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You can now catch all my writing at The Pick and Roll, at pickandroll.com.au!
By WARREN YIU Back in October, the season-ending injury sustained by Michael Kidd-Gilchrist was supposed to be the death knell for this frisky Charlotte Hornets squad. These Hornets, who had missed the playoffs in the campaign prior, had real pretensions towards re-joining that postseason rat race, and potentially improve upon their surprisingly feisty playoff…
By WARREN YIU Probably not. At least not for the NBA title. But could they conceivably make the Conference Finals, in a wide open East? Abso-freaking-lutely. And certainly if their showdown with the Warriors at the Boston Garden was any indication of their potential. And most certainly with legitimate question marks surrounding the other viable…
By WARREN YIU With 1 minute 58 seconds left in the final quarter, Hollis Thompson rose up for what was an open 3 point shot from the right corner, one of the juiciest shots available within an NBA game. It was an air ball. The crowd at Wells Fargo Arena sniggered in disgust, as Kyle…
By WARREN YIU The Golden State Freaking Warriors (yes, I’m coining that as their official team moniker now) have somehow rendered the rest of the league irrelevant, to this point, despite virtually no changes to their roster. You see, continuity matters, but it’s also boring for the news cycle. So it was that the summer…
By WARREN YIU One of the telling narratives to emerge from Golden State’s destruction of all-comers last season was the emergence of Draymond Green as an ancillary play-maker; an offensive outlet who could punish opponents brave enough to trap Stephen Curry, with smart decision-making. Far from being a league saturated with “stretch 4s”, it’s the emergence…
By WARREN YIU The DeAndre Jordan circus has, rightly or wrongly, overshadowed the NBA’s free agency period. Whether you’re in the Dallas Camp, or you’re in the Clippers’ corner; whether you’re a firm believer that a verbal agreement should be binding, or you are more forgiving when it comes to life choices, the point is moot.…
By WARREN YIU A week has passed in free agency and all the topline free agents, not named Lebron James, are already off the board. Barring any major LeShock, the Spurs remain the only team to land a landscape-changing Big Fish, in LaMarcus Aldridge. In fact, despite the frenzied nature of signings and team transactions, there was very…
By WARREN YIU Residing in the NBA’s middle class is often seen as NBA purgatory, particularly within a league defined by a lexicon of “championship or bust”. Teams who barely make the postseason also barely miss picking in the lottery, a seemingly inequitable trade-off that can make teams queasy about chasing a lower seed. What is the point of…
By WARREN YIU The Boston Celtics, with their treasure trove of accumulated assets, were perfectly positioned to strike. After all, this was the plan all along. The Celtics understood that the window of title contention with their modern Big 3 of Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen had drawn to a close. That July 2013 trade of…
By WARREN YIU My initial reaction of the Tiago Splitter trade to the Atlanta Hawks was mixed. On the one hand, it was a perfectly reasonable move designed to clear cap space for the LaMarcus Aldridge Sweepstakes. On the other, it signalled the end of Splitter’s time with a franchise in which he helped to propel…
By WARREN YIU Lance Stephenson improbably became the worst player in the NBA this past regular season. He sported the lowest win shares in the league at -0.9, per Basketball Reference, meaning he was the only player in the league to cost his team a win during the regular season just by being on the…
By WARREN YIU In one of my favourite sequences of Game 2 of this crazy Finals, the Warriors tried to generate pace into their offense by going to their small lineup of Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson. Andre Iguodala, Harrison Barnes and Draymond Green at center. The Cavs countered by having their giant human, Timofey Mozgoz…
By WARREN YIU Gosh, I miss this. It seems like eons since we last saw Timmy clowning fools from the left block on a regular basis. In recent years much has been said about the demise of the post up, as more and more NBA teams adopted spread offense principles centered around penetrating guards, lob-finishing…
By WARREN YIU At last we’re here. Two teams remain out of a field of thirty, and it feels about right that these two teams were the best this season. The Golden Freaking State Warriors were the class of the Western Conference for season 2014/15, winning a franchise-best 67 games, 11 games better than the…