual player in the league. This was not a trade so much as it was a suicide pact.  Barbosa's first game as a Honu is pretty good, but not spectacular in what is a close loss to the dangerous Lakers. I still take this as a net positive, because no one on our team was scoring that night, and he managed to get something going.  Gilbert Paxon (NBA Injury Report: "reorganizing book shelves by author's astrological signs") takes a nasty injury that could have lasting effects on his career. He already wears a pad on the other elbow. Now they match. (I actually edited one in.) He's still effective in his role when he comes back, but he's a valuable rotation guy and this is a fairly big blow to the team. Both Morrison and Sonnet make their second and third All-Star teams, respectively.  (NOTE: Every player's number of All-star selections is 1 lower than what is shown; this is what happens when I forget to screen grab it and then grab it after the game.) Catinella gets a much-deserved one time all-star appearance for the Mavericks. He comes in as an injury relief for.... for someone. Another Maverick, Zach Cooper, makes a deserved first time appearance. Houston is easily the most popular team in the league, because they don't have the record of a squad where you would see three all-stars, but starters are voted in by the fans. "But VSM," you say. "They don't have three starters". Well, they did. Teddy Vaughn was a starter but got injured. Antonis Giannu is his injury replacement (apparently) and Casey Daniels is given his starting job from the players that Terrell selected.  The Honu's side gets massacred in the All-Star game, but none of the stink falls on them, as, outside of Petersen himself, they're the only players who bothered to show up.  Radu gonna Radu, though. Toss an(other?) all-star game MVP onto his resume. Honolulu goes through a rough stretch after the all-star break where nothing goes right for Hugh Morrison, and our fringe rotational pieces trade off injury concerns. There are a few bright spots during this time.  After our first few losses, Sonnet seemed to get the message and realized he needed to be more aggressive in looking for his own shot.  Him and Andersen absolutely demolish the Clippers, who are the best team in the West and mostly on incredible defense. Maybe someone should tell them how to defend a pick and pop.  Louie Morgan, probably in his last year with the Honu, still has value for us, and shows some of it off in this 31 point outing against the Kings.  By April, Morrison is back up to form and most of our injury concerns have gone away. Honolulu has not had a very good season, but this game really illustrates the potential we have from our (on paper) best three guys. (In practice, I still think Andersen is our #3 guy, but god drat Barbosa is so much better than Kraemer was. Except maybe on defense. I need to check his defense going into the playoffs/offseason. But notably, the offense doesn't randomly die anymore, and he's a big part of that.)  Case in point, this 34 point outing against the Celtics. Both the Celtics and the Timberwolves are elite teams. The Barbosa/Kraemer swap was mostly to get rid of Kraemer and I had very little expectations on Barbosa coming in, but I'm very happy with him. We get one final "injury" toward the end of the season:  .....I have never seen this. I've definitely had players get the flu, though, so I'm not really surprised. I wish Cameron enjoyed shooting practice as much as he enjoys Honolulu's fish tacos. Final Standings       We limp into the playoffs. Between the big trade, and most of our team being injured at some point in the season or another (Sonnet and Morrison were the only players to play every game this year) the Honu struggled with chemistry and cohesion. The big problem though, was Morrison had a bit of a slump season. He started surging the closer we got to the playoffs, so I'm not worried about him as a player, but I think more of the season can be placed on his shoulders than on the roleplayers. Although, even BJ Lawrence had a rare injury this year and that left me spooked for a couple of weeks. He's getting old and we might want to consider using our own pick on a Center, if we can find one (there don't seem to be any reasonable options in the top five and HAHAHAHAHAHA we have Orlando's pick. Somehow this looks to be a really weak draft, despite it being the first draft that isn't just old farts. Also, I took a break because of real life basketball and came back and yes, the Sixers/Nets trade is still really funny.  Pictured: A man who is very happy Philadelphia's management has a drinking problem. Not that Dudley didn't have an excellent season on both ends of the floor--he did. And Boston's record reflects that.  Max Steele lives up to his promise and just fits beautifully into the league. Those are some gorgeous shooting numbers for a rookie wing player. Compare to real life Anthony Edwards's .417 .776 .329  Very well deserved. Gaines plays backup for Michael Torres and frequently takes some of the spotlight from him.  Real talk? The DPOY in NBA 2k games is much, much too streaky. Players do not come into the league and dominate that award for 5, 6 years at a time. It's definitely streaky in the sense that there are a lot of repeats in back to back seasons, but that's usually where it stops. (Has anyone other than Dwight Howard gotten 3 in a row? I'm pretty sure the answer is "no") Ben Wallace is gonna be in the Hall of Fame for a loving reason. (Also, Ben Wallace is gonna be in the hall of fame.  You're goddamn right he is.) Sam Drew has this excellent scoring season and the Celtics are probably wondering how their year would have been if they had kept Drew to play next to Dudley. They definitely gave up on this kid way too fast.  'Sup Lloyd. All NBA First Team  That first team is fire. Yeow. All NBA Second Team  All NBA Third Team  I gotta think, slump aside, Morrison was pretty close to taking third team honors from Swift here. Honolulu probably needs someone on one of these teams if we want to claim we're competitive. Catinella has been a standout defensive star for years now, but it's nice to see him recognized for the rest of his contributions. All Defense 1  Why yes, Paolo Salvaderi is yet another Italian all-defense player. Why do you ask? All Defense 2  And the two Rookie Teams.   Didn't have to replace anyone this year. The last rookie on the second team actually averaged about 13 points per game. This was a terrific freshman class. We have our work cut out for us.  Well, the good news is, all of our rivals are in the other half of the conference. Hell, San Antonio isn't in the playoffs at all. The bad news is, we're also somewhat built to beat up our rivals, and I'm not sure how much I like our odds against our corner of the bracket.
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May 23, 2021 04:40
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I don't know why I'm surprised, but I am surprised, and the game has found a new and exciting way to screw me over and piss me off during the off-season. Chapter 25: 2039-2040 Part 4: Playoffs, early offseason For the most part this looks to be a good, clean playoffs, where most of the relevant players were injured before they got here, or in the case of Jalen Gardner, missed the playoffs, which are probably related issues.     Sanchez on the Celtics is actually their highest overall player (which is saying something when one of their other players was just named league MVP.) But 1-2 weeks at the start of the playoffs is one or two games at most, so they'll be fine. The heat and Mavs are without a rotational piece, but Detroit is hosed. That's their best player by a mile, and they were a 7 seed anyhow.  The first thing I notice is mother fucker they have a second, identical looking Vladimir Tarlac and since there's no trade deadline, I double checked, and nope, it's not the same one that was on the Mavs on the injury screen. Just one with a very similar face and the same OVR that plays the same position. Great. I'm gonna have to come up with a way to distinguish the two, but this isn't what I was referring to with new and exciting ways for this game to piss me off. I already knew about this (hence Stephen B and Stephen C Shumaker.) When I see a name I know is a duplicate, I've been re-naming the players. If it's enough time in the future, I might add a Jr or II afterward, but for now I just straight up re-name everyone when I find them. But they slip through the cracks. This is especially likely with Foreign players because the name pool for foreign nations is laughably, incredibly unprofessionally small. It's basically self-parody. Not shown is the best player on the Lakers by both actual ability and OVR, so I'm shocked he's off the bench. But that would be Vlado Tomasevic, who you may remember we almost signed a few years back. Barber is an excellent center, Cody Lowe is a former first round pick that is by and large living up to his potential, albeit not shown any superstardom yet. Vladimir Tarlac was built on an assembly line to piss me off and Clayton Patterson is a former all-star that can drop a lot of points in a hurry. As for Ervin Perdue, he's the glue guy heart of the team. His picture here doesn't do him justice.  Look at that thing. This is all he brings to the table as a player. His immediate backup is a big-bodied, do everything small forward named Reinaldo Carlos that usually doesn't score too high off the bench, but drops 19 on us in this game 1. Coach Shai seems to like to make us go small, since we only run with 3 true Bigs, and the first one in our "just in case" players, while a true PF, is also like, 6'9. So Wang is frequently playing out of position at PF and there were weird stretches where, of all people, Gilbert Paxson was put in at SF, and that dog don't hunt. I make playoff necessary adjustments.  Enjoy this shot of assistant coach Bol, because he'll be doing this for, at most, one more season. Wang is holding Loiue Morgan back, because the bench is reacting to an and one that Hugh Morrison drew. It wasn't that exciting, I'm glad they're amped, though.  Here is Morrison doing Morrison things and scoring against a triple team because Vitor Vitti (#46) is late getting over. I'll repeat, he scored because a third defender was both necessary and too late in showing up. (I have no idea why he's jumping at this angle, he made a play later on the ball, but if I took a screen shot that shows it right, you see that Tarlac wisely got out the way, and he wouldn't look like he was defending Morrison. What happened was Lowe was defending Morrison, Tarlac came to double team, Morrison stepped through, got Tarlac to back-peddle or be squashed, causing Vitti to declare "OH poo poo!" and rotate off his man to attempt a block. I love Hugh Morrison. Despite his excellent play and some seriously hot shooting from Reeves and Sonnet, we somehow blow a 20 point lead in this game, seemingly by magic. I watched the whole game and could not tell you what happened. Because we were still making shots, just... apparently not as many. It really seemed like the Lakers were hitting things they loving shouldn't, like last second, well-defended buzzer beaters, or jumpers over a taller defender. There were also a few jumpers over smaller defenders, see what I said about Reinaldo Carlos. So after this game, I deactivate Paxson and give his minutes to Macy. We win two of our next five games but ultimately lose to the Lakers in 6. But hey, it stopped Carlos (and also Lowe!) and we got more points out of Barbosa, so the adjustment actually worked! What went wrong? Again, I have no real idea. Team stats individually seemed fine. We stopped who I would think we would need to stop. We had a couple of bad games from Morrison, including game 2 which would have been his first after playing super heavy minutes in game 1. We could use some more size in the rotation to help him out, but that's been an ongoing problem. Elsewhere, our bitter rivals the Nuggets have basically the same problem against the Clippers, matching us almost beat-for-beat as they get eliminated on game 6 as well. Gerardo Catinella has a sublime series against the Suns, and his two 35 point games is enough for the Mavericks to pull off the baby upset. The Rockets are absolutely not a team that has 3 real stars (basically, only Paciani is actually any good) and the Timberwolves blow through them in 5. Out East, Detroit briefly has the world believing when they win game 1, which is enough to hold off the Grizzlies for Sam Gooden to return on game 5 and win the next two. Sadly, game 7 goes to the Grizz and the Pistons are eliminated and sent home with a standing ovation from the Memphis crowd. New York pulls the Upset off on Boston, getting people to ask "Who's the real MVP", because people are annoying and stupid that way. Jacque Cisse has a double double in his final NBA game for the Miami Heat, but they lose in 6. Atlanta has been waiting for Cleveland for a while though, accomplishing the only sweep of what's regarded as a drat good playoffs. Catinella's luck runs out, and the Clippers break the Mavericks in 6 games of balanced scoring, loving Bruno Jukic got 3 triple doubles in this series. Why'd you have to be the #1 option, Bruno? You aren't scoring for San Diego either. You could have done exactly that same thing on the Honu and we'd have championships. You could be in the hall of fame, you rear end in a top hat. Minnesota fairs a bit better against the mighty Lakers and push them to 7 games, but still aren't enough to get by their bigs. New York continues their little Cinderella run by eliminating a worn-out Memphis team after 6 hard-fought games. Much hype is made to the Dakoulas Balidis/Radu Constantin matchup, and they do both put on a stellar scoring show, but in the end, the difference maker is Darrel Logan, who the Hawks have no answer for, and Cleveland finds themselves in the conference finals after 6 games. In the conference finals, the Lakers stand no chance against San Diego, because for all the poo poo I give Jukic, he's one of the best defensive bigs in the entire league, and he quite frankly clowns the Lakers' best players. Patterson is enough to give the Lakers one win, but that's all they get. The Clippers head into the finals with both assured home court advantage and also a rest advantage and oh god, is Jukic gonna win a championship? Midnight falls around game 5 of the Eastern Finals and the Cavs finish clearing them out in six games, leading to a matchup of San Diego vs the 4th seeded Cavaliers. Anyhow, what people are claiming will happen this year with the Lakers is actually true with this fake Cavs team, where they're way better than their 4 seed but didn't have their best player (who happens to be the best player in the entire NBA according to OVR, lest we forget) for most of the year. So   You'll have that sometimes. No rule changes are made in the offseason. There's an insane one for trades proposed where salaries no longer have to match at all, which, man alive, that could be interesting, if nothing else.  As mentioned, Jacque Cisse retired. I'm saddened, but not surprised that the Honu didn't retire his jersey. Former Heat superstar Ciro Reyes retired, and those bastards didn't hang his up, either. I've mentioned Johnny Phillips before several times.  Courtney Baldwin, one of the generation's best shooters leaves as well. Amazingly, Bernie Lawrence was still in the league until this year, albeit not on a real team. The 9 years was just how many he played an actual game for. Which wasn't even every year he was with us. That dude managed to stick around on the end of the bench somewhere or another for at least a decade. The game must have decided it was time to generate new staff, because 4-5 pages of staff retired. I didn't list anyone, because there was no one actually interesting, it was mostly just CFOs, Trainers, and Scouts. Speaking of staff hiring:  The pressures of head coaching are too much for Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who chooses to sign, instead, with the Pacers.  And I have no idea why. This is the "new and exciting" thing that pisses me off. I have no idea why he preferred their contract (my best guess is because it was an assistant and he hadn't yet "officially" changed to a "coach"? Either way, it's so loving stupid.) We were offering him over 4 times the amount of money in a more prestigious position in a much more prestigious and successful franchise located in an island paradise and he chose the worse paying, less powerful job in loving Indiana (Sorry, Indiana but... ....c'mon.) And also, he was already very successful at it, and very nearly made Coach of the Year in the 2038-2039 season. The only narrative that makes sense is "he wasn't ready for the pressure" so that's what I'm sticking with.  We replace him with this guy, who also runs the Triangle, because that's what the Honu know. His potential looks bad but, I've looked at his stats and I can assure you, as far as coaching goes, that is a bald-faced lie. Unfortunately, his default role is "Assistant GM" so there's a good chance he pulls a Shai if his "Role" doesn't change. If he decides that he likes coaching, though, he should be a real diamond in the rough. Bol is, at least this year, not only not willing, but not an option to move to the scouting position. I leave him as assistant coach for now, since his contract is still valid. Hopefully he's willing to jump next year, or we'll have to finally say goodbye to our dear friend. I'm not sure if assistant coaches do anything, but it's possible at least some of our issues this year is on him---I cannot stress enough; he is not good at his current job. Onward to the draft lottery.  This is false. It might be true of Honolulu's own draft picks, but we've definitely picked in the lottery since then. Hugh Morrison was taken 3rd overall in 2033. As broken things in 2k go, this one's fairly minor. ALSO, Astute readers may have noticed that Kings (via GS) isn't listed yet. Mother fucker.  I knew it was a possibility, and still found it worth it to be free of the Kurse of Kraemer, but I'm still beyond irritated that my good pick wound up missing the lottery and my so-so pick I traded won one of the three spots. And this, right here is the number one reason why it is stupid to tank. Full stop. But hey, real-life executives are stupid, so we needed the play-in tournament to curb their lust for bad decision making. Honolulu has the 4th and 21st pick in what looks to be an unimpressive yet fairly deep draft. Even though its the first draft since freshmen were allowed back into the talent pool, I am not going to alter any ages this year (since logically, there'd be older players who didn't or couldn't declare last year). Our biggest needs are going to be finding replacements for Louie Morgan, Su Jun Wang (likely), and finding another big, either a PF or C to play in our rotation, or to give us emergency minutes if Hugh Morrison or BJ Lawrence get injured. In short, we need everything, although we have a ton of young small forwards that might actually stop being lovely if we're lucky, Macy might get better, and Freddy Tiggs is coming over from Australia to play the 4. So we might not need more PFs or SFs, but guess what there's no good Shooting Guards or Centers in the draft that I could justify burning the #4 pick on, but plenty of good Power Forwards, and maybe a little competition will be good? I mean, it's easier to make a PF into a C (though their OVR will go down because 2k OVR is nonsense psychic bullshit and until someone proves otherwise, I generally assume it's impossible for a player to have a higher OVR at center than Power Forward) Since 4th is quite high up, instead of abstracting, I'm going to instead post the 5 possible candidates. Since there are no 2s or 5s, and since we have a bunch of (bad!) 3s (who, aside from one guy slated to go first, also look like they suck), all of these particular guys will play the 1 or 4.  First up is Clay Calloway, a Point Guard. ++: Our scouts believe he has the most potential (A+) of all available players, not just the ones on my list. He already has an NBA level of passing and ball handling. (his badges are playmaker badges) He is lightning quick, and blew away all other players at our private workouts. He's two inches taller than the other PG I'd consider taking. He has a great jawline. Look at that thing. --: He won't be NBA ready this year, at least according to the game's automatic rotations. So he'll get some burn, but not as much as he could, and there's no way he'll accept a G-league run. He's a terrible shooter, and we're trying to replace Louie Morgan who could sometimes go off for 50.  Option 2 is Philip Reed, a Point Guard ++: Very good shooter from both 3pt territory and mid range. Not as fast as Calloway in general, probably a hair faster in transition. (Two of his three badges are shooting, the other one is "downhill"). Despite lower OVR, probably more NBA ready. The closest player available to the one we'll have to lose. --: "Only" a B+ Potential. Lowest OVR of available options. Questionable defense.  Option 3 is Bernard Evans III, a Power Forward ++: Best interior defender available. Has 3 defense badges and (I think) one finishing badge. A good hedge between potential, ready made skill, and OVR, from what I can tell. --: PF is less of a need than PG. Pretentious name. Went to University of Michigan. Suspect physical strength. Much worse shooting than option 4  Option 4 is Fernando Santiago, a Power Forward ++: Can score from anywhere. Good, but not great footwork. Doesn't make a lot of mistakes. Close to Evans III on the "hedge our bets" status---essentially, this is the offense version, and Evans III is the defense option. --: PF less of a need than PG. Questionable defense. Older than Evans III.  Finally, we have option 5, Stephon Cox, yet another Power Forward ++: Highest OVR, not that that means anything. Also highest potential of the three power forwards, which does mean something. (A) Physically superior to both other PF options. Only 19, so has a better shot of fulfilling his already better potential. He's also considerably heavier, so there's more room on his frame for muscle mass to bang down low. Theoretically, more flexible in development paths. High OVR means the AI coach will need less incentive to give him minutes. --: PF Less of a need than PG. Despite higher OVR, he is really raw. Mental attributes are not there yet. No badges, so what you see is what you get. Large body might just indicate that he'll be fat. Between the mentor system being unusably broken and never to this day patched, and my already being bad at it, player development on the Honu has been hit or miss. Might cost us some games as he figures it out. VOTING TIME Pick 4: CHOOSE TWO 1)Clay Calloway 2)Philip Reed 3)Bernard Evans III 4)Fernando Santiago 5)Stephon Cox Our second pick is our own pick at #21. There will still, unfortunately, not be a good shooting guard at this place. There's a few more reasonable power forwards, and maybe one or two centers, and maybe this is where I would expect weird, high-scoring but not-great passing point guards to possibly wind up. What am I aiming for, here? Pick 21 1)We need bench shooting if both Wang and Morgan leave. Get a shooter that can play the 1, 2, or 3. 2)We've gotten beat in 2 of the last 3 playoffs by big-bodied small forwards, who cares about already having all the small forwards, they suck anyhow. Get a big small forward, drat you. 3)We need a backup for our backup center. Take the best center. 4)Just take the best player left on the board, as near as you can tell 5)Just take the highest potential player on the board, as near as you can tell.
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May 24, 2021 03:38
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He may not have as much potential and his face is kinda dumb, but Clay Calloway has the best name of the candidates. It's just got a good mouthfeel. Santiago, Calloway, 2
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May 24, 2021 16:23
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Calloway and Santiago look good to me
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May 24, 2021 16:35
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(2,5) and 5
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May 24, 2021 17:10
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Reed, Calloway, 1
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May 24, 2021 19:46
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Chapter 25: 2040-2041 Part 1: Offseason Not too exciting of a draft. As I said, it was deep, but not especially talent rich, barring some players breaking out. We did seem to snag a couple of the higher potential players in the whole draft, so I'm pretty happy with our scouts.  For reference, this guy's ceiling is listed as "Shane Battier", and I love me some Shane Battier, but I feel like a #1 pick is supposed to reach greater heights.  Sacramento makes part of our decision easier for us. Reed also has an excellent potential, and might wind up one day as the best player in this draft.  We make the play for Calloway, who doesn't look a day older than 65.  The next one of my scouted picks lands down in 8th to the Pacers.  Seattle decides that maybe they should commit further to the rebuild, and trade their aging point guard to Utah.  Now, I was completely convinced there were no good shooting guards in this draft, or at least in the top half; I will never discount sleepers. But Seattle seems to think this guy is worth one of their best players.  Santiago falls all the way to 17th. I didn't count my own vote, but if I did, my top 2 were Calloway (who we got) and Santiago. Also, he's way bulkier than I thought. I could have sworn he was about 20 pounds lighter, like Evans was.  Speaking of, he falls all the way to 19th. I considered everyone I listed as a worthy #3 pick. After looking at players (since they get re-evaluated after they drafted, no takebacks) I think he might actually be hands-down the best of the three power forwards, so I'll say this: 2k20 was less deterministic than previous editions, when it came to drafting players.  We end up using our 21st on this guy, who has some decent size, good potential, and some of the best athletic results in the draft combine.  Quite a bit later, the Celtics take this guy, who I spent about 5 minutes debating vs Cam. In the end, Cam's physical attributes and the pending signing of Freddy Tiggs made me go with Flores over Saramago.    Mr Irrelevant 2040 is Terry Barkley, who I did sign to the Grizzlies, but who might not get any minutes.  It comes time to pick up the options on my young players, and I can't bring back all of them. I can only bring back 3. (I had thought 2, so I only picked up my option on two.) The decision for which two was somewhat tricky. I went with Samuel Macy, because he seems to be the only one of them currently worth a drat. As for the three small forwards, I first eliminated Rudolph Dudley, because he's a bit of an rear end in a top hat, currently mad at us both for not playing him more minutes, and then also for losing in the goddamn playoffs of his rookie season. Between Cameron and Longley, Longley is better, but neither is remotely good, or at least that was the case last year. I eventually go with Cameron because 1)He's younger and 2)I have more guaranteed years with him to try to get him to do anything of value. Coach has him in front of Flores on the depth chart, but since neither is in the rotation, I fully intend to give first crack at minutes to Flores.  The first guy I sign, and the one I start to consider the highest priority, is Frederick Reeves, and I lock him up as long as I possibly can, managing to get the next two years under 20 million dollars. Navarro has been way less of a headache in these signings than my last idiot. I gotta remember to re-hire him in the offseason. Anyhow, Reeves is a great value, and with both Wang and Morgan gone, I need his scoring now more than ever. He projects as our starter, but there might be value in putting Payne ahead of him and having Reeves lead our bench, which is a lot of unproven question marks. (And BJ Lawrence!) Reeves is probably our third most important player.  Secondly, I sign Andersen to a bigger per year deal. Reeves was more interested in a longer deal, plus Andersen wants more money per year. I make sure to give him at least 3 years so I can extend him if I want to. He's probably worth this amount, but we've got a lot of money tied up already in Sonnet, Morrison, Barbosa, and now Reeves. So the shorter term works both for Andersen, and for us.  A bit more haggling gives us Paxson at these figures. I think your range for error in these smaller contracts is more difficult, which feels like the opposite of how negotiations go. I feel like these guys should accept anything reasonably close to their desired price, but actual stars should be much less willing to front load contracts in the middle of their prime.  Apparently, I also signed Rubens Viana to another deal. Except I didn't. I didn't pick up his 2 way contract, I didn't give him a qualifying offer, and I renounced him from my cap. Oh well. Guess he made the team anyway. Since this makes 14 players, I have no roster space available to sign anyone else, and I'm too strapped for cash to waive him. Free agency in 2040 is absurd with some of the good players that are available. And, given how we were fairly mediocre last year, maybe there's an argument that I should have been more of a player for it. But I actually do expect our team to continue growing, and honestly, I like a lot of our core quite a bit, and remain more or less totally convinced that we massively underperformed based on our potential. I think we could have both gotten a better record, and defeated the Lakers. If we have a similarly bad season, then it might be time to look into making some serious moves.  Among the big names available is last year's MVP, Jackie Dudley. The Bucks, already a very good team, manage to convince him to sign on. This is probably the most high profile free agent signing in Milwaukee's history.  The Celtics reel a little from the loss, but come back and sign another all-star caliber center to fill the position. It's a dropoff in talent, but honestly, not that much of one. Like I said, right now, Center is stacked in the league.  Case in point, the monster deal of the offseason being Donald Powers getting the Super Max for sticking with his Portland Trailblazers. For all that Dudley won the MVP last year, Powers is probably the second best big man in the league after Dwight Dixon. He might be better than Dixon. Portland really needs to get him some help.  Fresh off a disappointing loss in the NBA Finals, Bruno Jukic departs San Diego for Utah, alongside underrated Alexander Rollins. You may remember from the draft that they also got Silverstre in the draft. There's a small window here for Utah to make some noise, but I assume they're going to be replacing someone in the playoffs this year.  San Diego doesn't falter, replacing Jukic with two members of last year's all-star team and a former 2-time MVP. Jesus, what an off-season. 2k is absolutely goddamn stupid with its number of 1 year contracts on excellent players. Butler here shouldn't have a 1 year deal. Sam Drew shouldn't have had a 1 year deal with Charlotte.  Miami makes two big name signings, and both play an extremely similar role. There are a lot of questions on if the two can coexist. They did lose their best player, Jesse Lowe, so this stinks of a big panic move.  Sacramento steals multiple-time All-star Jeffrey Schultz away from Montreal. I think Sacramento had a good offseason. The all-star they were able to lure is a bit on the old side, but they picked up two of the guys I had my eye on in the draft.  The Pacers opt to not re-sign Casey Daniel (I forget who actually picked him up) and instead commit their future to the vastly underrated Lou Pollard. Similarly underrated is his newest back-court running mate, Donte Bishop, who, while in the twilight of his career, still has what it takes to lead a team. Hasan Ozat is my bet of "player the AI stupidly signed for a single season that will make the all-star game"  In an absolute coup, our one-time thread rivals the Vancouver Ravens manage to peel Sebastien Barber (thanks, Vancouver) off the Lakers and Jesse Lowe from the Heat. Lowe is a frequent MVP candidate, and Barber is pretty drat good himself. They're also the ultimate destination of Su Jun Wang this year, and I fear what those two bigs can do with a wing as nightmarishly efficient as Wang. I'm starting to second guess my re-building choices. Should I have stayed with the proven Morgan and Wang instead of Andersen and Reeves, who seem to have more upside, and Paxson, who has more per dollar value?  Speaking of Morgan, he signs himself to the Wizards, and after 9 years with the Honu and being one of the best sixth men in the league, he finally gets the keys to his own team. Washington considers him their best player and their new star. I'm very happy for him, but I have to believe I did the right thing for the Honu by letting him leave. The Power Rankings have us at either 13 or 3, depending on who you ask. Here's hoping we're closer to the latter. Either Houston or Miami is selected to host the next all-star game. I legitimately don't know because, unfortunately, my save got eaten and I had to re-do half of free agency. Infuriatingly, the Viana bug still fired. All Honu images are from the first timeline, but I was able to match all three guy's contracts exactly so I didn't bother to re-take them. All other team's images are from the second and accurate timeline. Calloway and Viana manage to lead us to the semi-finals of Summer league. I might actually wind up liking Viana. He does seem to have found his NBA shooting stroke, and, more importantly, I can plug him in at Shooting Guard, Small Forward, and, weirdly, Power Forward without losing any OVR, in part because of his good size. He'll likely only play if someone gets injured, but he could also find himself playing regardless of who actually does get injured. Freddy Tiggs also acquits himself well in the Summer league and Coach Bennet currently has him as the 8th guy in a 10 man rotation, expecting about 20 minutes a game. This is the most we've played a rookie since Andersen's rookie year. One thing I notice, either because Morgan's gone or because Bennet plays things a bit different than SGA did, but to start, Sonnet's minutes are all the way up to 34. With all our proven scoring in the starting lineup, Tiggs has as good a shot at RotY as any Honu has in a long, long time. Our Depth chart is more balanced than it's been in quite a while, too: PG: Sonnet/Paxson/Calloway/(Reeves)/(Payne) SG: Reeves/Payne/Viana/(Paxson) -------- Sonnet can play this, but never will because he's our best point guard by a lot. SF: Barbosa/Flores/Cameron/(Reeves)/(Hopefully not Paxson)/(Viana)/(I think Andersen?) PF: Andersen/Tiggs/(Barbosa)/(Lawrence)/Macy/(Cameron)/(Viana) ----- Morrison can play this but never will because he's our best center by a lot C: Morrison/Lawrence/(Tiggs)/(Macy) That seems like much more injury insurance than we had last year. I believe in the Honu.
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May 25, 2021 05:14
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Also, I didn't notice the year until I began simming. So we'll get a midseason take on a ten year retrospective. Including a preview of all teams. I've said it out loud, that means I've committed to it.
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May 25, 2021 12:03
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drat, I got three more updates ready to be edited. I have no idea what possessed me to go through all this. ALSO we very nearly had a panic when the game decided it wanted to delete all my assets meaning three of the four expansion teams and the Clippers and Hawks lost all their poo poo. I was able to recover it all, though. I also am going to cut this interlude short----I was going to do all the awards for the decade and then an overview of the current state of the NBA. But I forgot I never really discussed a career I think would be of interest. Even though I have had the picture file sitting around for months. I could only get through my little side-track into that career before running out of energy. There's too much stuff to talk about in the 2030s, and going over 34 teams, even though I'd only be making the pithiest of comments, is a lot of work. So.... we'll get a couple data points and then an extended discussion about the greatest player of all time. INTERLUDE pt 1: Basketball in the 2030s  Any discussion of a decade almost certainly begins with a discussion of the champions. And though it wasn't as dominant of a performance as the 2020s, the Honu are still the cream of the crop of the league. Making 4 finals appearances and winning three of those puts them above anyone else by enough to be notable. The closest competition is the Atlanta Hawks, who have a tremendous front office, but also a little bit of luck about halfway through the decade when they nabbed the transcendent Radu Constantin. It's arguable that the Hawks have been better than the Honu. The next closest competition to either is the Cleveland Cavaliers, who have Constantin's rival and closest direct comparison, Dakoulas Balidis. The Cavs are a legitimate dynasty, even if they don't necessarily rule continually. Nothing like the Honu, who, even after their best player took a back seat, have made deep playoff runs with eclectic new players. It's considered an inevitability that they'll be back in the finals, they have a mystique built up that is on the level of the Lakers, Celtics, or Spurs. This period oversaw League expansion again, and the two new teams have been a smashing success, with the Voyageurs competitive in the East being competitive immediately, even making the finals, and the Sonics out West actually managing to get a championship, something that went a long way to healing some of the old wounds that lingered from the team being cruelly snatched away, decades ago.  Championships don't tell the whole story, though. As much as basketball is a team sport, it is also a showcase for individual players. Fans argue that the end of the 2030s was some of the most exciting, unpredictable races for who would be considered the number 1 player. A far cry from the middle of the decade, where Randy Butler clearly dominated, but more importantly, the early 2030s and all of the 2020s, when the Great One played. Before we get to the other awards............How good was Doncic? Well, for starters, he went out with 9 MVPs, and 4 Championships, each of those netting him a finals MVP. He had double digit all-star appearances and double digit all league appearances.  He would wind up just behind only one other man in the GOAT conversation for career points, LeBron James. With exactly 300 less.  ...However, Doncic would get there on over a thousand less shots.  This feat was partially made possible by his ability to get to the line, which ranked among the very best....  But also in part thanks to his ability to shoot from distance at volume, eclipsing another star that was supposed to burn forever.  He was one of the best passers ever, and certainly the best that was required to score at such a high volume.  But Doncic's game was complete, finding himself not just in the top 40 in rebounds....  But in career steals, as well. Doncic played with a competitive streak, and a penchant for trash talk that could have come out of a time machine straight from the 80s. Never known for his defense, Doncic made a point of letting other players know he could nonetheless guard them better than they could ever guard him.  His per game numbers were elite, but perhaps a step behind the final numbers.   But these were heights he reached in less time than some of the other greats (And Andrew Wiggins). His durability and sustained greatness being long enough to be noteworthy in itself, but not so long as to drown his achievements.  And Doncic wasn't just jacking up shots. His shooting form and consistency ranks him among the NBA's very best. And notably, a micrometer ahead of one of the most celebrated volume shooters of his era. These were the tools that allowed him to accomplish his greatest feats.  His stellar 2023 season remains the third best of all time for points scored, and was an epic affair where Doncic was also named the league MVP, averaged a 41 point triple double, and ultimately led his team to the championship after a legendary 7 game series against Giannis and the Milwaukee Bucks.  It was not only his best raw scoring season, but his best three point shooting season, too. (Also: Holy poo poo Jesse Harrington.)  On December 4th, 2024, Doncic would erupt for his personal best outing. 76 points. While that particular number, while noteworthy, was also not recordbreaking....  The 32 free throws he made stand the test of time as the most any player has ever put up, and were a figure we hadn't seen in 40 years.  He was just as prodigious in the playoffs. Never quite getting the benchmark that Kyrie set in 2022, but ultimately having three of the top 5 all time scoring outings in the post season. If Luka caught fire, no one, anywhere, could guard him. You may remember when Lebron retired, there were a few leaderboards where I cropped the top 10 list in... fairly interesting positions. That is very simply because, to go any higher, on any of those leaderboards, would reveal that Doncic was already on them. And Doncic was not done yet. It would be an injustice to reveal this information too early.  He was unguardable. There has never been a better offensive player. Remember, this man also put up 8 assists a game for a career that spanned almost 20 years. When it comes to 40 point games he is ever so slightly farther away from Jordan, than Jordan was to the third highest player. By one game. I think he did this on purpose.  And in 50 point games, it wasn't even close. .................................but that's going back to the same old story of painting him as a scorer. I mentioned the assists, I briefly touched on the rebounding. He was complete. He was in another stratosphere. That the Honu were ever able to beat him once, let alone as often as we did, is a testament to the culture that this organization has developed from its infancy. Russel Westbrook, often criticized for chasing his statistical numbers, would finish his NBA career with 147 triple doubles. What do you think Doncic managed, winning early and often enough to never have this stigma?  Oh, and by the way? Doncic played several years without the shot clock. How high could he have reached, if the league didn't deliberately slow him down? ...........................................I don't think we will ever see his equal again. It might not be impossible. There's just not going to be a lot of time to do it in. I'm confident it might happen if we had 200 years of simulation. ....But 80 years might be pushing it.
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May 27, 2021 03:11
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INTERLUDE pt 2: Basketball in the 2030s PHEW. I hope that was actually somewhat interesting. Getting back to other things that happened during the 2030s...  Generally speaking, anyone who had an elite rookie season in the decade continued to be productive and consistent. Silverstre was an all-star candidate for much of the decade, even if he didn't make too many teams. Butler, of course, was a two time league MVP. He's currently content with playing a super sixth man role on the Clippers behind Sam Drew. Garry Gaines has managed an all-star appearance off the bench, and is a frequent threat to win 6th man of the year, playing for Phoenix behind Michael Torres. Hasan Ozat is a productive rotation piece. He just signed a deal with the Pacers. Everyone else is currently on their original team. Logan, Cooper and Mathies have been all-stars, I wouldn't be surprised to see Lowe and Steele on an all-star team in the future, I'm somewhat shocked Slaughter wasn't this year--he put up something like 25 and 7. But they're still getting their feet wet. Their time will come. More of them might hit this rarified air, but I'm close to certain both Loren Mathies and Randy Butler are going to the Hall of Fame.  We all remember Harry Francis. Coby White remained productive well into his old age, and we can see why the Grizz were/are so successful at making the playoffs, even if they haven't won the big one. We had Beasley on our team for a year. He's an elite scorer at PF that is still in the league, still putting up Beasley numbers. Hakan Mansiz comes off the bench for the Raptors and still puts up a gaudy A/T ratio. He fits in really well with their bigs. J.T Duncan typically starts for the Suns. Lou Pollard is the starting point guard and probably the best player on the Pacers. Jalen Gardner will likely miss the entirety of 2041 with a torn ACL. Gordon Byrd is the sixth man of the Knicks, and is a threat to win this award again.  We've talked about how much I hate 2k's take on this award and on the all-defense teams before. I don't have a lot to say now. Homer Barry never worked out quite like he was intended as the #1 overall pick, but he's definitely not been a disappointment. It's a shame he can't really get a real team around him that can make up for his deficiencies on offense.  Gerald Geiger went on to have about 6 productive years on the Pelicans but didn't find his way onto a roster in the 2040-2041season. Todd McCarthy signed a two year deal with the heat and should give them some added stability on the bench. Dixon has been an MVP and will win it again the second the 76ers are any good. While Dakoulas Balidis is the highest OVR player in the league, Dwight Dixon is actually the best player. Steve Dunn made his way to the Nuggets and he's so dreamy it's hard to be mad with him after he inevitably torches me at least once a playoffs. He fluctuates yearly on "Not on an All-league team" and "A legitimate MVP candidate". Chris Malone has been the only other good player on the Trailblazers than Donald Powers for years. Jukic is essentially the second coming of Draymond Green. So is Lionel Hodges, for that matter. It was weird seeing a team with both of them on it make the NBA finals, and I'm fascinated to see how San Diego goes with Jukic moving to Utah this year. Sebastian Barber signed with the Ravens alongside frequent MVP Candidate Jesse Lowe, and I am utterly terrified of that front court. Good lord. Hugh Andersen is still improving, and has become a vital cog in the Honolulu Machine. Sam Drew went to the Clippers and took a former two-time league MVP along to be his backup----yeah... I think the clippers will be just fine without Jukic. They might actually be better.  Yeah, scoring tends to be fairly streaky. These guys are likely all going to be in the hall of fame. Jesse Harrington might not, but, especially after seeing his three point shooting seasons in the Doncic interlude, I'll be pretty disappointed if he doesn't. He's already made 6 all star teams, so he stands a reasonable shot.  Everyone from Szomory on up is still in the league being productive. The top 3 guys here are all MVP candidates-----also, something about this list and seeing Lowe makes me realize that there actually has been a noticeable change in the Sim from the removal of offensive goal-tending and the move to a more FIBA-style goal-tending. The league has produced a lot of guys like Teddy Vaughn or Jesse Lowe where they shoot fairly poorly but have absurd rebounding numbers (Vaughn's the most extreme example of the "shoots poorly" part) but since this rule change went into effect, they've been shooting, as a group, about 5 percent better from the field. To the point where Vaughn's shooting is passable, and someone like Lowe is downright decent, which would really be an MVP threat with everything else Lowe does.  What the hell happened to Dario Zagorac? He seemed to vanish. Did he retire? The Pistons once drafted two rookie point guards in the same draft with the last name Wilcox, and while Loren is the better one, it's not by all that much.  Courtney Baldwin is highlighted. #Stillemployed. Still making the big blocks. Not bad for a former Mr. Irrelevant who got cut and had to work his way back into the league.  This is the most useless menu in 2k (among the ones that at least work) Unlike real life where it will probably tell you a facet of how someone is really good (Chris Paul has topped this list 6 times) these guys are largely irrelevant. I know who three of these guys are. Silverstre and Sanchez are both good. Lamond Lowry was good but has since retired. Shout out to Slick Watts. Hope you've been recovering. MEET THE TEAMS  First up is these guys you might have noticed me mention once or twice in the thread. This is as good of a starting 5 as I have ever put forward. All 5 are terrific at scoring from just about anywhere, although Reeves and Andersen are better outside (but have a few post moves), and Morrison is better inside (but can shoot the three). Andersen is a better defender than his stats. Morrison is an actual good defender. Our other good defenders come off the bench, but Sonnet is at the very least a pest.  Not pictured because he had a minor injury at the time of this screen capture: Sebastien Barber. Put Barber in for Cortez and this is a rock-solid starting unit that Vancouver should have sewn up for the long term. This is legitimately a championship caliber team. Lowe has been on drat near every MVP board of the last five years, even if he hasn't won it yet. D.J. Stevenson gets points in a hurry. Victor Dean has a good outside stroke and can lock a guy down. Wang is the most efficient jump-shooter in the league, but maintains a slasher's mentality. If I had infinite money, I would have been much more aggressive about keeping him. He is gone from the Honu because I made a mistake----I didn't sign him long enough to offer him extensions, which could help me manage the cap better.  They've sewn up Paris Rush longterm and Gregory Hayes is yet another ridiculously good Center in what I'm slowly realizing is one of the richest periods for Centers in league history. Aside from these two guys in particular, the Sonics don't have a lot of long-term commitment and not a lot of talent. I suspect they'll miss the playoffs for a while, but either of these guys is an all-star threat.  I had no idea these guys took Reinaldo Carlos off the Lakers for me. Thanks, guys. Rich Hurley is starting to get worn down. Patrick Love could be a star someday. The Voyageurs aren't very good.   This team has been so mismanaged lately. After years of being a competitive, or even a dominant team, the Sixers were on the bottom very briefly before they turned right back around by drafting Dwight Dixon, the league's best individual player. But two of their top 5 players play the same position as Dixon, so almost all of their minutes comes from playing out of position. At least Ariza and Miller is a very solid back-court, so as comical as this is, the team is a good wing, preferably a scorer from being a championship threat. Also, last year, they traded Dedric Wesley, an excellent wing scorer for Todor Szomory, the backup power forward that gets the lower amount of minutes of the two backups. In 2k, Dixon's happy, but in the real world, he'd be demanding a trade about now.  Milwaukee isn't the first, or even the second team that would spring to mind if you told me someone was running an all-white starting 5, but they're on the list of cities I would guess. This is a stupidly good starting 5. No real holes in defense or offense. Maybe you want to see more assists come out of Copeland, but he's one of the best defensive points in the league, or indeed, maybe even the best defensive guard that isn't from Italy. That makes up for it somewhat. This is very likely a championship contender. You just know their fans, or at least the ones that aren't actually from Milwaukee, are the absolute worst people.  Batista, Hood, and Fletcher are all good, even if Fletcher has fallen off some. The Bulls are currently directionless. It's not known how they plan to get this up to a quality playoff-caliber team. Hood's probably the best player here.  No surprise with these guys being the defending champs. This is as strong a starting unit as the league has ever seen. Gibson and Simms have been aging, albeit gracefully. If there's one knock on this team, it's that their two bigger stars, Balidis and Logan, are both injury prone. I wonder if Logan would have lived up to his promise of "the next Hakeem!" if he had been developed as the guy instead of the sidekick.  That front court is bananas. So that's where Daniel went. Looking at my prior update I see that I even grabbed the summary where he was signed. He's only on a 1 year deal. And he's super old now. But if you're gonna replace a league MVP, you can do worse than two of the league's best bigs. Loren Wilcox is one of the best pure point guards in the league. They could use a bit of wing help to play alongside Sanchez, and maybe someone that can get a ton off the bench in a hurry. This is a fascinating team because Daniel will likely either leave or retire after 1 season. They're a legitimate threat this year and won't take a lot of work to get back to that point, but if they do so immediately, then Park is likely to retire, too. The Celtics' GM must suffer from Acid Reflux.  The Clippers' third best point guard is a 2 time MVP. As lopsided as this is on paper, I'm terrified of this team. Lions and Popovic can get buckets. Hodges plays lock down defense and is himself an excellent passer... I stand by my assessment that this might be better than the team that went to the finals last year.  Loren Mathies is a force unto himself, and Balestrieri has that patented Italian perimeter defense. (Maybe the Italian league got some kind of savant coaching one of their teams) But aside from that, I'm not terribly impressed by the Grizzlies' roster.  I didn't realize the screen grab was before the players loaded. If it was some scrub, I wouldn't care, but Radu Constantin is probably the best shooting guard in the league, and just an abomination. I did not enjoy playing him in the finals. Shaw and (former #1 pick) Person give them an excellent starting backcourt and sixth man. Ronnie Little is pretty decent. I want to say these guys either signed Dedric Wesley in the offseason or traded something for him off the Nets. And he adds a ton of scoring punch. Maybe a small ball team, but if they're taken lightly, you're likely to get Radu'd.  The Heat are another lopsided team, with their best two players being two guys they signed long term that play the same position. Andersen is the better one but likely to be the one that comes off the bench if they don't just run the two together. Although, either one of them being an all-star again would not surprise me. This seems like a team that won't go anywhere, but both those guys are fantastic. They can probably punch above their weight class.  Speaking of lopsided. No one. I mean no one is more of a lopsided mess than the Hornets. After losing breakout star Sam Drew after just one year to audition for a real team, four of the Hornets' top five players are small forwards, and all five are wings. I'd edit some of these guys to play other positions, but Vaughn is old enough that I don't want to gently caress with him and ruin him (he's also their best player by a country mile. Holy poo poo.) and who knows what any of the other guys will do after this season. This is like, performance art or something. White III is notably one of the league's best defenders, at least.  Jukic and Rollins are studs and here long term, but after that, there's a dropoff. I'm a little surprised Byars is still in the league. All Byars gives you is defense. Which Lionel Hodges proved last year, is a type of player you can stick next to Jukic, except, Hodges is also an excellent passer, which Byars is not. This is a team that will struggle mightily to score points, I would think.   I take it back, the Kings are definitely more lopsided than the Hornets. For all that I just said I won't edit Vaughn, the Hornets' Vaughn is an anomaly at the wing, and regularly pulls down 14-16 rebounds a game. So he could conceivably play PF or even center. All these guys... my god. At least Schultz is really good. Unfortunately, he has a passive personality, so the deeply troubling, shouldn't be a gameplay mechanic "Alpha dog" badge goes to Jemerio Kraemer. I can't imagine a team where Jemerio Kraemer is "The guy" will turn out well. Even though the potential is there, I just don't see him becoming another Craig Payton or Michael Torres where he leaves the Honu and becomes an all-star.  OK, New York, I see you. I don't think you can get to the playoffs with this team, but I'm digging it. Courtney Adrien won't wow you with his numbers, but he's just rock solid and consistent and plays good D. Manny Cruz can be added to the list of "Holy poo poo there are so many really good Centers" Gordon Byrd has won the Sixth man trophy before and is a threat to do it again if he's playing behind Adrien. There are some other good pieces here that are developing. Give 'em a little time.  Certainly they'll suffer without Carlos or Barber or whichever Tarlac clone they had. Nonetheless, this is pretty close to the team that beat us last year, and while I suspect we'd kick their rear end if we met up this time, this is still a legitimate playoff team. Lowe's still improving.  Basketball in Orlando is dead. Richard Morris has announced that he's retiring from the sport at the end of the season. Years of mismanagement and bad roster moves have led to Morris never having a solid running mate, and by the time they finally pulled the trigger and got Greene and Sancovic, it was too little too late. The consistent misery of wasting one of the career of an all-time great point guard is probably the main culprit, but the ownership group of the Magic filed for bankruptcy. (Of all the available cities that 2k has for franchises, Orlando is currently one of three that has no stat above 40 for Median Income, Fan Interest, or Population. The other two are Anchorage, Alaska and Athens, Georgia. So a joke city that was added to the game as, I can only presume an esoteric Easter Egg, and a city that is literally in Alaska) The team will be moving to Las Vegas after the 2041 season and rebranding.  And you would think, you would think that there would be someone who made a "Las Vegas Magic" team, because IT IS SO loving OBVIOUS COME ON, but naw. Naw. There are Magic teams for other theoretical moves. I guess fuckin' Louisville is more known for its magic than Vegas. There's tons of Vegas teams. No Vegas Magic. I went through over seven thousand custom teams with no success. I found tons of Las Vegas Kings, so real-world Sacramento, watch the gently caress out. I found dozens and dozens of repeats of Aces (which is their WNBA team), Pharoahs (Have a great color scheme but an ugly rear end mascot on all their gear), Jacks (meh), and Outlaws (Also meh). I found a few Louis Vitton teams. (LV, it makes sense. But I also found at least one Gucci team! That... that makes much less sense.) I found a smurf team. I found at least 30 teams that were pornographic images, the porn actress most likely to represent the city of Las Vegas as a sports mascot is Mia Khalifa. But after all my searching, not. A. Single. Magic. "Las Vegas Magic" or just "Vegas Magic". Is it too obvious? Anyhow, I did find this design, and it's super unique, has a great looking set of jerseys and a great looking floor, and is very Vegas. Knowing to keep the little gap in the "light tube" of each letter is a fantastic touch. So even though I couldn't keep the team name, they're still moving.  In contrast to Orlando, the Mavericks are a team that just transitions from periods of stars effortlessly. Doncic has already passed the torch to Zach Cooper, who has been stellar and is only getting better. Catinella is also increasingly emerging as a bonafide star. Payton and Monroe are both getting up there, but again, more and more responsibility is being moved from the forwards to the guards as the guards come into their own. I like the fluidity of this team.  With Gardner expected to miss the entirety of the season, you can write the Nets off as knowing they're gonna lose. Gardner's also pretty up there in years, so even he's probably a temporary piece. I wouldn't get used to any of these guys. They'll need some good bounces in the lottery.  The Nuggets, our greatest rival, are just as they always have been, just a little bit older. The veteran Silverstre gives them an excellent sixth man. They might not have the supporting cast this particular year to make a lot of noise, but Dunn/Popov/Cortez is about as balanced and effective of a big 3 as you can possibly get, and genetic lottery winner Dunn is frequently in the MVP discussion.  After losing Casey Daniel, the Pacers decided to invest in their backcourt of two incredibly talented players that are consistently snubbed and disrespected by the media and the rest of the league. Snow and McDaniels are both capable big men. Not as good as Daniel, but almost certainly more efficient. That backcourt is straight fire, though. It probably doesn't jump out from their top 5 as a playoff team, let alone a good one, but believe me, these guys should be in the mix, although Bishop's window is smaller by the day.  Ooof. All three of their good players are bigs. Slaughter is the real deal, and should hopefully wrack up some all-star appearances soon. Kiran Indra is a rock solid back-up, and probably will be a career backup, but if I were NOLA I would consider moving him for a position of need.  A young team with most of their pieces signed for the next couple of years (but I think only that), the only really notable player on the Pistons is Sam Gooden, but the rest of the starting five is probably at least above average, and this seems like a team that could go to the playoffs.  Holy poo poo the Raptors are terrifying. That is the most stacked front court.... Gilbert Swift is an elite, elite center and is one of those guys that, because there's like 7 or 8 ELITE Centers, could either be "League MVP" or "Not make an All-NBA or all-star team" on a given night. Not shown here is the Raptors' point guard rotation. Yunlong Yang and Hakan Mansiz are two of the lowest mistake passers in the league, and this is exactly the kind of squad you want to pass to. Both Olic and Curtis can slide down to SF if need be and Garay is a reliable outside scorer. Eeek.  Man. I'm so glad I didn't re-sign Teddy Vaughn. He might even be a hall of famer. But my god he's inefficient. The thing is, thanks to the goal-tending change, he's only a little below average in this regard.... if he were to somehow win MVP "again", I'd actually let him keep it with his current shooting totals. He does handle the ball like a guard. For all that the game algorithm seems to love his style of play, he's never been better than Paciani. Alonzo Patton is the worst starter in the league. The biggest net negative between OVR and actual production. I think he shoots like 35% from the field. Make no mistake, any time this team has gone to the playoffs, the game gives credit when they're successful to both Vaughn and Paciani, but any actual success is almost entirely because Paciani is that drat good. He's been in the league forever, his age at one point glitched, but one day he will be gone and I will miss him. He's probably my favorite guy that generated that was never on my team.  Man. I feel for the Spurs. This is a team that can and should go to the playoffs, but might miss it since they're a little lopsided and they keep losing important rotational pieces in the offseason. TP and the Reece's Pieces are one of the best three man shows in the league. Jackie Wilcox is the "Other" Wilcox that Detroit drafted when they drafted Loren Wilcox. He's not quite as good, but he's close. He's also completely superfluous on this team and they should really trade him for another big. Edmund Battle has sonned me in the post in some of our playoff runs.  By now we're familiar with the Suns. Don't let their top 5 fool you--this team runs 10 deep. Yes, they're a good team. Yes, they'll be in the playoffs. Yes, we'll almost certainly have to play them again.  This seems a bit lopsided toward the wings, but that's about as nasty of a set of wings as you can have. I don't know who's more underrated, the Pacers duo of Pollard and Bishop or the Thunder duo of Harrington and Flores. Either one of Harrington or Flores can light up anyone, and I mean anyone in this league. I could see them being a high-seeded playoff team or missing the playoffs entirely.  When you play the Timberwolves, no one has fun. You don't have fun. The Timberwolves don't have fun. The Audience doesn't have fun. The team's whole mindset reflects that of their leader, infinity-time defensive player of the year Homer Barry. They're lopsided and need an honest-to-god point guard and a true power forward to stick next to Barry. But. Winston Alexander is steadily improving, does a bit of everything, and is a hard-nosed defender in his own right. The big exception to the defense thing is Howard Wood. Howard Wood deeply understands that the rest of the team has his back and is the second-worst oFG% player in the league.  I do not understand how this team keeps missing the playoffs. They seem balanced. Donald Powers is a monster that frequently puts up 30 and 15. His supporting cast is never fantastic but it's always capable. Lambros Giannu is either a second or third year player that seems likely to start being one of the premier "true" point guards in the league. I wouldn't be surprised to see his name come up a couple times on the 2040s summary leaderboards.  Another team that's better on paper than in practice, I'm not sure what the Warriors are doing wrong. They've definitely taken a dip ever since they lost Cisse to Miami. But the wing rotation of Eriksson/Keefe/Steele is as productive as you can get, with the first two being all-star and all-nba quality, and Steele being a #1 overall pick and rookie of the year. I guess they need upgrades at both center and point guard, which are traditionally two roles where most basketball teams want to have a good player.  And finally, we have the team I'm most looking forward to seeing, the Washington Wizards. The Wizards are Louie Morgan's new team. And I mean, not just the team that acquired Louie Morgan, I mean "this team considers Louie Morgan to be their main star." And, since I used Morgan for so long and painstakingly developed him from a guy I had on my summer league roster and signed because he seemed promising, to a guy that sometimes goes off for 50 or more, and since I have no bad blood for Louie, and since he plays in the East now I really hope this experiment works. That's about as complementary of a group as you can put next to him. His backup is listed as being higher up on the depth chart, but I already started this season and can tell you that is not true. He's still south of 30, so there's time for him to have a really terrific back half of his career, and I hope he does. Spread your wings and fly, baby bird. Go out there and make me proud. Veryslightlymad fucked around with this message at 05:50 on May 28, 2021 |
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May 28, 2021 05:02
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Jesus, Donkic was a loving Colossus. A shame the league decided to ruin the last bit of his career.
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May 28, 2021 05:46
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Chapter 25: 2040-2041 Part 2: Through the Break Opening day of the '40-'41 season kicks off with a win over the Nets. We get a great performance form Sonnet and Reeves. (Though Reeve's shooting numbers this game were poor... we wouldn't have gone to OT if he hit those shots, but this is an aberration) This is arranged by +/-, so I'm pretty sure that while Morrison didn't contribute much offensively, his menacing the paint along with 3 blocks probably put in some good work. This is the second consecutive year the Honu have faced the team that drafted the #1 pick on opening day.  However, unlike Max Steele, Chavez is only technically on the court for any length of time, essentially only in the closing seconds after Brooklyn had already surrendered to the Honu.  Nights like this one against the Magic show what the Honu are really capable of when they're firing on all cylinders. We've got an army of skilled scorers, and they're fronted by Alain Sonnet, who is also one of the best passers in the league. (Also, I think home team is at the bottom. If so this is the last time the Honu visit Orlando. Unless I re-expand there.)  Shortly after that, we get a minor setback when Hugh Morrison goes out for a small handful of games. This was closer to the 2 week mark than the 4 week mark.  Coach decides to give some burn to Cam Flores. And he has a tough go with shooting, but I gotta love the aggression shown here. His being able to convert at the line gives me hope that the other shooting numbers will start to go up. This is also a great scoring game from Barbosa.  In a close game against the Clippers, Sonnet dishes out a career-best 19 assists. Which is good enough to either tie first place in Honu history, or it's one shy of Filimon's best. Sonnet is incredible. We had that one year where Morrison played like an MVP for half the season, but Sonnet's the star of the show. Also, shout out to that insanely efficient scoring night from Reeves.  Which isn't to say that Morrison's gone downhill or anything.... I think he's just tasked to do fewer things. Sonnet dropped 42, sure, but Morrison's approach was just the whole package and hard to find fault with. (aside from deep. ew.) Morrison's scoring is more like it was last year than the year before, but he's got more scorers around him in the starting unit than ever. Frustratingly, his scoring/rebounding/assists, while great, aren't the mind-bendingly good ones that a few other centers put up that tend to make the all-star teams and all-league teams. And his blocks and assists, while great, aren't the same as the guys that put on the all-defense teams. But he's better on offense than any of those defenders, and he's better on defense than any of those scorers. Why yes, I'm salty at 2k.  Barbosa really gives us that added something that we've been missing. Sure, he's not the defender that Kraemer was, but he's big and mean and secures us rebounds we might not get, and he's a much more reliable scorer. He hasn't developed an ego yet, either. Any one of our starting 5 guys is a threat to go off on 30 any given night. Even 40 isn't a stretch if the stars align. You gotta beat a lot of guys if you want to beat the Honu.  I'm starting to avoid Sonnet captures if they "only" have about 12 assists. He's a complete point guard.  That Reeves contract is starting to look like the best value on the team. Throughout the season, he's neck and neck with Sonnet as our leading scorer. His confidence is through the roof. He also has PG as a sub-type and is trusted with the ball in odd situations where we want Payne on the floor for defense, but don't want Sonnet to wither and die from working Jared Henderson System (tm) minutes. We got this assassin all locked up for relatively cheap for five years. Barbosa's game looks bad here, but he took a minor injury and missed no time. Mostly because this was the last game before the all-star break.  Some thoughts: ~ LOOK AT LOUIE GO. He's not just an All-Star, the fans wanted him to be one of the starters. Hell yeah. ~ Jesse Harrington is "only" a 7 time All-Star. I think I replaced Ian Eriksson because the Warriors were really trash around this time. ~ I've already talked about what Cruz and Copeland do in the Meet the Teams interlude. ~ Really, really annoyed by how 2k does these things. Morrison really should be here, even if his numbers are still dipped--but then, I'm not sure who I would take out, because there's so many stellar centers. As a rule of thumb, I only take out really egregious players, like guys who are posting way less PER and EWA and also on a bad team. I pretty much need both of these things to be true to replace a player, or I need one thing to be very, very true. ~ Nonetheless, Sonnet is recognized for a fourth time, so I'm somewhat placated. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I stupidly overwrote my standings for the half-way point with my standings for the end of the season, since I finished the regular season up. I don't want to go through it all right now, though, so I can be a bit more reliable on scheduling to help get back into the groove. The general league info at the halfway point would be as follows: Honolulu is doing well. In the top 3-5 teams in the West. San Diego is currently a cut above everyone else in the regular season in the Western Conference. The East is apparently nuts, and I almost feel bad that I'm gonna make the league more lopsided by taking their worst team out West, but then again, I'm going to be moving one of the bottom feeders from the West back East, so I think it'll be a wash more than anything. Orlando continues to be the worst team in the league, going out with a real whimper. Since I don't have mid-season standings, I will post some thoughts on the team instead. ~ Alain Sonnet, as discussed, is a stud, and the true leader of the Honu. I'm very comfortable surrounding him with what he needs. I don't know if he'll be the multi-time champion Bol was as "the guy". As much as it hurts me when Morrison misses the all-star games and all-league teams, Sonnet being snubbed on all-league makes me furious. There's two other point guards in the league that do what Sonnet does. Terrell Petersen (A former MVP) and Zach Cooper. He's as complete a point guard as a franchise can ask for. ~ Frederick Reeves is scoring just a hair less than Sonnet, but is lights out from deep and not too shabby of a passer. His increase in scoring puts him in the top 5 for the MIP race. ~Barbosa's kind of the X-factor this team has been missing. I really hope he lets me lower that contract a little, when the time comes. If I could surround this starting 5 with a slightly higher quality of roleplayer? Oh, man. ~ Freddy Tiggs is great. He's in the top 5 for Rookie of the year, but Vitaly Kozlov (some draft-and-stash point guard the Rockets have) and Philip Reed are running away with it. He's 6'10 with soft hands and a nose for the ball. If I absolutely had to, I could reclassify him as a Center, and he wouldn't suffer too badly, but he would suffer a little. ~ Flores and Calloway have had very limited minutes for us, mostly because we've both been cooking and also because we've been largely avoiding major injuries. Both of them have some terrible shooting percentages, but really, I don't give a poo poo about those on a rookie that isn't expected to shoot anyhow. ~ Cameron has also gotten some minutes for us, and his shooting numbers are fine. Last year, he shot 14% from the field (since he played so few games.) So the potential the three guys have lets me overlook a really limited data point like horrendous shooting percentage. ~ Rubens Viana has also gotten some burn, and if I can keep his contract below 5 million a year, I'm seriously tempted to keep him as a long-term mascot, because he plays far above his terrible OVR rating and he's also able to play 3 positions. Veryslightlymad fucked around with this message at 00:43 on May 29, 2021 |
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May 29, 2021 00:38
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Veryslightlymad posted:The big exception to the defense thing is Howard Wood. Howard Wood deeply understands that the rest of the team has his back and is the second-worst oFG% player in the league.
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May 29, 2021 22:08
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Chapter 25: 2040-2041 Part 3: End of Regular Season I must have been wrong about Barbosa's injury, because I have a couple of screenshots without him. Whatever. We were still winning (enough) games.  Without him, Reeves and Morrison combine to fill in the slack--Reeves taking his points and Morrison taking his rebounds.  Morrison's back half of the season is better than his front half, but still not the rarified air he had a couple of years ago. The Honu have more-or-less settled as an incredibly balanced team around Alain Sonnet, and you know what? I'm OK with that, but I'd have really liked having an MVP candidate. Also, check out B.J. Lawrence. At 33 years old, and after having been in the league for at least a dozen years, Lawrence has his first season averaging over double digit points. In fact, he would average 13.4 points per game on the season, blowing out his previous scoring high of 9.9, beating his old average by 3 and a half whole points. Not bad.  I'm gonna use this loss to the Trailblazers to indicate how stupidly rich the league is in centers right now. Here's a stat line from Donald Powers. Donald Powers, annual MVP contender before the Blazers' season goes to poo poo, would also not make an All-NBA team. I think it was somewhere around 3 seasons ago, I said the league had no centers. Well. Times change.  Here's another great balanced attack from the Honu. Barbosa was injured all the way out to here, so.... I'm not sure why I thought he wasn't injured all that long. We got him back before the season ended, at least.  Reeves closes this one out to clinch us the 4th position in the conference. I then spend the rest of the season with Sonnet, Morrison and Barbosa on the reserve list.    No idea how the Spurs missed the playoffs. Our point differential is not as low as it looks, but not much better, since 4 games is a little less than 5% of the season, and we weren't exactly getting blown out. Hell, we won one of them. Despite it, the only teams that frighten me on this side are San Diego and Vancouver.    The East, on the other hand, is loving terrifying. I want to say the top 5 teams would rock the Honu in a 7 game series. The defending champs were 7th in the conference and didn't have significant periods of injury. This disparity will get a little worse next year, too, when the Magic will become the Vegas Neon and the Timberwolves get kicked over to the East.  It's crazy how much better this looks than the supposed Teddy Vaughn MVP with just 4% better shooting and about 3? each of points and rebounds. God, Teddy Vaughn sucks. Pretty sure the game made him all-NBA this year, because 2k hates me as much as I hate them.  For all that Tiggs was great and consistent for us this year, he never stood a shot at this award. Kozlov and Philip Reed were the only people in the running. Reed caught an injury toward the end of the season which pushed Kozlov over the line. For those of you keeping track, the Rockets have three starters that are in the 40ish% range for shooting: Vaughn, Kozlov, and Alonzo Patton.  OKC's wing positions are just stacked. I wonder what kind of offense they run.  Homer Barry of the year. "I gotta be this good of a defender. Howard Wood is on my team."  Hey, this is the guy I said I outweighed when he was drafted. I have since learned that this is no longer true. No, Parker didn't put on mass. I apparently haven't really been eating because of stress. Cool!  What a joke. This guy's better of two coaching stats is a D-. He's nearly as bad a coach as you can be. Without him, they'd be over 60 wins. I hate that, of all the awards given out, this is the one I can't override. It's the one I most want to override every year, and it frequently goes to guys that it would not go to in real life. The guy deserving this award is Otis Newman, who coaches the Clippers. (And was the Honu's assistant coach for years) They had to completely reconstruct their offense and identity and they're still #1 in the West by a wide margin. When asked how he felt about losing out on the award to Brown, Coach Newman quipped "I can safely assure you that the reason why the Raptors are just shy of 60 wins is because of Samuel Brown". The press corp didn't get the joke, but I did. All-NBA First  Second  Third  OK, you know what? Seeing Louie up there is like the one thing that'll keep me from losing my poo poo about how badly Sonnet got Snubbed. All Defense Team 1  Team 2  All Rookie First Team  Second team  Yeah, I'm honestly pretty happy with Freddy Tiggs. 4th place for Rookie of the Year ain't bad at all. Remember, when I drafted Tiggs, my entire logic and reasoning was that I couldn't make my excess of draft picks work without having a player that I could stash and he was conveniently projected to be at around the level I was drafting, and fit a position that was possible I would need to fill. As for Flores and Calloway... well, they're fine, but they didn't really play any minutes of substance.  At only 46 wins, I'm not about to anoint us as champions, but I feel better going into this playoffs than I did the last one. And finally, RIP Orlando Magic. Shouldn't have been Mickey Mouse in a Bugs Bunny game. Your franchise now finds itself where you go when you make a wrong turn at Albuquerque.
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May 30, 2021 08:49
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Welp. I made a pact with Satan and maybe killed basketball. Chapter 25: 2040-2041 Part 4: Playoffs   Looks like we can have a good, clean playoffs. Nuggets are beat to hell and back, but that's just more minutes for Dunn and Cortez. Meanwhile, the Raptors are without the most accomplished of their point guards, and are definitely a team that requires a good guard to work. That's a lot of pressure mounted on the shoulders of the young Yunlong Yang.  Welp. Here we go. Despite the OVR difference, Danny Roy is an excellent Center, someone we almost drafted ourselves, years ago. (Like... 16?! Years ago? It was the Jacque Cisse draft, and Cisse has already retired, so....) Similarly, Sharp isn't as bad as his OVR makes him seem, but he's still several steps down from Sonnet, who is about as good as a 92 can get. (Sonnet has very low intangibles) In game 1, Barbosa gets hot really, really fast and starts torching the Oklahoma City wings, which is probably a mistake as those are their best players and the guys he's supposed to guard on the other end. He winds up tiring himself and cooling off, but had already secured the W by that point. Barbosa getting tired out is a theme I've picked up on. He does not have very good stamina at all, but we don't run a very deep rotation and boy, howdy, does he give us something we haven't had at that position for a while.  In one of the first two games, we lose Samuel Macy. As far as playoff injuries go, this is about as good a loss as possible. Because he's at the end of our bench and also because Injury Report Guy is right. He does run like a chest of Drawers. I nevertheless spent several minutes staring at the rest of our available roster, wondering if I should give burn to one of our two 2040 draft picks, or entrust some responsibility to Cameron, or to simply cut the rotation down to 9 players. In the end, I opt for "none of the above" and activate our lowest OVR player, Rubens Viana, because he's got the versatility to play more positions. This winds up being a very good choice as he would shoot 65% from the playoffs and 80% for the Thunder Series. Holy smokes, did he get hot. Re-signing Viana has become a priority for our offseason. Also, OVR is fuckin' stupid. Anyhow, the Thunder never, ever come close to looking like a threat.  Look at this madness. BJ's career high was somewhere in the mid 20s before this series-clinching game 4. When friggin' BJ Lawrence is hanging 30 on you, maybe you should call it a day. I'm talking to both the Thunder and to Danny Roy, but amazingly, he doesn't retire at the end of the season.    Well. Despite our record, I was never concerned with a possibility to losing to the Thunder. We had already handled them before our team started gelling together, and they've gotten shallower since then. Our real challenge is coming up next when we face the San Diego Clip---  >Snrk< F--- Aaaaaahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Hoooooo. Oh, man. I needed that.  WHOA, SLOW DOWN A SECOND ....OK, OK. So yeah, after we swept the Thunder, (and accomplished the Only sweep of the first round) the next team to actually join us in the conference semi-finals was our opponents, the Los Angeles Lakers. And, I gotta be honest with you, I don't know how the Lakers pulled that off at all, let alone in 5 games. Just a good, balanced attack all around. I'm gonna go ahead and blame that on San Diego not quite having enough time to fit all their new pieces together. The rest of the first round was pretty exciting, as the short-handed Nuggets pulled a massive upset over the Ravens in a 7 game series, largely because of how brilliant Steve Dunn is. Like I said, losing their "biggest" star just means the AI feeds more minutes into their actual best star. The Suns come out of a 7 game slugfest with the Mavericks looking kind of shell-shocked. Catinella and Cooper are going bananas. The Mavs might have the best back court in the league. I know I said someone else on my "Meet the teams" Maybe the Pacers. Well, if the two ever played, that'd be a must-watch game. Back East, we discover that Mansiz was a load-bearing 8th man, as the Pistons gut out a 6 game victory over the heavily favored Raptors. Guess when it comes to the playoffs, you might benefit from having a real coach. Granted, Coach Newman's Clippers were eliminated first, so fans weren't treated to the shade-throwing we all earned. As good as the Pacers back-court is, it, and the Mavs, by definition can't be the best backcourt in the league, because the Hawks have Radu, and the Pacers done got Radu'd in 6. Cleveland pulls an "Upset" of their own against the 2nd seeded Heat, except Cleveland pretty much always has a lower seed than they should because of injuries. My God the East is terrifying. They had 5 teams over 50 and the Cavs are probably better than most of them. There's an extremely bitter battle between the Bucks and Celtics, as last year's MVP, Jackie Dudley, goes head to head with his old team and his replacements. In the end, he manages to show them why he was always the best, by putting up 20 and 20 in a game 7. And since I already spoiled Round 2, at least for us, I'll spell it out for you: We swept the Lakers, too. So LA, in the offseason, lost Sebastien Barber and Reynaldo Carlos, who, I'll level with you, are the two guys that kicked my rear end when the Lakers knocked us out of the post-season last year. Patterson, Lowe (not pictured) and Tomasevic (pictured this year but not last year) are all still threats, but I have tools to deal with them. When I saw the Clippers and the Ravens, and the Raptors, and the Heat, and then I will repeat the Raptors all lost in the first round, I started to think I had a real shot at this thing. In round 2, Honolulu is once again the first to advance, but we're quickly followed by the Suns, who lost game 1 because of PTSD or something, but rattled off 4 straight wins to put the poor Nuggets out of their misery. Out East, Eighth Seeded Detroit pulls another incredible upset, Needing 7 games to do it, but ending Radu's reign of terror. Detroit, much like the two most famous iterations of the real world Pistons, plays some stifling defense. On 4 different occasions, they held Radu under 25, and they won all four of those. I'm not sure any of the Atlanta/Detroit games hit the 120 mark for either team. Milwaukee plays a very similar style, in fact, and accomplishes a similar result against the Cavs, stamina being one of the Cavs biggest weaknesses---their stars are all either really old or have a history of significant injuries. So where was I? Oh, right. We've played the Suns a bunch, and for the most part, they're the same team. Harden is better than his 78 suggests, but for the most part, we've seen what these guys can do. The big difference maker in this series is now we have Emanual Barbosa now, and he's actually able to guard Michael Torres. I mean, it's not a sure thing, and Torres still manages to be pretty effective. Barbosa is not a good defender, but what he has that Kraemer never had and Payne doesn't have, is size. He's one of the few players who is fast enough to stay in front of Torres (if he gets a head start---Torres is definitely still faster) and strong enough to not be pushed around by him or bullied in the post. The Suns are a team I have beaten, and a team I feel like I can still beat. If anything, we're better now and they're worse.  Also, Hugh Morrison finally woke up. So between games like that  Or games like this  Or games like this.... the Suns aren't really a problem. For those keeping score, that is thirteen blocks over the course of three games. Chim-Chim Charoo mother fuckers, we just swept the entire conference. And our finals opponents?  Hoosier wannabes: STEP IN TIME Our journeys to the finals could not be any different. Where we cruised through the conference in 12 games with no losses, the poor Bucks have had every series go the full 7 games. So they've played 21 and lost 9 of them. And  Young Freddy Tiggs (love his eyes. That is a cold man.) is pumped. I'm not sure what he was actually doing with his hands before this free throw, but I'm gonna pretend it was pantomiming a championship belt, like wrestlers do to hype up a big match. Also, Frederick Reeves lurking in the background with an expression like anyone with the "Zealous" trait in Crusader Kings 3. Tell me I'm wrong. Well, we beat the Bucks in the finals once before. Let's see if we can do it again. But first---  IS THAT JARED HENDERSON?! I thought I banned you from the league. (It is, and I can't. He's the Bucks Assistant coach. I have fired him every time someone has hired him as a head coach. Which is frequently)  Meanwhile, the Honu's assistant is one of the baddest MFers who have ever lived. Check this out. Look at Bol's eyes. That calm, almost irritated look.  ---doesn't even flinch. Just lowers his head a couple of inches and lets the ball sail right by. What a badass. I flicked between these two screen shots a lot, because Bol, Paxson, and Lawrence's little turns and/or bobs all got very hypnotic. Coach Bennett, on the other hand, has this fixed thousand yard stare. It's unsettling. This man has seen some poo poo.  Oh, wait. Maybe he just saw this game. That's abysmal. After another 3 by Payne, the Bucks would finally score around the 1:30 mark of the third quarter, and make just one more basket to have a whopping 48 going into the final stretch. Like I said, this finals had to have been unwatchable.  Even with that, (look at it! A 12 point third quarter. Egads.) the Bucks showed why they're such a threatening team. A third of all their points that game (and closer to half of all their rebounds... 24/59) came from Jackie Dudley. Definitely a guy that I will believe won an MVP and could easily have won this year, too. Around this time, my assets deleted themselves again. So.  We have a new floor now. And some new Jerseys (note the stripes at the legs.) It's about time we have an upgrade. I didn't stick with the original design, because it no longer exists. There's still a Honu by the same guy, but 1)I have no way of knowing if the Honu was their idea or if that was just the one I found first and 2)I was worried that it would relocate us to the Bronx, which I didn't want to happen. There are a lot of Honolulu/Hawaii Honu on the community pages. For all that this is in 2k, as near as I can tell, these might have originally started as a contest for a fictional Hockey league, of all things. Maybe. Maybe not. Anyhow, we have new gear because NBA 2K IS A TRASHFIRE. You know what would make me feel better after losing all of my downloadable assets. Again? This time after I had saved?  Yeah, that. Good call. Badly Pictured: the 2041NBA Champion Honolulu Honu. Leftish to Right: BJ Lawrence's good side only, Freddy Tiggs's right ear and left arm, Hugh Morrison, Rubens Viana, Frederick Reeves's arms, Hugh Andersen taking a little too much credit, Alain Sonnet and his clone Emanual Barbosa, Aaron Payne --- that's our entire playoff rotation except for Gilbert Paxson. Sort of.  Morrison is very deservedly named Finals MVP. Sonnet had to struggle with Frankie Copeland the whole time, and Copeland plays some mean defense. Disappointingly, we didn't get one of the celebrations with a team shot this year, and since we swept the conference finals, I didn't bother jumping into the game to snap that team picture, either. And Coach Bennett still looks all horrified. Bill Russell just giving him the death stare. How bad was this finals?! Joshua Bennett: Bill. Oh, Jesus, Bill. Tell me what I've done. Bill Russell, somehow still alive: You know what you've done. You've sinned, Joshua.  Sonnet gets into the bubbly.  It takes a bit of the edge off when Barbosa tells him the horrible truth: That both are clones from the same factory, only Sonnet's settings got hosed up and he's 5 inches shorter than what he should be. MEANWHILE, Aaron Payne uses his Gatorade bottle to hide his expression---he is one of the alien people responsible for such projects.  This is easily the only time I have seen Reeves actually emote, and not just me saying something about a screen grab and trying to determine his emotion.  Even holding a championship trophy doesn't take the guts-churning terror out of Joshua Bennett's face. WHO HURT YOU, Coach?  You'd think I would recycle this instead of making a new image.  You know, you might have avoided this if you dumb bastards would have just put him on the all-star team. But noooooo. You had to make him angry.  Kevin Porter Jr., the final "Real life" basketball player in this simulation, finally retires. He had even made a team in his final year.  Richard Morris retires, along with a couple of really excellent ballplayers of yesteryear, Rabiu Udoh and Daryl Baldwin.  If the Jazz had kept Baldwin and Paciani together instead of stupidly trading them both away, then he might have been dragged into the Hall of Fame. As it stands, only Morris is inducted. Nevermind that his team never once utilizing him correctly led to their closing up shop and moving to Vegas.  They have the decency to retire his number, and the actual jersey hung up will have the correct, less gaudy colors.  Speaking of gaudy colors, guess what! Several of my other assets got deleted, too! The Arms of the Seattle Supersonics: "Vert." Hell, it's not like Libya is using it anymore.  Between the Neon being a transplant franchise, and having just lost a hall-of-fame level point guard, and this year's projected #1 pick being an elite point guard compared to Gary Payton, there are claims that the draft lottery is rigged. Nevermind that they had the best odds of actually winning. Or that similar logic is used every single year by conspiracy theorists.  The drawback of winning the finals is, although we didn't have the best record by quite some margin, we'll be picking last. If we held to form, we'd be picking where the Bulls' second pick is. We may have slightly overperformed in the playoffs. Or under-performed in the regular season. Very likely both.  For gently caress's sake. Look, I'll fix the logos and everything. The main point here is: Because of the Magic going West, the Timberwolves got kicked into the East, where they finally won't have to travel like, 5 hours for their closest in-conference away game. ....................nevermind that we're playing in goddamn Hawaii and have won 7 championships since we started this nonsense. Also, I'm pretty sure that I swapped the Neon with the Warriors and Kings, but might have changed it back. ...."Hey, commissioner. We just had the lowest rated NBA finals since the days of Tape Delay, and Centers are dominating the league and making everyone miserable. What do we do about it?" "I have just the idea!"   Partly because we won the finals, partly because loving Henderson got to the finals as an assistant with his stat block of F Everything (which is also his coaching philosophy, really) and partly because of that badass ball dodge, I kept Bol on as assistant coach. Sure his stats are pretty bad, but they're not as bad as I remember. But why mess with success. Not pictured: I lock Abraham Navarro's rear end up for 4 years. I also upgrade out scout to some generated guy with an A rating. Getting better all the time.  OH FOR gently caress'S SAKE I have to take control of the Seattle No Logos and fire Henderson. Not seeing a spectacular coach on the market to pity into their franchise, I make them promote their assistant, instead. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Departing our team this off-season will be resident chest of drawers Samuel Macy. We will also likely lose Cameron unless we take a stash prospect or someone we can put on a two-way deal with one of our picks. I intend to re-sign Rubens Viana because god drat did he come through in the playoffs for us. Viana has a 30 intangibles. This is on a scale of 25-99. Remember from our Dylan Windler days, that Intangibles very stupidly do absolutely nothing aside from inflate a player's OVR, which is part of why OVR is a terrible stat, why the AI is terrible, and why NBA 2k is terrible. So he's about 4 or 5 points better than he looks. Alain Sonnet, our star player, has 31 Intangibles. He's a 96 in a 92's body. Jackie Dudley, who was just an MVP and doing the yeoman's work for the bucks in the Finals, is also a 31 intangibles player. People that defend OVR: If the stat is a good idea, then why the gently caress does the company need to invent a stat just to make better players look worse? Or worse players look better? And don't give me that bullshit "It's supposed to reflect a player's perception" argument, because then it should be different depending on scouting. As a static number, the implication is everyone, everywhere perceives the player the same way. Either OVR means something or it doesn't. Intangibles even existing means that OVR, which is already inaccurate for displaying how good a player is, is even more and worse, deliberately even more inaccurate than what it at first glance appears to be. Just kill intangibles and split OVR into two stats. One being an average based on abilities (and if real life players gripe that their rating is too low, tell them to fuckin' play better) and the second being form, a general perception of how well they've been playing. Or kill the average/OVR entirely and make players look for specific skills and only have a form rating. Whatever you choose to do, abolish OVR because it's actively misleading and terrible. VOTING TIME The Honolulu Honu have the 34th and 58th pick in the 2041 NBA Draft. We have a solid all-around roster, but our biggest needs are at Center and the Wing (probably). PICK 34 A)Grab the best-looking wing B)Grab the best-looking center C)Our team's great, grab a foreign player you can stash. Pick 58 A)Best Wing B)Best Center C)Draft-and-Stash D)Best Name Available Veryslightlymad fucked around with this message at 09:55 on Jun 1, 2021 |
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Jun 1, 2021 09:04
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Pick 34: Pick 58: Best Name Available Also wow, just one vote short of having a play-out tournament for the top 2 picks & the death of the draft lottery. What happens to teams that traded their picks, do you end up with playoff teams playing the worst teams in the league in the playout? Three votes short of a 20 second shot clock...and 5 short of turning the league into a free throw shooting contest 
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Jun 1, 2021 15:42
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Two questions and a comment: 1) Did you sweep the finals like you did everywhere else? I presume not since you didn't mention it, but it's never happened in real life (Warriors had that 16-1 year recently) and I was curious. B) Any chance of expanding the league one more time with a 35th and 36th team? I like making new teams. iii) Bill Russell must be well over 100 by now.
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Jun 1, 2021 16:28
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B C
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Jun 1, 2021 17:11
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JustJeff88 posted:Two questions and a comment: 1)Naw. I lost two games in the finals and failed to mention it. B)Yes. Though, I don't know when, precisely. I only have two spots left, but we're about a quarter of the way through the LP, if I go 80 years. It may be some time, accordingly. iii)And he'll be there the whole time, along with all the rest. An earlier few versions of the game had a "meet the president" part of the off-season, which made it seem like American Democracy had fallen and Obama had been made King. Somewhat amusingly, during the finals, Bill Simmons showed up and started talking about "last year's" Bucks, meaning the 2019 Bucks. It was really odd. I kept thinking, "No Bill. Giannis retired, remember? The Bucks have Jackie Dudley now." Poor Bill. They give the perpetual youth elixir to all the announcers and even the entirety of Twitter, but they let Bill Simmons go senile.
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Jun 1, 2021 19:20
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I've simmed the offseason, and while I might not be able to get an update this weekend (depending on activities), I did notice during the offseason player progression that, while he's still "just" a 92 or 93 OVR, Sonnet has fourteen Hall of Fame quality badges. I'm pretty sure the next highest I was able to find has nine. I'm increasingly annoyed by his all-NBA snubs.
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Jun 5, 2021 02:21
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Chapter 26: 2041-2042 Part 1: Offseason Some big excitement this draft.  As expected the Neon take Bernie Sharp with the #1 overall pick. B-Sharp is replacing a hall-of-famer, but he's got hall of fame level potential and talent. Don't believe me? (I wonder why their background is Magenta, when it's the least used color on their jersey. It works though. We'll rock with it.)  He comes into the league with a monster 19 Badges. I think only Bryant Lowe (who you'll remember, did make the hall of fame) had near that amount. Maybe one or two others have, but it's a noteworthy number of badges. As an 82 OVR point guard, he's actually on par with Lowe, who was an 84 OVR when he started as a Small Forward. At 6'5, he would almost certainly be at least an 84 if I made him into a small forward, which I won't, because it makes little sense.  This screen shot I took because hey look my assets undeleted themselves. You actually cannot relocate or rebrand during the offseason, which, by the way is insane because that's the only time teams relocate or rebrand. Anyhow, this bizarre recovery of assets saves me from having to do a ton of work. So thanks, Edgar Ellis Jr. (I don't want to potentially lose Les Voyageurs and their perfect little mascot.  The Clippers, despite their conference best record last season, take their first round exit a bit hard, and deal their best (by OVR) player to the Timberwolves. But they give up their own #1 pick two years from now to make it work. So you're trading a first round pick talent and an actual first round pick (That could be 4+ in two years, or as high as #1 overall in three years with a little misfortune) for a first round pick and a second round pick. This really looks like the Wolves absolutely fleeced the Clippers, who seem to be a little shook.  For what it's worth, here's the guy they hope to replace Giannou with.  Now, I don't really know much about Dawkins here, so this started as a Meh trade to have the Bulls move up a couple spaces, but the Bulls were thinking (literally) two steps ahead.  And follow it up with this. So yeah. The Clippers completely blew up their core from last year. The Bulls get an incredible versatile defender on the wing and a world class point guard that is somehow now on his fourth team in four years, despite being the kind of player that anyone with half a brain would want to lock up indefinitely. So yeah. The Clippers are more than a little shook.  Here's the guy they drafted. I took this shot less to be "now he has to replace Hodges" (which, to be fair, he does), but more to be "I had never heard of High Point University until this screen shot." Nice 'stache and hair combo.  The Las Vegas Neon manage, in just one draft, to find the most Las Vegas Neon player possible. Shut it all down. Not only did he attend UNLV, but his last name is Watts.   Honolulu starts looking toward the future of an old or retired BJ Lawrence by taking this guy, who just reeks of snobby old money with that name. But, he's 7'2, has solid fundamentals, and is only 19 years old. I fully intend to make him go through the horrors of the G-league for his first year in the league, since we'll have 3+ years to make him stop hating us from when he inevitably throws a temper tantrum. If Wingate has any substance to his game, he could help us for a very long time.  With our second pick, I grabbed this guy from Finland. This is a prospect I renamed myself using a randomizer. Neither of those names are in the database. Anyhow, Maki might never see an NBA game, or, if he does develop, he could be a nice 3rd string point guard, which would allow us to potentially move Calloway if Calloway starts to look like a bust, or Paxson if Calloway looks like he's gonna work out. Maki won't come over for another couple of years, but he had a good A/T ratio, and checks several boxes that the Honu need help with, being weirdly good in the post for a guard, (on defense, too!) and having terrific pass vision. Just... don't look too hard at everything else. Give him a couple of years. (My scout whiffed hard on his potential, so he very well might never make an NBA roster. On the other hand, I semi-randomize potential changes each year.)  Mr Irrelevant 2041 is Coty Wells from Butler. I'm pretty sure he didn't make it.  We pick up Cameron's option because I'm convinced he'll work out for us one day. He's got such great passing instincts. He's just fairly low on our depth chart. Cam Flores seems to be developing quicker and will be on a cheap contract. On the other hand, Barbosa's on a contract year and has already said, before the season has even started, that he wants to try his luck at free agency. So if we don't find a trade for Barbosa, then suddenly those two guys will get a big opportunity. There's something to be said about both trading him and letting him walk. Our cap health is enough that we're not even necessarily out of the running to re-sign Barbosa, too. Whatever. That's a "not this offseason" problem.  Another potential fit for that spot is Rubens Viana. While technically a shooting guard, Viana is big. It took 12 days of negotiating his weasel rear end (he really didn't want a long term deal---but I really didn't want to repeat the error I made with Wang and sign him to a deal that prevents me from extending him. It felt horrible when I couldn't  The Clippers sign a marquee free agent in Frankie Copeland to help speed up their rebuild considerably. I do not look forward to a team that is legitimately focused around Copeland, who was enough of a headache in the finals. He's probably the best defensive guard in the league that isn't from Italy. (I still can't believe I have to specify that)  Perdue is pretty OK, but the real big news here is that they pull one of the more important pieces off of our arch-rival Denver Nuggets.  The Lakers secure the services of Paciani. I'm gonna have to closely monitor them to see how they use him with Clayton Patterson, and potentially move one of the two to Small Forward (back to Small Forward in Paciani's case)  I sometimes feel like my updates don't have enough nuance in regards to "which players in the league are actually good as both OVR and output". Catinella is one such player. He earned every penny of that monster deal. He's just an elite defender and a terrific scorer who can pass and gets about 4 rebounds a game, which isn't bad for a guard. Catinella, by the by, was the Mavs' second choice the off-season where they first acquired him. Their first choice was Jemerio Kraemer, and boy howdy, I gotta think Mavs fans that remember are ecstatic. Running up the contract on Kraemer for me and then signing Catinella afterward was one of the nastier things the AI in this game has done to me. And if it were on purpose and not just "No, the AI legitimately wanted Kraemer because he had higher OVR and POT at the time" it'd be a compliment to the game. As it stands, the narrative that the game has created inadvertently is still really good.  The Neon are very committed to showing their new fan base that they are not, in fact, the Magic. Although, Rich Hurley is pretty drat old now, and will be competing directly with Donta Greene (also old) for minutes. Not sure the logic here.  Speaking of old, the Nets get a bunch of vets to put around Jalen Gardner. While finally uninjured, Gardner's never going to be the same, but this is almost certainly the best supporting cast he's ever had as a starter. At this point, I'm not sure if the Nets are looking to win, or to just beat Radu in the playoffs to prove a point.  For Catinella and his monster deal, I understood and supported the decision. Now for this monster, monster deal, I'm much less enthusiastic. I don't watch all the Nugget games, so its possible that Popov here is the real deal that his OVR says, but just judging by our own games with the Nuggets and raw stats, he's nowhere near as valuable as Steve Dunn. A contract of this size makes re-signing Dunne more difficult. Though, if the Nuggets want to go way over the cap, they certainly have Dunn's Bird Rights.  The Pelicans welcome defensive player of the generation Homer Barry back to their roster with a fairly monster deal of their own, but this one I really don't understand. They had to renounce the rights to Boyd Slaughter, who was actually pretty drat good to sign Barry, who, while a generational defender, supplies nothing on offense, and is getting old. Slaughter is playing at levels where he could make an All-Star game. I don't know how I missed someone else picking him up, but rest assured, he's out there, somewhere.  The Rockets deal with the loss of Paciani by also losing "Worst starter in the league" Alonzo Patton and replacing him with J.P. Reece from the Spurs. Reece has been a pain in my rear end for years, so unless he's enough to propel the Rockets back into the playoffs, this deal is nothing but good news for us. Going into the season, the Honu are in the power rankings of anywhere from 3 to 13. It looks like the media still considers our championship a fluke. And hell, they're probably at least a little right. On the other hand, I intend to try to run it back, as the only key cog that's regressing is BJ Lawrence, and everyone else is still showing improvement. So while I could pull up some trade scenarios for Barbosa, unless we start to under-perform in the regular season, I'm working under the assumption that we're gonna keep him for now. In fact, I burned a camp on Barbosa to try to get his conditioning up to where I want a playoff-caliber starter. EDIT Simmed a game. Should have traded Barbosa. 
Veryslightlymad fucked around with this message at 03:01 on Jun 9, 2021 |
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Jun 9, 2021 02:47
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Chapter 26: 2041-2042 Part 2: First Half of Season But first, some assorted general  A clerical error was discovered that was keeping Magnus Fredriksson from being paid. Eventually, the issue is resolved and the Swede stops working for free. Apparently, his jersey number was reflective of his pay check. (Yep. One of the best teams in the league glitched a contract on one of their better players and he was working for $0 a year for 2 years. They had about 20 million in cap space left so I manually edited that as his contract. For one year. If they want to keep this guy in the off-season they can goddamn bloody well pay him. Stupid 2k.)  The game deleted my assets for Montreal and Seattle again, so while I replaced Montreal with the same one I'd been using, However, way back when we added the Sonics, I said I would use some of the other ones. And while this wasn't the exact one that was tied for first place at the time, it's pretty drat close.  Speaking of the Sonics, they're also where Boyd Slaughter got to. We get a clearer picture of why New Orleans was willing to cut bait with him. While the injury shows no severe permanent/red damage on his knee and only 2-4 weeks missing. But a dislocated Patella is an injury that will cost a player 4-6 months (ASK ME HOW I KNOW), so that it was 2-4 weeks on opening day meant that he would have been injured for the entire offseason----even though this page shows he clearly has a good prognosis, it's not completely unthinkable that the Pelicans got spooked and decided to go in another direction.  Speaking of Slaughters and Dislocated Patellas, Opening day we get absolutely massacred by Donald Powers's Trail Blazers. Powers would also go on to heart-breakingly dislocate his patella in this season toward the all-star break. It's a bad season for it. But I wasn't referring to Powers earlier. Oh, no. That's just a sick coincidence.  I was referring to Barbosa. 20 minutes into his season, Barbosa goes down with one of these injuries, and that threw an enormous monkey wrench into my plans. Barbosa came up big for us last season, and was a huge part of our championship run. I figured odds were good I would struggle to re-sign him in the off-season, but this just makes it even worse. Now I can't even trade him. (I mean, I can, once he's healed up----more on that later.) Well, I wanted to give more burn to Flores and Cameron. So..... silver linings? Both would get sporadic starts at the 3 throughout the season, and whichever one didn't start traded end-of-rotation minutes with Calloway and Viana.  A couple of 40-pieces like the one Powers dropped on us give him the player of the week. Former Honu have a tendency to appear on these boards much more often than current Honu do, and yet, we tend to actually win things. Annoying.  Tiggs drops a career-best 20 in a win over San Antonio. This would also be a flash of "old Morrison." I'm starting to come to the conclusion that maybe Morrison's injury a couple of years ago really did cost him a step. He's never really been that "MVP caliber" guy that he was. This has been the closest to a bounce-back season for him, so far. Obviously, with Barbosa down, some of the slack has to be picked up somewhere.  The main guys that picked up scoring slack for Barbosa were Hugh Andersen and Frederick Reeves. Early on in the season, however, I got a shocking amount of offense out of Aaron Payne, including this, his career high. (And another stellar Morrison number.) Aaron's early season became a problem for me. More on that later.  One guy that wasn't picking up the slack for us was Alain Sonnet, who looked just completely off in the early going. I had to manually assign scoring priorities around, making him our team's first option for several weeks to get him back into the groove. Eventually, he would look like his old self, including this brilliant performance in a monster rout of the Timberwolves. Sonnet then immediately got injured for a few weeks. I am completely convinced that 2k has some sort of "Players are injured before they get an injury" system at play. Which is actually pretty cool if that's true. If it's not, it's a hell of a coincidence, because I think every time I've been concerned about one of my stars randomly taking a dip in stats, they get injured about 5-6 games later. And usually come back looking like themselves.  On his first start with the Honu, Calloway gives us nearly 20 points, although the shooting could use some work. I do dig the aggressiveness though that 6/7 free throws is a nice side-note. Interestingly, the CPU/Coach Bennett put Calloway in the starting spot instead of Paxson. But it makes sense and seems like a thing a real team might do if they had a promising very high draft pick that doesn't regularly get more than 20 minutes.  Reeves and Andersen have been absolute heroes for us this season. I loving love these guys. This 38 pt game from Reeves is not at all indicative of his efficiency. This is a really bad shooting night for Reeves, although I can't argue with the results. This is more-or-less average in efficiency for Andersen, albeit with a lot more tries than he usually takes. The thing I love about Reeves is he has no ego. (Yet!) Like, he works for 20ish million instead of 30-something, even though he's easily as important as any of the other 4 starters. He's constantly in motion, and has never once complained about touches. He just finds ways to get open and finishes plays and will be one of our top scorers. This year, he is our top scorer, since Sonnet had a bit of a funk before his injury. To put it another way, I've assigned every single one of our other starters, as well as BJ Lawrence, a set priority in offense and have never explicitly made Reeves a priority and he is still our leading scorer. He's certainly more efficient of a shooter than Sonnet, but then again, Sonnet is a much better passer. Reeves is, nonetheless quite a good passer for a shooting guard, though. He's easily one of our most successful draft picks. Andersen is not in the running for MIP again, but he bloody well should be. He's jumped all the way up to 17.5 points per game, and he's shooting close to 50% from deep. I figure that's not sustainable (hell, he was 1/7 in one of these shots), but then again, he takes a lot of shots from 3. He was regarded as a "Stretch 4", but he's worked on his post game enough where he's no longer just a pick-and-pop guy and is now considered a 3-level scorer. Don't get me wrong. He's still probably the best pick-and-pop guy in the entire league. (He has 99 in both 3pt shooting and in mid-range shooting.) Astonishingly, Andersen is an excellent defender. I'm not sure how or why, because none of his attributes outside of "help defense IQ" are any good, so maybe he's just a really good help defender and it makes up for his other deficiencies? Anyhow, be it offense or defense, Andersen is a player that is limited, but very good at understanding what those limitations are and playing within them. Unfortunately, he had a few gripes about touches, but I'm not concerned because 1)He's right. If he's shooting like, 48percent from deep or whatever the hell and is one of the top 4 guys in the league in eFG% then yeah, he should absolutely be getting more touches. 2)It's my fault, because I plugged in Sonnet and Morrison when I usually don't, because I was trying to get Sonnet out of his funk (and it worked!) while keeping Morrison happy (and it did!) and 3)We'll get to it at the end of the post.  Anyhow, the real point is, between our other starters and Morrison playing a bit more like the player he can, the Honu are kept alive and in the thick of things. Here's another of those monster all-round performances that Morrison gets every so often that I just adore.  He even manages another triple double this season, albeit in a shameful loss to the Pistons.  After being relegated back to the bench, Calloway shines in this outing where he averages over two points a minute. Remember when we drafted him and I said "I think he's a playmaker" or something along those lines? Either I'm an idiot, or my scouts are idiots, or we're both idiots, because Calloway does seemingly everything else that you might want a point guard to do. He defends better than a second year player ought to, he finishes and scores very well. But he is not a playmaking point guard. Of course, Louie Morgan was a big part of this team for this sort of bench scoring point guard role. It's probably a good thing we have Paxson on such a good contract.  With Sonnet injured for several weeks of the season, he misses the 2042 all-star game (Actually, he might replace Catinella who is injured.) However, Morrison's performance in keeping us afloat has earned him a spot on the roster. Some new faces in here: ~Karl James (SF, Bucks) is a 1 time all-star. Now that Copeland's over in San Diego, James is the clear second-best player on the Bucks, who are still one of the better teams in the league. ~I did, in fact, move Paciani back to his SF position. I also moved Clayton Patterson to PG for the Lakers. That's because Craig Curry (SG Lakers) exists and is the least flexible of the Lakers' big 3. All three of them were consistently in the starting lineup. If Patterson leaves the Lakers next year, I'll have to remember to change him back. ~ Louie is listed as a one-time all-star again. He must have missed last year's game from injury ~ I had forgotten Vlado Tomasevic (PF, Pacers) went to the Pacers. That's a scary addition. ~ Gene Lyons (SG, Raptors) replaces some loser. Lyons is having himself a hell of an efficient, high-scoring season. Toronto's got some of the best big men in the game, but Lyons here might have been the missing piece. ~ Noel Vaughn (SF, Hornets) is finally selected as an all star by the AI. This dude was putting out 15/15 seasons fairly regularly as a small forward. ~ Jesse Harrington (SF, Thunder) was manually added and is "only" on his eighth selection. I do not know why the AI consistently snubs this guy, when he's got to be one of the greatest shooters ever and consistently among the league's best in efficient scoring. Standings    I cannot believe how high we are. East    What in the world happened to the Celtics!? And now, the problem Aaron Payne got himself a taste of "Hey, I can actually shoot the basketball" by stroking it for a cool 50% for the first quarter of the season. This is crazy, because his career shooting is in the low 40s. He is not on the team to shoot, he's on the team to defend and pass and sometimes cut. Not that I'm complaining. The thing is, even though he's regressed back to his usual self, he's started to think he needs touches, and the precarious balancing act of meting out touches has made this untenable. He's maybe the 7th or 8th guy I would be willing to say "Hey, run extra plays for this kid." I had Sonnet getting extra touches to get him out of a streak, but that made both of the Hughs upset, so I had to juggle them for a while, and then Sonnet's injury happened. I've more or less managed everyone's egos and they've fallen into a grove---but there's an exception of Payne, who just does not get it through his head that there's a reason I'm not giving him more shots, and that's that he's the least qualified member of our team to do so. Unfortunately, he's also on the hook for another 3 years at about 16 million per year. Payne is our team's best perimeter defender, full stop. And he's one of the better perimeter defenders in the league. So I don't want to part with him, but I want to part with our other players who would get touches ahead of him even less. So if we pull the trigger on dealing Payne, there's 4 viable trades:  OPTION A "Speculation" Aaron Payne and Cam Flores to the Detroit Pistons for Edgar Brand and Rob Brooks. + Brand is either still on his rookie deal or would be an RFA, I forget which. The point is, the SF in this deal is already a productive NBA player, he has good size, and we could conceivably keep him as a long term piece. Meanwhile, the PG, Rob Brooks, will give us a very solid bench presence for this season, and then save us 14 million dollars in cap space to potentially play with free agents. - We'd have to get rid of Flores, who is much younger than Edgar Brand and our other SF, Karl Cameron.  OPTION B "An old target" Aaron Payne and our 2046 second round pick to the Celtics for Reinaldo Saramago and Christian Garner. + Saramago is on his rookie contract and has a team option for next year. He's a guy I was looking to draft recently, and would really fill out our big-man rotation. Would save us about 12 million a year in cap space. - Garner is washed and won't play a game for the Honu. This will give us slightly less cap space than trade A OPTION C "Mid life crisis"  Aaron Payne and BJ Lawrence to the Atlanta Hawks for Sylvester McGuire and + We get a younger version of BJ, right down to the hair-style to play ball for us. McGuire is probably not a keeper, but he's a guy who can give us solid minutes while Barbosa's out and then we'll have 11 million to play with in the off-season. - This is still only 11 million instead of 12 or 14. I don't want to trade BJ Lawrence, but this is a fair deal. I say McCoy is a younger version, but BJ is actually better. He's both a more efficient scorer and a better rebounder, percentagewise. But McCoy is about as close as you can get. OPTION D  "Variety pack" Aaron Payne, Cam Flores, and BJ Lawrence to the Sacramento Kings for Mauricio Cortez, Nicholas Buford, and Jamal Malone + Unless my math is off, this would save us the most money--roughly 16 million. Cortez's salary would come off the books, but in the meantime, he'd definitely be a contributor to our bench scoring. Nicholas Buford's contract is an excellent value. Jamal Malone is definitely a downgrade from Lawrence, but he's a productive, reliable center. This is the most valuable trade. - Accordingly, it's the most costly trade, as we'd have to give up both Flores and BJ Lawrence. Two of these trades would involve BJ Lawrence, and I've included them because I think they're either fair or potentially in our favor. Additionally, all four trades should have an extra note in the cons column that says "we'd lose Aaron Payne's defense". If we don't do one of the two trades that has Lawrence, I intend to extend him, as he's ready to do an extension, and he'll also take yet another pay cut if I do extend him. I really like BJ. Here's an illustration for why:  My work here isn't finished.  He is a five time champion and doesn't feel like his work is finished. Voting Time QUESTION 1 Aaron Payne has become an Aaron Payne in my rear end. I don't have any idea how to fit him into our offense without either pissing off someone better than him, or just getting less production from someone better than him. A)TRADE A "Speculation" B)TRADE B "An Old Target" C)TRADE C "Mid life Crisis" D)TRADE D "Variety Pack" E)Do not trade Payne (as he's our best defender) QUESTION 2 Emanuel Barbosa is still out injured. He did some really important work for us in the post-season last year, and we're on pace to go back. At the same time, his contract is up, and as an unrestricted free agent, there's very little I can do outside of overpaying him to make sure that he stays in Honolulu. And even then, it's not exactly a sure thing. Also, thanks to a rule change a few years back, there's no trade deadline. A)Pause the simulation when Barbosa comes back from injury and examine some potential trades B)Don't bother, just take the money if he leaves.
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Jun 11, 2021 20:48
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B)TRADE B "An Old Target" A)Pause the simulation when Barbosa comes back from injury and examine some potential trades I would suggest question 3, download more assets and relocate/rebrand some more teams (the Timberwolves in celebration of their re-conferencing, in particular), but considering 2K likes to delete your assets that seems like a huge waste of your time.
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Jun 11, 2021 21:10
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B. An old friend. Everything else requires including an asset of value (Flores or Lawrence) while this one lets you keep your non-Payne team intact. A.) Pause for Barbosa trades. No idea if there'll actually be something worth doing; depending on how the rest of the season goes, we might be in a situation where it doesn't make sense to give him away for table scraps (especially if that timetable is more "six months"), but it's worth checking.
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Jun 11, 2021 21:18
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Thirding options B & A
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Jun 11, 2021 22:29
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B, A. Hopefully the defense doesn't shrivel up and die.
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Jun 12, 2021 03:50
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How does the team rank in terms of defensive efficiency? I'm curious because the Honu's record this season is frankly not that good, and I don't know if it's scoring or defence that is the issue. Meanwhile, the bloody Pacers are dominating out east.
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Jun 12, 2021 04:06
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JustJeff88 posted:How does the team rank in terms of defensive efficiency? I'm curious because the Honu's record this season is frankly not that good, and I don't know if it's scoring or defence that is the issue. Excellent question. I haven't talked about team identity in quite a while, and it's quite a bit different from our old teams. We're 18th of 34 in Points per game, but 28th in points allowed per game, which the game calculates backward, since its lazy and bigger number = first. So more accurately, we're 18th of 34 in points per game, but 7th in points allowed. Ergo, just by "average points" our defense is actually ahead of our offense right now. If we normalize for pace, our points per game drop to 23rd, but our defensive rating drops to 32nd (so jumps to third best). Our pace is slightly higher than 100 possessions but league average pace seems to be quite high. We're 26th of 34 for FG% and 24th in 3pt%---unlike Honu teams in the past, we're actually not that good at shooting. I really wonder what's causing this, as the guys who put up the most shots, Reeves/Andersen/Sonnet are very efficient shooters (EDITOR'S NOTE Turns out this is wrong on at least one of them, but for volume of shots, this is still quite true). We're 9th in offensive rebound rate and 4th in defensive rebound rate. We definitely control ours/our opponents misses better than most teams. Normalizing for pace, we're still ninth in offensive rebounds, but second in defensive rebounds, and this combines to fifth overall in rebounding. We're 4th in turnovers (So 31st best... that's bad) and 32nd in fouls (So third best. That's really good!). These numbers more or less stay the same adjusted for pace. We're dead last in points off of turnovers--speed and court vision remain a huge hole in this team. If you had to point to our biggest flaw, it's this. We need more players who can push the tempo, play fast, and create a play on the move. We're 32nd in bench scoring, which is a huge change from our old teams. We used to get most of our punch from our bench, but our current system/coach prefers all our weapons be brought to the front---I don't consider this as bad as it looks, as our starting five is insanely dangerous when they're together-----I would say only the Cavs might have a better starting five, but they're constantly injured, so they rely more on their bench. We're 29th of 34 (so sixth best) in oFG%---so yes, we're a very good defensive team. At least some of that is Payne, but Payne is a bench player, albeit one with more than 20 minutes a game. The two Hughs do very good work. Tiggs, off the bench, is actually our best defender by oFG% this season. Something nutty like 34% to Payne's 41%. But Payne defends a number of shots comparable to a starter, something like 11 attempts per game, compared to Tiggs and his 3 or 4. It's also worth noting that the current era has a lot of very efficient shooting guards, but a lot of wildly inefficient power forwards, so two of our best defenders (by oFG%) being power forwards that don't have good defensive metrics isn't that surprising in context. In defending the 3, we're 27th (so eighth best) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ So to summarize, the Honu's current strength is a lights-out, nightmare of a first unit. Hugh Morrison can score from anywhere, but he's better inside, and he has the freedom to operate inside because the other Hugh is very complimentary. He ranks 4th among all centers in PER, Game Score, and third on EWA. He is 39 out of 44 for turnover ratio (or sixth best). While Honolulu as a team commits a lot of turnovers, Morrison does not. Andersen is one of the most efficient power forwards in a league that is wildly inefficient at that position at the moment. He's a great fit next to Morrison because while Morrison does most of his work inside, Andersen is lights out behind the arc. He's is 2nd among all power forwards for 3pt percentage. As a defender, he's weirdly good, ranking 43rd of 59 qualified power forwards for oFG% so uh... 17th best? (Tiggs is currently sitting at 59 of 59 for first place.) Andersen is second among all power forwards in both eFG% and True Shooting%. (Interestingly, he's sandwiched between two Toronto players---that might be why Toronto is so good.) Exploiting this edge in efficiency while making bad shooters even worse has absolutely got to be one of the keys to Honolulu's success recently. Our Small Forward that has gotten the most minutes is Cam Flores, and he's a project. Karl Cameron has played better, but has played less minutes. I'm somewhat annoyed by that. Neither has played particularly well, but I wish Cameron played more because he has actual vision, and while Honolulu has a lot of willing passers, only Sonnet, Paxson, and Cameron have any vision. Reeves is both a worse shooter than I thought and a better defender than I thought, somehow ranking in the bottom half among shooting guards for shooters by percentages, but the top half for oFG%. Aaron Payne ranks 58 out of 59, so by strictly his opponent's scoring, he's the second best defender in the league at his position. Nonetheless, Reeves is still 14th in PER, 11th in efficiency, and 10th in Game Score. He's 9th among shooting guards in EWA, and of the 8 guys ahead of him, 6 were selected to the all star team this season. He ranks 11 on Usage. So Reeves is a volume scorer---he's efficient by his usage and he's a better defender than I had given him credit for. The other value that Reeves has is he's 57th out of 58 (or second best) on turnover ratio. So again, while Honolulu as a whole has a bit of a turnover problem Reeves absolutely does not. (Payne is currently 2nd of 58, so no, Aaron, you're not getting more loving touches.) Sonnet has had an off season because of his injuries and is only around the 11 to 15 mark on a lot of advanced stats, including 13th in EWA, but I would point out that 13th in EWA at your position when you've missed half the season is still pretty loving good. In previous seasons he was much higher, more like top 5. In the last two years he led our team in most advanced stats--this year that honor is once again Morrison's. Eyeballing it looking at team stats, Payne seems to be a lot of our problem w/r/t turnovers. We also get a lot from Paxson and Cameron, but they both have a high assist number, too. Lawrence is also a problem for turnovers, but he's our highest pace player and one of the league's best rebounders (by the numbers, the 8th best offensive rebounder per 36 minutes, and 16th best in rebound rate) so I'm inclined to think that we still get more possessions than we lose when Lawrence is concerned. That might be at least somewhat true for Payne too, who ranks 3rd in steals per 36----however, that's the difference of 1.7 steals vs 2.4 turnovers in that timespan. Still a negative if you don't factor in his lockdown defense. Among all defenders, Tiggs has the fifth best oFG% in the league at 307 out of 311 players. Payne is 297 out of 311 for 15th place. It is almost certainly worth knowing that both players in the Pistons trade are among the 14 guys that have a better oFG% than Aaron Payne.I hope this gives a little more light on our team. tldr; we're much more front-loaded than our early Bol Bol teams were, where our top 4 guys are really good. Our bench is still very valuable, but almost all of that comes from defense, rebounding, and hustle. The Honu have a reputation as a defensive club with a very polished, methodical approach. By necessity, almost the opposite of our early teams. Veryslightlymad fucked around with this message at 06:42 on Jun 12, 2021 |
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Jun 12, 2021 05:56
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Thank you for the detailed analysis. How do you feel about the team's performance and record so far? The reason I ask is that I, personally, place a quite high importance on record. Everyone wants as much home court as possible, of course, and regular season record in basketball is a fairly good indicator of playoff success, unlike baseball where regular season and playoffs might as well be two different sports. I ask because the Honu are only about 8 games over 50%, and that's not exactly a world-beater for the defending champions. If you aren't happy with the team's performance, what do you think the major problem is? Conversely, why are the Pacer's destroying the East? Is this simulation like now where the West is overwhelmingly better than the East? I'm curious as to why the team isn't as dominating as one might like, but there doesn't seem to be some glaring weakness such as 'terrible at defence'. Is it the turnovers? The reason I ask is that these things can be subtle. I don't watch gridiron football, but I once read about a team that had the #1 offence and #1 defence in the NFL but didn't even make the playoffs because their special teams were brutal.
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Jun 12, 2021 16:43
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JustJeff88 posted:Thank you for the detailed analysis. How do you feel about the team's performance and record so far? The reason I ask is that I, personally, place a quite high importance on record. Everyone wants as much home court as possible, of course, and regular season record in basketball is a fairly good indicator of playoff success, unlike baseball where regular season and playoffs might as well be two different sports. I ask because the Honu are only about 8 games over 50%, and that's not exactly a world-beater for the defending champions. I'm pretty happy with the performance so far this year. If you would have told me I'd miss a stretch of 10 games from Sonnet (it felt like more, honestly) and that before his injury, he'd have a really off year, and that we'd only have Barbosa for one game, I'd have assumed we would be ranked somewhere around the 50/50 mark, like where San Diego is. Knowing our best player was playing at about 75%, and then wasn't playing at all, and then the guy with the least competent backups was the starter that went out with an injury.... those two things make me think that, much like last year, we're a lot better than our record shows. Or we have the capacity to be better. Nonetheless, if we have a glaring weakness, turnovers has to be up there, but it's speed and vision. Our fast break is awful. A far cry from the early days of us being free-wheeling run and gunners. Just jumping into games in the playoffs, what I'll see happen, is Sonnet will be benched and the offense will stagnate hard. Paxson is controlled, but he's also timid. The ball will just sort of sit in one place for too long and the players will look lost. There's no one pushing the tempo or actively trying to create. This is where we feel the loss of Louie Morgan the most. When we had Morgan, though he'd eventually get his assist numbers up, he was a reliable, confident scorer for himself. So when our bench came in, we'd see him just decide sometimes "You know what? I'mma win this game by myself" and then he'd go do that. Calloway has a bit of that to him---if he can get his percentages to go up, that'd be good. I'd still like to see better/more/ANY passing out of him, because that's pretty important in a point guard. The Pacers are dominating because they have had an outstanding back-court for a couple of years, and this year, they bolstered their front court by adding Vlado Tomasevic, a very good front-court player who is having a career season. The league is the opposite of current reality NBA; that is, the East is much better than the West. There's a reason it seems like we face the same couple of teams every year in the playoffs; we're the only teams that are any good. Right now, out East, the current ninth and tenth best teams in the league are the Cavs and the 76ers. I've talked quite a few times about the Cavs' starting lineup, although they have frequent injury issues. If the 76ers were a top 5 team, Dwight Dixon would win MVP every year. He's really loving good. Radu Constantin is the only player that's close to as impactful.  I don't understand how a team with that guy on it can possibly be in tenth place in the conference. A team with Dwight Dixon shouldn't even be as low as tenth best in the league. Compare his stat line with the current best player on the 76ers, Joel Embiid. Embiid finished this year as second place for MVP voting. And he would have won if Jokic didn't put up one of the most best seasons in recent memory. Dixon 2042: 32.9 PPG/10.6 RPG/2.2 APG/1.3 SPG/.8 BPG/2.2TOPG/.521 FG%/.411 3p%/.887FT% Embiid 2021: 28.5 PPG/10.6RPG/2.8APG/1.0 SPG/1.4 BPG/3.1 TOPG/.513 FG%/.377 3p%/.859 FT% ...............That's really close in production, with a slight edge going toward Dixon. Now remember that in Dixon's time, power forwards are trash. You have guys like Teddy Vaughn repeatedly making All-NBA teams despite struggling to shoot above 40%. So that there's so many teams higher in the East is telling of 1)How good the East is, and 2)Probably how bad this simulation seems to undervalue certain things, such as shooting percentages, and overvalues certain things, like rebounding, steals, and blocks.
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Jun 12, 2021 19:44
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| # ? May 12, 2024 23:03 |
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Chapter 26: 2041-2042 Part 3: End of Regular Season Per thread directive, I attempted to find trades for Barbosa after he came back from injury (literally less than 4 weeks before the close of the season) however, I found no trades that would have netted me something of value---what I would consider "of value" in this circumstance would be either a first round draft pick or a rotational or prospect player that had more than one year remaining on their contract. Since nothing offered would get me more than the expiring contract, I opted out of holding a vote on trades. The best I found was another small forward with one more year on their deal, but for 6 million dollars more than what Barbosa already makes---all this would do is put me into a worse version of the same dilemma next season, with no guarantee that the new guy would gel with the team like Barbosa has. I could find other trades that would net me a player of a similar contract at a position we don't need, which just seems like it would be taking my poor salary cap out to behind my shed and shooting it. Also, GUESS WHAT GUYS! I found  another new glitch in NBA2k20, or, more accurately, I can confirm that something I noticed earlier was a glitch and not just me making a mistake.Since we didn't wind up trading BJ Lawrence, I extended him to a front-loaded deal with a pay cut.  He's 34, so he'll probably be overpaid on the last couple of years here, but the important thing to note is I definitely made that last year a team option (since if he fell off dramatically, I wanted to be off the hook) however, the game once again didn't recognize the team option. So I decided "no, that's too much money, I'mma just edit his contract because I triple-checked, that's what he agreed to."  And lo and behold, when I get to the edit screen it says that the contract extension includes a team option, even though the bio page and the salary cap page disagree, and I trust the two that suggest he doesn't have a team option. I tried reducing the number of years of his contract, and what this does is delete the 11.95 year and make that year show up as a blank team option year----so I could have a 0 dollar player like Magnus Fredriksson. For the life of me I couldn't figure out how to get the team option to apply to a year where he had an actual salary. So I left him in without an option and restored his extension contract to the full three years. Except, when I re-applied the last year of his contract, instead of sticking with the 5% reduction, it re-applied this year's salary of 14.25 million to the final year. So I had to manually reduce it. Only, when I manually reduced it, it wouldn't let me fine tune it down to the mathematically proper 11.93 million, and I think it wound up being a lower 11.84 million, which saves us roughly a hundred thousand dollars a year. I'd feel bad about this inadvertent cheating, but it was that or set it one pip higher, which would have cost us about 300,000 a year. I refuse to be penalized for this bug, so sorry not sorry.  Freddy Tiggs is instrumental in a terrific and exciting Rising Stars challenge that sees team World defeat team USA featuring a great USA rally in the second half. Cam Flores also participates and plays for team USA, but didn't acquit himself nearly as well. (I just realized that our small forward rotation is a guy with the last name Cameron and a guy that almost certainly has the first name Cameron. Why do the Honu seem to collect names? We have two Freds, two Hughs, two Camerons, and we used to have two Gheorges. FUN FACT, last year in the real world, the Indiana Pacers ran a full house TJs full of Holidays lineup with 3 players named TJ and two of the Holiday brothers, one of which was former Honu Aaron Holiday.) Dwight Dixon once again is named All-Star MVP and leads his team to a convincing win over team Terrell. Unfortunately, Morrison was on Terrell's team. In other news, the Celtics are inexplicably terrible and do what inexplicably terrible teams do.  Here's the shot.  And the chaser. To be fair to the fictional Marvin Bagley III, he's actually a pretty drat good coach, with a C offense but an A defense. As he hasn't been a coach for very long, it's very possible that C goes higher (and technically possible for the A to improve, too), so he's honestly better than our coach. At least for now.  A couple days after his rising stars performance, Tiggs goes down with an injury.  After the break, I start getting games like this sometimes out of Calloway. If he actually develops into another Louie Morgan, I would be very, very happy with him. The rest of the team obviously did their part in this domination of the Clippers, though.  Lot of injuries this year, but luckily, the post all-star break injuries are primarily on our bench.  The back half of Morrison's season is absolutely brilliant  This is the best game all around, but here he is setting a career high in blocks, with seven. This ties Honolulu's all time record.  A mark he would reach two more times in the waning days of the season.  The one against Brooklyn got him his second Player of the Week award this season. The first was after the Clippers and Neon games.  He's not the only Honu that kicks into high gear as the playoffs approach. Sonnet drops a career-best 50 points on the Mavericks, putting the league on notice that he's back at 100% This game was also the return of Barbosa.  It has been a hot minute since one of the Honu got one of these awards, so pulling three as we rule the month of March was very satisfying. We are ready. Final Standings West    At the time of that nearly 60 point victory over the Clippers we were fighting for the 8 seed. After that point, Honolulu never looked back. East    Huge falloff for the Celtics. I can see why Stevens was fired. The reality is, their old stars probably got too old, but hey, let's get some new coaching blood.  Back-to-back for Lowe. I feel like this probably should have been Radu, but hey, 17/17 with good defense is a pretty juicy figure.  This was a foregone conclusion. Let's see if the league's newest team can gently caress this up.  Despite coming off the bench his whole career so far, it doesn't look like Steele's development has been held back at all.  Defensive Homer of the Barry  Wait, didn't you get traded to the Hawks? How the hell are you on the trailblazers?!  I can't tell if this is supposed to be the model used on Jim Boylen. If so, it feels wrong for his model to be coach of the year, even if he's the most deserving candidate of this award in years. His Pacers were easily the best team and they didn't have a player make all-NBA. (Weird aside: does anyone else find it really strange that in the course of 10 years the Bulls had a coach named Jim Boylen as well as a coach named Jim Boylan?) Speaking of all NBA: All NBA First team:  Second:  Great to see Morrison back. I would like to point out that 4 out of 5 players on the All-NBA Second Team have been key players on the Honu. Third team  I don't usually have pictures of the all-league players but I realized something: quote:
Not so irrelevant after all. He's been an all-star a three times between the Grizzlies and Heat. I love when these guys make it, and Brett really, really made it. All-defense 1  All-defense 2  All Rookie First team:  Second:  The Table:  I'm torn. With how we finished out the season, I feel like we're in a much better position than we were last year to make a deep playoff run, possibly even win. On the other hand, we're matched up against the Lakers, who are the absolute last team I wanted to face in the playoffs. I literally laughed them off last year, but this year, they have Craig Curry and Giovenco Paciani added onto their team. That's a big increase in firepower I'm not sure I'm ready for. Veryslightlymad fucked around with this message at 14:57 on Jun 15, 2021 |
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Jun 15, 2021 14:49
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