Jake

Offensive gameplan continues to be ramming it in there and hoping for a foul call. Doesn't work at the end of games, they won't call that stuff

Pau reminds me of Mike Davis, former Illini. You watch the game and see him blowing opportunities, failing to use his physical tools, etc. but at the end of the game he has an impressive stat line so you don't know how to evaluate him

Seems like our main plan on offense is pray for foul calls

Pau has been highly uninspiring

I've been a big Thibs fan, but we haven't looked like a well-coached team in this series.

I'm not going to say the officiating has been biased, but it's certainly bad. They'll let all kinds of contact go at the hoop on both ends and then suddenly call a touch foul on the floor or call a clean block a foul. The Bulls need a game where fouls are called on those physical plays and they aren't happening.

If that's the only reason they've been carrying Kendrick Perkins, there's no reason to have Kendrick Perkins. You need your vets to keep everyone's collective cool, not instigate more cheapshotting after you've already lost a guy

The bright side of failing to steal that game is that it gives us a chance to play a lot cleaner game heading into the next round. They have played so little together that every additional game of prep they can get makes a difference.

grumble grumble something about Reinsdorf

Rose for Love might have been the one trade where the team did get better in the short term

I'll stand by what I said then which is that there's no way you'd trade for Love and have a better team in the near term.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 22, 2015 -> 03:12 PM) Bosh is a much better all around player for sure. I remember when Love was a top 5 player in the league, AKA when we were supposed to trade everything in the world for him or else the FO was incompetent

I wouldn't expect much from Russell this year. I see him as a guy whose bat may not really pan out, and even if it does I don't see major upside in it - though it's high upside for a legitimate SS. I think they've rushed him, considering how his BB% dropped from 12% in A+ to 4% in AA last year. Hasn't been remarkable in AAA this season. Very, very young though, lots of time to get better.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 20, 2015 -> 02:44 PM) TBH, I'd rather get 25 minutes of 110% Derrick Rose who attacks the rim, than 40 minutes of 80% Derrick Rose who just shoots 3's. Sure, but I'd like 40 minutes of 110% Derrick Rose when I need it

ptatc, what's your read on the cause of Mark Prior's injury issues and some others who have been lumped in with him as Tom House guys? I've heard a lot of talk about the "inverted W" and more generally the arm coming through late. Is that what you're thinking about in terms of the chief injury risk of that approach? I say this because for a long time I saw a Tom House instructor (and a couple of times the man himself) and I was encouraged to go with what felt natural in terms of arm slot and position throughout the delivery, which in my case meant taking it out low and throwing 3/4. Of course, the arm slot kept dropping as my labrum tear got more severe...

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Apr 19, 2015 -> 08:33 AM) When Rose is penetrating, he still looks like a HOFer. And thank God Pau can at least block shots. If he couldn't, he would make Boozer look like a lockdown defender. QUOTE (Brian @ Apr 19, 2015 -> 09:42 AM) I actually asked myself that yesterday. Were we actually a better defensive team with Boozer the past few years? I still take Pau's offense over him all day. I saw a really good breakdown someplace, maybe it was linked here, showing why Boozer is probably better for this team's defense than Pau. Not so much because Boozer is a better defender, but because Pau isn't well-suited to do what we ask him to and he seems wholly unwilling to try it. At this stage, of course, Boozer isn't really an offensive contributor so it isn't as if you'd really want to swap them. QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Apr 20, 2015 -> 08:47 AM) We will see if Rose can keep up the tenacity tonight. I am very excited for this game! He looked gassed a lot in Game 1. I hope he can get his wind back before round 2.

Well the answer is no. Sanchez should have started the year at 2B. You have to give Micah a little time now that you've gone with him. It's tough to say how he's played. His defense looks very bad, as expected. He hasn't looked good on the bases, but we haven't seen much of him there and it's quite plausible that he ends up looking good in that regard. His results are mixed enough at the plate that it's hard to take much away from that, either. We have to make him make the decision for us and you just won't know anything after only a couple weeks. The first instance where I'd begin considering a swap between him and Sanchez is once we've hit about the 30 game mark, and in that case only if Micah is clearly just not going to do well this year. We are eager to penalize Sanchez for an allegedly low ceiling - which isn't untrue - but the question is who has the best chance of being good right now. Sanchez is a very good defender so we can rest easy knowing that a worst case in terms of defensive impact from him will be something like league average. While Sanchez doesn't look like he'll ever draw a lot of walks or hit for power, he's been productive everywhere except his age 21 season in AAA, where he wasn't exactly terrible. I think we are really, really overvaluing the difference in baserunning value between the two players, especially when the fast guy was 22/35 in SB last season. I think Micah could be good and he has some of those signs of a guy who will just produce despite meager high-level production. I wouldn't have chosen him over the younger, lower-risk option in Sanchez. I think Micah would have benefited in playing more AAA competition, since we have usually seen him struggle at each level before starting to hit again (though admittedly he's only really hit well in a half-season in A- at age 22 and a month in AA at age 23).

The Royals look like the babies at this point. Yordano and Herrera have both particularly made them look like whiny bullies rather than enforcers.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Apr 20, 2015 -> 11:49 AM) I'm thinking there is a reason he hasn't pitched in a week, and has tallied less than 2 innings this season. Nice observation.

I normally don't like moving guys back and forth between the pen and rotation, but in this case it makes sense. They want him to get prepared for MLB competition in a relatively safe environment and they absolutely have to keep his innings total relatively low this year. This kills two birds with one stone.

Bryant's ceiling really has a hard cap because of how little contact he makes and how, at best, he will be a neutral contributor on defense. FanGraphs called Giancarlo Stanton his ceiling and that makes sense. Giancarlo is a great player, but chances are he'll never be the best because his bat has to outperform guys like Trout's and McCutcheon's AND their defensive and baserunning contributions. So the excitement is certainly justified--who wouldn't want Giancarlo?--but there is a realistic chance of failure, especially if failure means he becomes a mere pretty good (~3 WAR/season) player.

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Apr 16, 2015 -> 01:54 PM) I'm having a difficult time buying that the government has any business telling me what my health care plan has to cover. If I choose to risk not having something covered, what business is that of anybody else? Even if a person wanted to, they would have a hard time grasping what is and isn't covered. The vast majority just aren't going to go through what is necessary to get the best possible handle on things. More convincing to me, though, is that the entire field of behavioral economics is basically designed to tell us why the government has a justifiable role in the health market. People are terrible at judging individual risk, even when the odds are laid out plainly in front of them. Even when they judge their risk correctly, they tend to make the wrong bet anyway. Personal health is incredibly difficult to judge pre-emptively. People won't get it right. Non-behavioral economics would simply suggest that the private healthcare market is alarmingly inefficient in comparison to largely public-controlled health systems around the globe. Here are a couple charts measuring total (public+private) healthcare spending per capita on the x-axis and estimated years of life lost per 100,000 people. The first is for men, the second is for women. It's insane that we spend at least 8x as much as Mexico on healthcare and collectively have gained nothing in terms of loss of life for women. And this isn't like many other sorts of choices people might make that include risk. When you buy spotty insurance, you've put yourself in a position where if any of a certain set of things happen to you, you're automatically either going bankrupt or going to die before you otherwise would (so in this set of choices, if they let you take enough debt to go bankrupt, you've benefited!). The stakes are really high. Remember, upwards of 65% of bankruptcies in the USA are driven by medical debt. Of those with medical debt-induced bankruptcy, 75% have insurance. Between 800k and 1.5 million people file for bankruptcy every year.

The logic that occupation of a territory prevents terrorism is the exact reason that occupation of a territory causes terrorism

QUOTE (Jake @ Apr 16, 2015 -> 10:17 PM) The main injury worries have been for guys that have been Bulls their entire careers - Rose, Noah, Gibson chief among them. My point with this is that this fact makes it difficult to say whether we have crap medical staff, a front office that keeps choosing injury-prone players, or a coach that gets the guys hurt - or some combo of the three.

I'd at least wait until it's clear who he should replace, for now