Upon my entering of the Palestra I was both honored that my graduate alma mater would be hosting this event and disgraced when I saw the free t-shirt given to me – it had nothing to do with the Sixers, but was simply a black shirt containing NBA propaganda and logo.

As I made my way to the stands I was actually quite surprised by the number of people there. I arrived around 5:15pm with plenty of time to settle in and find a nice seat amongst the Sixers fans. As I looked around I was quite surprised at the number of Charlotte Bobcats and Indiana Pacers fans there – none. Anyway, after the Sixers dancers danced their lovely dances and shook their lovely dance-shakers, we were soon greeted by the players who threw miniature toy basketballs into the stands. Most of the players just chucked them up where the large crowd was hovering on the sides. Hawes, though, tried to be cool and throw one length-wise across the arena and into a small crowd of people, but missed. Hilarity ensued.

After Iguodala and Brand spoke to the fans, Sweet Lou got up on the mic and beat-boxed a thank you speech (at least in my mind he did). Then, Doug Collins himself let everybody know that this team plans on working hard and improving from last year. In fact, 50 wins would certainly be the obtainable goal if this season were 82 games long, but it’s not, so they won’t be winning that many games.

The team went through a series of warm-up and conditioning sets, then through some impressive-looking four-on-four and five-on-five defensive drills. Speezy, however, just took to spinning in circles and trying to bounce a basketball off his head. He failed at this several times.

During the drills and entertaining scrimmage I made a number of observations. Feel free to read through these or just laugh at my inability to pull a Stefanski and make basketball sense.

Notes:

• I was impressed with Silas’ shooting form. He looks like he has a solid shot, and also decent handles. I’d like to see the him get signed as a backup PG.
  
  
• Speights just looks lost out there. He seems so talented, but has one too many screws loose. He also looks out of game shape. Everyone already knew this, I’m just restating it after observation from close-up. In my honest opinion, he’s literally a brain away from being a great contributor on this team. How much do brains go for these days?

• Iguodala clearly looks like the best player on the team. He was hitting a lot of his shots tonight, so that’s at least a good sign. Most of the jumpers he took were plays set-up when his feet were set. If he’s going to take jumpers, I’d like to see them taken in this way.
  
  
• Another interesting note is that Iguodala and Meeks were taking perimeter shots together at the beginning. This was the first time I was able to get a closer look at Meeks and Iguodala shooting side by side in consecutive fashion. Meeks, of course, has the more refined stroke. However, seeing it next to Iguodala’s made me appreciate Meeks’ shot that much more. His release is quicker and of course his form is better. His role between Iguodala and Jrue should not be underestimated.
  
  
• I was impressed with a bunch of Jrue’s playmaking and driving. However, he seems to struggle when he tries to drive and gets cut-off with a double-team. Something I’ll keep my eyes on when I watch them play for real.

• There was one play in particular where Holiday drove into traffic, did an amazing spin move and went up for the lay-up. I’m not sure if he could pull that off against the more athletic bigs in the league, but it was definitely impressive. I hope to see more of these aggressive drives from him this season.

• Iguodala and Lou were the only ones drawing fouls – no surprise there

• Brand was Brand, Meeks was Meeks, and Hawes was Hawes. Hawes, though, did have one bizarre fast-break dunk. Not too many teams would allow this to happen.

• Thad hit some jumpers, but I still wasn’t convinced that he can hit them consistently. His release is kind of slow and awkward.

• Voose looks lost. He did have a block on Hawes. Funny to see too relatively unathletic centers try to defend each other.

• Collins basically sat there and let the other coaches run the show. I liked this. If, in the past, he used to wear on the players by getting on them all the time, taking a more passive role like he was should help to alleviate whatever tension might build-up over time.

• Also, defense on both sides looked solid. It was interesting to see Iguodala guarding Lou. Lou got past him on a couple of drives, although he didn’t get into the lane and Brand helped pretty well to push Lou to the baseline.

• Brackins played at the three and struggled guarding Iguodala.

• Silas struggled guarding Jrue. Definitely a difference between the bench players trying to defend and the starters. Regardless, there was enough cohesion to convince me that they look ready to start the season strong.

One of our beloved libertyballers commenters, LeQuan, gave me the idea for this activity when stating these words (in reality, they've been restated constantly to a point where that's his only argument):

"I hope the new management has the guts to come in and recognize that this team isn’t a piece or two(or five) away, but it’s a fundamentally flawed mess.

We don’t have wings that can shoot/slash with consistency. Infact, the only “wing” that qualifies is Jrue Holiday. Meeks is a bench player. We don’t have guys that can also play good defense if they are good offensively(Thad, Lou suck at it) and Brand’s the only exception."

Be that as it may, if you are completely bored and have nothing better to do, I challenge you to act as GM and choose four other players that you think would effectively work alongside Jrue. The goal here is to try to create the best 5-man, Jrue Holiday-led roster under the following conditions.....

(Check for conditions after the jump)

Continue reading this post »

Say after CBA discussions are finalized and the attention is turned to signing players...

What do you think is a reasonable contract for Thad? Don't look at it from a game-by-game analysis like some of us do (you know who you are). Rather, think about his performance this season.

A couple of stats to throw out, which may be helpful (unless of course you judge with your eyes and ignore things you don't understand):

28.2 Min
12.4 PPG
50.6% FG
4.9 rebounds
6.3 rebounds/36 min
13.1 Drb%
52.5% eFG
54.9% TS
15.9 PER
.103 Win/48min

These numbers are in a vacuum, but feel free to use the baketball reference player comparison.

Stats compiled from basketballreference.com

Some thoughts after the quote-unquote jump:

Continue reading this post »

After Sam Dalembert was traded, a lot of sixers fans were left scratching their heads. Afterall, Sam was the only big on our team that gave us consistent rebounding, shot blocking, and competent defense. More so, he was a presence in the paint. You could literally see the difference it made having him in the line-up as opposed to on the bench. So why Dalembert was traded for a 22 year old center who lacks rebounding and defense and a "tough guy" with a DUI who plays a position currently clogged on our roster is beyond me.

If we draft Turner in the coming days we will have the starting PG/SG/SF position locked up defensively. However, this leaves a hole in our front court. If we don't have a competent big on our roster, how can we possibly be a good defensive team next season?

To cheer myself up (ok, it's because I'm a loser and had too much free time on my hands today), I decided to take a look at Collin's coaching history and compile a list of the bigs (those listed as C or F-C) for each of his complete seasons (thus, Pistons '97-'98 is not included). I've listed each player's offensive and defensive rebounding percentage (ORB% & DRB%), offensive and defensive rating (Ortg & Drtg), and offensive and defensive win shares (OWS & DWS) in the tables. Above the tables I've listed the season, record, ppg, oppg, and offensive and defensive ratings.


After the jump, you can take a look at all of the cool things I've compiled and read the observations/analysis and/or use the information to make your own observations/analysis.

All information listed was derived from www.basketballreference.com

Continue reading this post »

I'm bored and so I decided to do a little research on the sixers' newly acquired center. In order for the fans to become acquainted with him, some of these details (some of them are laughable) might be of help:
The following information is provided courtesy of www.nba.com

As for his playing statistics, his best year seemed to be with the Bobcats about five years ago when he averaged 31.6 minutes per game with 13 points and 7.4 rebounds. He shot over 51%. Of course, his productivity increased or decreased proportionately with his playing time. He doesn't have the shotblocking skills in comparison to Theo Ratliff, but he is younger, taller, and weighs more and therefore could be more useful against taller/bigger centers.  I didn't know anything about this guy before, but he just might be a decent third-string center.

I`m not sure if someone wrote about this topic before, and if they did, my apologies for the redundancy.

Anyway, over the past week or so I have come across a lot of blog posts (on other websites) where angry Philadelphia sports fans are complaining about the off-season and the "lack of aggressiveness" with regards to free agents this summer.

It seems most people feel the team should have been more aggressive and tried to obtain the best free agents on the market this year. The fans are impatient (this is typical in Philadelphia), they are tired of seeing a .500 team and they want some kind of response. They want a competitive team no matter what it takes. Aside from the idiots who want to see Iverson back on this team, most felt we should have been more aggressive in obtaining a shooting guard or a point guard. Upon the mentioning of luxury tax, this was irrelevent to them.  The attitude is, if the team cares about the fans, and thus, the purchasing of season tickets, the front office would go after the best free agents possible to make the team "more competitive."

I tend to be a little more conservative with my beliefs. If a front office is not wanting to go over the luxury tax threshold, I pause, and ask "why?" From my understanding, the team wants to develop their young core of talented players. It seems as if these players will need at least another year to develop. I imagine after Thad and Speights` rookie contracts expire, they will want to resign them. Afterall, I see them becoming very good players. So I can see why the sixers desire to preserve a little cap space. After their rookie contracts expire, these players will have been on the team for a few years, hopefully under a solid coach, with a group of players they know well. So I can also see the logic behing wanting to build up a team rather than acting rashly and trying to get the biggest names out on the market. This is also why I didn`t really mind seeing Andre Miller leave. I like the guy, he`s a solid player, but I know developing the younger players is more important for the future.

So anyway, I would like to hear what you think...

Is it best for the sixers to avoid the luxury tax?

Do you think this team is going anywhere with a core of Thad, Iguodala, Speights, Jrue, and four more years of Elton Brand?

arigatou gozaimasu