DISMEMBER THE ALAMO
-VS-
Game Time Start: 8:30 PM EST
Where: AT&T Center, San Antonio, TX
Officials: J. Phillips, D. Taylor, J. Tiven
Media Notes: Indiana Notes, San Antonio Notes
Television: FOX Sports Indiana / FOX Sports Southwest
Radio: WFNI 1070 AM, 107.5 FM / WOAI 1200 AM, KCOR 1350 AM
NBA Feeds:
*NBA Audio League Pass (available free to NBA All-Access members)
*NBA League Pass Broadband (subscription req'd)
*NBA League Pass Broadband (subscription req'd)
REMINDER: Per PD policy, please do not share a link to, describe how to search for, request a link to, or request a PM about streaming video of a NBA game that is not coming directly through the NBA. Not even in a "wink-wink, nudge-nudge, know-what-I-mean" round-about sort of way. Thank you
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PACERS Paul George - Fractured Right Tibia/Fibula (out) Roy Hibbert – Sprained Left Ankle (day-to-day) George Hill – Bruised Left Knee (out) C.J. Watson – Bruised Right Foot (out) David West – Sprained Right Ankle (out) SPURS Matt Bonner - Stomach Virus (probable) Cory Joseph - Sprained Left Ankle (doubtful) Patty Mills - Right Shoulder Surgery (out) Tiago Splitter - Tightness, Right Calf (out) |
The Spurs and Pacers met in San Antonio for a game, with Indiana emerging victorious 117-100. One starter on each side failed to score in double figures. Who were they? |
A. Vinny Del Negro, Mark Jackson B. Dale Davis, Dennis Rodman C. Dale Davis, Vinny Del Negro D. Mark Jackson, Dennis Rodman |
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Aaron McGuire: NBA Bouillon Report - Whose Stock is Boiling? NOTE: Technically, broth and stock are different things. I realize this. For the purposes of this post, I am also totally ignoring this important fact. Sorry, foodies. Boullion is one of my favorite things. Nah, not the boxed stuff -- the real deal. The kinds of stay-at-home stocks that take a ton of hands-on effort, where you buy a ton of aromatics and simmer off a beautiful homemade stock that brightens every soup or reduction you make in subsequent weeks. (Or, if you're not a vegetarian, the kind where you buy a bunch of unloved chicken pieces and some gelatin and turn it into God's gift to liquids.) That's my jam. You can't always have a stay-at-home stock, of course -- sometimes you need to resort to boxed stocks. Oftentimes you have to resort to bouillon cubes, those overly salty flavor bases without texture or complexity. Sometimes, in darker hours still, you find yourself in a kitchen bereft of any of better option and need to resort to canned stock. The hard times. The painful hours. Similarly, the NBA is one of my favorite things. If you look hard enough, you can find a similar hierarchy among the NBA's landscape. You have the teams spinning full-force brilliance on a nightly basis, putting up best-in-class entertainment with unmistakable style. You have the imitations, too -- the teams that are ALMOST there, but lack the creativity and pizzazz to make that last leap. You have the workaday teams that are a bit too salty and a bit too drab but good enough for a simple soup. You have the teams whose inspiration and guile seem to come from the world's worst can of Campbell's soup. And you have the teams who are, for all intents and purposes, not stock at all. (Looking at you, Philly.) In this post, I will isolate one man's opinion about the varied classes of stock in our noble league. Who's home-made? Who's a suitable workaday stock from a box? Who's a salty over- seasoned mess? I'll highlight one representative example from each class and split the rest of the league between these slightly confusing tiers of watchability and talent. The league's stock is coming to a boil, it's time to take its temperature... because it depends on your altitude, since boiling point changes with altitude. This is the stock report everyone wants to read thin winter. Jim Cramer, eat your heart out. • • • THE NBA'S HOME-MADE STOCK STOCK DEFINITION: The crème de la crème of stock. Lightly simmered and carefully constructed, the perfect home-made stock is rich without the overpowering saltiness of its lesser iterations. Perfect for virtually every cooking application you can imagine using broth in, and perfect for a few things you can't. This is the stock you can't miss. If I'm looking for the 2015 season's best overall experience, I'd have to start with the Golden State Warriors. They've got it it all. They've got the fundamentals at their back, with a compelling west-heavy schedule and a competitive division race against the Los Angeles Clippers. They play fun basketball, pushing the tempo at the NBA's fastest pace and featuring (in this man's opinion) the most entertaining player in the NBA's top five with Stephen Curry. His three point accuracy is legendary, and even his dumbest game-by-game mistakes (his often inane turnovers) are fun to watch in a slapstick comedy sort of way. They feature two of the NBA's best defensive players (Bogut/Iguodala), both of whom are fun to watch even when their offense is flailing. They feature Klay Thompson, who's been the NBA's best shooting guard in the early reaches of the season. And they feature one of the best uniforms in the league. As a full package, the Warriors are almost unbeatable. So they'd head up this category. As with real life, home-made stock is hard to come by. There aren't that many other teams that deserve this lofty designation. The only other two that come to mind: The Portland Trail Blazers and the Dallas Mavericks. Neither of them are quite as good of a team as the Warriors, at least in the early season, but they're very nearly as entertaining. The Warriors generally win on the strength of their defense -- Portland and Dallas both claim a blitzing offensive attack as a mark of their triumph, and it's been a lot of fun to watch. Portland's offense is roughly the same as last year, bolstered slightly by an improved bench and some inspired play from the fill-ins for their stars. (Really, Stotts was able to fill Allen Crabbe and Meyers Leonard for Batum and Aldridge off a few recent injuries. Everyone's getting better!) As with the Warriors, they're a full package -- contention, watchability, and interesting (if not perfect) play on both ends of the floor. The Blazers don't have nearly the defensive chops that Golden State sports, but this year they've upped the help defense and shored up some of their larger-scale defensive problems that torpedoed them against the Spurs last year, and they're a tiny bit more balanced. They're a team to watch. The Mavericks are a special case. Part of what makes them so interesting is their utterly horrible defense -- I'd consider Dallas one of the league's best bouillon teams regardless. Their offense is that good. The distance between Dallas' top offense and the #2 offense in the league (Toronto) is equivalent to the distance between Toronto and league average (Memphis). They're playing offense on an entirely different level than anyone else right now, and exceptional edge cases like that can override a few serious flaws. Also, as noted above, fulfillment and failure are never completely separate. It's not simply THAT you fail, it's HOW you fail. From that perspective, Dallas fails in a way that's fun to watch -- you're almost always looking at the opposing team's best foot forward on offense, and their defense is so bad that it circles around and becomes fun. A must-watch. • • • THE NBA'S BOXED STOCK STOCK DEFINITION: When you're looking for stock, boxed stock is usually your second best bet. Absent the tinny flavor of canned stock, boxed stock generally doesn't last quite as long (not as many preservatives) but the grotesque aftertaste fades. Hardly perfect, but good in a pinch. For this definition, we're going with the best possible boxed stocks, the ones where you can taste the different ingredients that went into the stock and reduce it a bit without turning your food into a salty mess. When you're trying to analyze a league or a group through weird analogies, it's usually pretty easy to identify a league's best-of-the-best and the worst-of-the-worst. It's much tougher to look at the landscape and figure out the gradations between those two designations, especially since the best and the worst encompass only 4-5 teams. Never fear, however -- in the early season, there are a few distinct classes of teams within the "not quite home-made stock, but certainly not bad" designation. To wit: The Title Chasers -- These are the ones that aren't quite the must-watch, must-digest teams as the perfect three above, but they're title-chasing teams with serious aspirations and serious talent. The Houston Rockets aren't nearly as watchable as the above teams, but they've been downright excellent on the defensive end this year with Ariza spotting Parsons' old minutes and a rejuvenated Dwight Howard. They're not a must-watch (no contender that depends on foul shots and James Harden is), but they're a strong team and a great choice for a random night game. Memphis is very nearly in the above bucket, as their defense/offense mix has been about as close to my platonic ideal of a defensive juggernaut as it could possibly be. I love Gasol, I love Z-Bo, I love Conley. They're great. Maybe they belong in the above category, actually. The Young Upstarts -- This list is highlighted by Anthony Davis' New Orleans Pelicans, who serve as one of the league's most entertaining teams with Davis on the court and one of the league's most mediocre with Davis on the bench. The entertainment they provide is almost entirely related to the amount of Anthony Davis on your TV screen. Nature of the beast. You also have the Raptors, a hard-to-believe-in yet delightfully tame group of players that look likely to snag a top-4 seed and a better playoff run than last year's disappointing bow-out. The Kings are much like the Pelicans -- terrible without DeMarcus Cousins on the court, a must-watch with Boogie at the helm. (NOTE: There will be more on the Kings. I love these Kings.) The Hopeless Scamps -- These teams kind of suck, but they're really entertaining and interesting regardless. Start with the Boston Celtics, who've been a surprisingly fun watch. They go heavy on the passing (as you'd expect from a Rondo team) and have several delightful pet plays for well-designed layup conversions. Very fun. The Pacers are in this box too, although I get the feeling I'm alone on the "Indiana is fun!" train. Watching Solomon Hill do work as a team's leading light is one of the weirdest things going in the NBA this season, and Roy Hibbert has been absolutely amazing for them. No, really. Look at his statlines, and watch a few Pacers game. He's absolutely carrying their defense on his shoulders right now. It's impressive. And he's doing it without most of his best running mates. He deserves an all-star spot (or DPoY) even more right now than he did last season. The Charlotte Hornets have been really atrocious this season, but as expected, their confluence of talent is solid and the overall product is intriguing. Cody Zeller is quietly developing into an actual NBA talent (his two-man game with Lance Stephenson is one of the neater things about these Hornets) and even though they look like a pretty awful team they play with an odd style that makes them fun and engaging. Finally? The Utah Jazz. They've been bad-but-entertaining, with Quin Snyder's rotations a refreshing exultation of Utah's best players instead of the constant veteran-emphasized lineups Tyrone Corbin tortured Jazz fans with for years. Hayward has been surprisingly good, Dante Exum is fun, and... let's just not talk about Trey Burke, thanks. The world of boxed stocks is dangerous. It's hardly as can't-lose as a well-crafted homemade blend...CONTINUE READING AT GOTHIC GINOBILI |
Pacers Candace Buckner @CandaceDBuckner Jared Wade @8pts9secs Tim Donahue @TimDonahue8p9s Tom Lewis @indycornrows Ian Levy @HickoryHigh Whitney @its_whitney |
Spurs Jeff McDonald @JMcDonald_SAEN Aaron McGuire @docrostov Timothy Varner @varner48MoH Graydon Gordian @therealgraydon Andrew McNeill @drew_48MoH J.R. Wilco @jollyrogerwilco |
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