DanteGabriel

I'm pretty sad to lose Marcus Smart. Occasionally infuriating, but he always seemed to be able to make some game-changing improbable play at the end of games. I understand the logic getting Porzingis. Wish they could have dealt Brogdon instead. I guess Derrick White becomes the starting PG and hopefully Porzingis stays healthy and lets Horford rest more.

Wow, I had no idea Modelo had gotten that popular, even though it's been my regular beer for years. Negra when the weather is cool, Especial when it's hot.

I read through this entire thread over the course of a couple of days and I really really tried to extend some patience your way, but here is where you conclusively lost me. First of all, tedious? Seriously, pot meet kettle. I get that DMC rubs people the wrong way but I thought his questions were pretty incisive and kept waiting for you to at least address them instead of whining about how he hasn't treated you with sufficient respect for you to deign to address him. If you're going to ignore him, just ignore him. But it is a ridiculous performance to repeatedly tell him you don't like how he says things so you won't actually engage with him when he's actually asked you directly to clarify several points. This comes across like a pretty stale and cowardly defense. Oh, poor me, I'm just a mere mortal humbly expressing my ideas so I must be afforded some grace when I make mistakes, but if anyone pushes back against my claims, I wasn't saying what you said I'm saying, and you were obviously just misreading me, and solely interested in attacking me. Half of your responses in this thread have been criticisms of the comments of others. If you are really interested in furtherance of communication, why not answer DMC's critiques, not for his own benefit, but for other people reading this thread? You've had plenty of posts to try to unpack whatever it is you're trying to unpack and I've gotten no more than you think some leftists do things that are counterproductive to their causes, which has never been denied. I think it's bad faith to automatically accuse someone of bad faith just because they thought one of your points was dumb. Not everyone is arguing with you just because they're biased or personally out to slander you. If this is how you respond to even mild hostility (and not every poster you refuse to respond to has been hostile) then everything will be an exercise in futility. If you want to make yourself into some martyr of a reasonable leftist, victimized by vicious extremists, you have to actually take some wounds. It seems to me DMC and Raja and plenty of others did point out concrete parts of your arguments that they took issue with, but you deflected by claiming they were too disrespectful of your augustly flawed self for you to properly address them. Why does Week need to restate the questions if he, and others, just want to see you directly address DMC's questions? Are you grading papers or are you participating in a discussion that you purport is about precise and patient communication? I think you vastly overestimate your own entertainment value. Watching DMC and Ty split hairs about Ty's favorite NBA players for the hundredth time has more entertainment value than this bizarre dance you're doing where you make profound statements about The Left, then walk them back, plead misunderstanding, or whine about disrespect whenever someone responds. It looked to me like others were treating you like any other forum poster and you took offense at a pretty typical level of pushback, or made repeated complaints about how they didn't put in sufficient work to respond to your two-whole-hours-of-effort posts. Responding to DMC's questions the first or second time he asked would have surely been less effort than... all this.

Surely the answer depends on if you're asking a Reform or Orthodox Jew.

I'ma let you have that one because I know you never get to say it.

And if any bleeding hearts do sneak through the process, they'll be frozen out, forced out, or otherwise sabotaged.

Go Nuggets!

God they can't makes 3s or layups.

Apparently when the Celtics challenged the foul called on Horford, that gave the refs time to review and reset the clock. So, more created luck. Seems like every championship requires some lucky breaks along the way. Oh, I don't know, I can see the Celtics getting high on their own farts again and blowing it.

It was an amazing play and sure, lucky. I think, though, this was one of those situations where "You make your own luck" applies. Derrick White was the inbounder and yet managed to crash in from the baseline in two seconds. Spoelstra said afterwards that the ball went the only place it could have gone for the Celtics to be able to put it back, which strikes me as wishful thinking, or maybe you have to tell yourself that after that kind of reversal. If the ball had gone the other way, Tatum was above the rim on the other side. Or it could have just gone in instead of rimming out. There were many ways that ball could have gone that led to their loss.

I feared it, but damn I thought the Celtics had at least grown enough to make a series of it. I never imagined this kind of pants-shitting. I can't even with these fucking guys.

Point taken. It's just that I've switched most of my emotional investment into the Celtics and Bruins over the last few years. I would trade the last Sox and Pats championships for just one for either of the Garden teams. ETA: I don't read the dating thread because I'm a boring married suburban dad and it seems... I dunno, voyeuristic or something to read about y'alls romantic travails.

Also, the threes and layups strategy doesn't work when you brick so many open looks. So frustrating.

Is watching the Celtics and Bruins choke our karma for the Patriots?

Watching Jimmy Butler has not been fun.

Wicked pissah!

Seriously, when you find yourself defending the papps as "working media" maybe it's time for a perspective check. I guess Piers Morgan is just a hard-nosed truth-seeking journalist as well.

I am shocked, absolutely shocked, to find HoI trying to polish a turd of a right wing position by pretending it is the most anodyne sloganeering instead of acknowledging the context of policies meant to elevate the "traditional family" above others.

That may be so, as I haven't watched that much of the Heat in these playoffs, but Butler's killer instinct seems Jordan-esque. Not only did the Sixers pay handsomely to get Fultz over Tatum, but they also let Butler walk to keep Simmons. Obviously a massive dose of hindsight, but wow, just wow.

I guess with 51 points in a Game 7 he's now second best again? Others have already taken you to task well enough for this but I, a Celtics fan, never had him in the top five. Even now probably not. The MVP chants are borderline embarrassing. That being said, I've had my own concerns about his ability to take over when needed. The end of Game 6 was great but it felt like the guy got hailed as a hero for pulling a drowning kid out of the water when he bumped the kid in in the first place. Every time he's had a crap performance in the playoffs I muttered dire things about him being more Carmelo than Bird. But he has at least found ways to contribute when his shot wasn't falling and I haven't questioned his effort. If only we could get him to stop whining to the refs so much. I'm pretty scared of the Heat. Butler is kinda what I hope Tatum will grow into.

When I want to drive myself crazy I think about how different things might have been if those dingbats in Florida's election committee who designed the infamous "butterfly ballots" had actually been competent, and hadn't resulted in a bunch of Democrats mistakenly voting for Pat Buchanan. For want of a usability designer, the republic was lost.

You know, I read that part of Belichick's motivation to trade back was to allow the Steelers to pick the OT the Jets wanted, but I didn't realize the Jets had put themselves into that position in the first place.

Um, because it's their literal job? Because they have analytics people, scouts, cap managers, etc informing their decisions? That is objectively going to lead to better outcomes than Durant deciding he wants to play with DeAndre Drummond. Obviously some front offices suck and some players are actually pretty good evaluators of talent (LeBron probably is). But those are outliers. And of fucking course you were race-baiting. Otherwise why bring up white execs and black players? The implicit purpose of every professional sports franchise is to win games and compete for championships, and it's nice if they can also do it sustainably. Team-building via players' friendships is not likely to achieve those ends. Is that a fair and accurate statement? Sure, cynical me knows that professional sports franchises exist to provide circuses to distract the masses and funnel their money into the pockets of billionaires, but it seems pretty pointless to evaluate team building strategies from there, and we'd need to move that to the politics threads. This is a weird and obscure hill to plant your flag, even for you.

Hey I like race-baiting as much as the next tyrannical liberal, but come on. A front office's job is to assemble a team. They would theoretically have a more dispassionate and balanced method of roster building than Durant recruiting his friends. Masai Ujiri builds a super team? Great. Luka decides to put together his own team? Probably headed for disaster.