Maithanet

I thought about making that joke as well. The Russians just hate that place.

Fair enough, we'll see. I am well aware that the Mavs are capable of taking a game or two with hot shooting. They do have Luka after all, you're never going to completely shut that offense down. I nonetheless think OKC is the better team, and I don't even rate OKC terribly highly (I'd put them behind Minn, Denver and Boston).

Yes, he was.

Must be a conference call. "Hello, the United Nations? Please hold."

I hate picketing, but I don't know how to show it.

Slow, awkward man just won his third MVP.

I think you're only saying that because the Mavs got a favorable matchup in the first round which allowed them to advance. The four teams you are comparing them to are all better than Dallas (except Milwaukee I suppose, if we're counting their injured 2024 playoff roster). The Mavs did a decent job of turning around the disasterous roster they had last year, but there's only so much back patting I can give them for that, since that was cleaning up after their own mess. The team improved from a complete dumpsterfire, but still is competing for like the 8-10th best team in the league. That is nothing to be proud of considering they have Luka.

Most All-NBA players are washed by age 28, it is known. Well, he's won either regular season or Finals MVP for four straight years now (once he wins tonight), so that is probably his ceiling. Are you saying he's "only" a middle tier hall of famer, but not top 10 all time? Right now I'm expecting it to be TWolves vs Celtics. I will be rooting for Minnesota, but if both teams are healthyish, I expect the Celtics superior experience to prevail.

I'll admit it might just be my bias because I dislike Irving both on and off the court, but I do not find the Mavericks at all impressive. They beat a flawed Clippers team missing its best player, that's not much of an accomplishment. Would they have beaten the Lakers or the Suns? I doubt it. Could they beat the Nuggets or the Wolves? No. Will they beat the Thunder? Also no. It is hard to figure out how much of the Mavericks poor construction is on the Dallas front office and how much is on Luka, but since he arrived none of his teams look like actual contenders. They are capable of pulling off a surprising upset, but that's as far as it goes. It's a challenge because it is hard to pinpoint exactly what kind of roster you want to build around Luka. Does he require another star playmaker like Irving? Would he be better with an off-ball threat like Jaylen Brown or Aaron Gordon? Or would you be better off remaking the 2017 Rockets with a bunch of great defenders/shooters and rely on Luka to make it happen offensively? I don't have an answer, but none of the teams the Mavericks have put on the court have even been close.

I agree with this argument, but I do think that it sells short what Biden has delivered for Democrats, and if you are talking to people about why you should vote for Biden, you should explore whether another tact is needed. Some people just flatly refuse to believe that Trump is a threat and that the US might change from a real democracy to a sham one. Biden has done a lot of good things (economic stewardship/employment, climate bill, Ukraine). I think that when you make an argument of "it doesn't really matter how fit Biden is, Trump is totally unacceptable", the unspoken assumption is that Biden isn't that great. But Biden has in fact been pretty good, and it serves us all well to point that out.

I thought this would be a challenging series for Denver, since they are a very big and talented defensive team, and a lot of the success in the 2023 playoffs was abusing size mismatches against Miami, LAL and Phoenix. I wasn't particularly surprised that Minnesota took game 1, but I fully expected the Nuggets to bounce back in game two. In the playoffs, when you have two fairly well matched teams, you can count on the more desperate squad to win like 80% of the time. Denver does not want to lose two home games and should have been more desperate, but it didn't show. Even without Gobert (who played well in game 1), the Wolves were still dominant on defense. Murray has been terrible and may be injured. The other starters aren't shot creators, they rely on Murray and Jokic to get them looks. Which means it is all falling on Jokic, and thus far he is stymied. The one reason I won't count Denver out is that experience matters in the playoffs, and this is the first meaningful run for Towns and Edwards. The games only get harder, and if Denver finds a way to bounce back, the pressure might start to get to them. But thus far Minnesota is not just better, but vastly better. Denver needs answers and quick.

I am supporting Biden because I think he has done a pretty decent job. There are some things I obviously disagree with him on, but that is true of every president, and I don't expect that to change. He has pushed harder on climate change and union rights than I expected, overall.

Yeah, Davis Bertans is due $33 million over the next two years, and he is bad at basically every basketball skill except shooting (and he's not an elite shooter). He is barely even a rotation player for $17 mil a year.

I just asked my friends who are Sixers fans and they said that he's still an average NBA player, but he's never been even a top 40 NBA player, which is why his contract was ridiculous from the start. He probably just had a bad game.

His numbers this year weren't terrible, he's just never been a flashy player. He's an above average 3 point shooter and (for most of his career at least) an above average and versatile defender. The kind of guy who can fill up minutes and let your star players do their thing without making your team worse. It is quite possible he's no longer able to keep up defensively (he is almost 32). I haven't watched much of Philly's games this year to say. He gets a lot of hate/scapegoating just because of his contract. The Nuggets looked a LOT more beatable against LAL than they did last year. The big question is whether the competition is going to get better or if the Lakers are basically on par with anyone else in the West. Their depth, while still better than the Lakers, was indeed a problem. I don't imagine they'll be able to survive such a short rotation against Minnesota.

Nuggets-Wolves is the second round series I'm most excited about (regardless of who advances in the remaining matchups). Are the Wolves real contenders? They certainly looked it against Phoenix, but the Nuggets are a much sterner test. The Nuggets have a way of stretching even strong defenses to a breaking point, we'll just have to see if the Wolves can keep up. Should be fun.

The rule of thumb in WW2 was that you could mobilize 10% of your population into uniform. So for a country of 42 million like Ukraine, that would be ~4.2 million men. Ukraine's demographic problems make that probably an overestimate (less of the country is under 40 than most nations in WW2). However, there are also women serving in more roles in Ukraine than most countries did in WW2. So overall I think that Ukraine should be able to put at a minimum 3 million men and women in uniform. Obviously Ukraine doesn't publish exact numbers of military units, but I've seen estimates around 1-1.2 million. This is obviously a huge expansion from where they were in 2022. So the idea that Ukraine cannot expand their military is incorrect. Pulling more men and women into the military would be painful, as civilians help the economy keep going, but it is definitely possible. They would need to be trained, and morale might not be as strong amongst further conscripts than with the current Ukrainian military, but those are challenges, not hard barriers.

So the Bucks are out in the first round again. They keep getting hit with the injury bug at the worst time. They were healthy for thier 2021 run, but since then they've had to deal with injuries to Middleton (2022), Giannis (2023), and Giannis+Lillard+Middleton (2024). Don't know if this team is good enough to beat Denver or Boston, but if they can't stay healthy we'll never find out.

The Harris contract was just what happens when a pretty good player finds incredible leverage. Everyone knew that giving Harris a max contract was a bad move, but letting him walk was also a bad move for Philly, so they chose to paid him. It pretty clearly wasn't the right call, but it wasn't a crazy decision. They had two games won, right up until they didn't. It looked to me like the team with better depth and younger stars could execute better in the final minutes. Who would have thought?

The NBA probably rigged it so that their biggest star and most popular franchise were eliminated in the first round.

They would. The Ukraine-Russia war has been a mixed bag for China, but this would be almost entirely downside.

Also noteworthy that Kazakhstan's 2022 GDP was 40% higher than Ukraine's. Pretty impressive considering that the Kazakhs have half the population. Obviously their GDP is still well behind Russia, but Kazakhstan's ability to defend itself could (and likely will) increase dramatically in the next few years.

The Bengals are certainly on the bigger side, most OTs are somewhere more like 6-5. But the idea that a 6-7 guy is too tall to make it as an OT is simply wrong, there are plenty of offensive tackles in the league that are that height or even taller. If anything, that seems to be the direction that offensive tackles are going (bigger and taller). I remember when he was drafted people marveled at Trent Williams size as well as his athleticism, whereas nowadays 6-5, 320 is fairly normal.

Has any superteam won a title with one of its stars hurt? I don't think they have. I guess you could point to the 2012 Heat which won with Bosh out for the first 4 games of the ECF. He was at less than 100% in the Finals, but he played every game. The '17-'18 Warriors superteam had some minor injury issues, but again not enough that anybody missed much time. The 2015 Cavs and 2019 Warriors were almost good enough to survive a major injury, but in the end both succumbed in six games. But I would not say that Superteams have eliminated injury risks, quite the opposite.

Finally!! https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/biden-administration-plans-reclassify-marijuana-easing-restrictions-na-rcna149424