HALLELUKA: Luka Clinches All-NBA 1st team. 4th in 5 years

[mavsluvr]

Maybe I'm just a patsy, but...




END results? They just got here! I guess by "end result" you mean the result of their first offseason. 




Kidd was saying "we'll see what we have around Christmas" and "we can't just rely on the 3 pt shots" in the preseason, not while they were struggling. 




I don't think this is true for all fans. I see progress. I see fans with more basketball smarts than I (at least one of them, anyway) detailing progress. 




No doubt, but the stuff I listen to is what the poeple involved say, not PR releases. Do you think Kidd and Nico just tell the press things they're told to say? 



Yes, for sure! I'm in no way certain that this will all work. 


I'm not responding to anything based on whether it's positive or negative. I always hate when conversation fails to engage anything real and just devolves into positive vs. negative. My take is that I could see this process leading to either exciting or disappointing results. I have no idea which it will be. 

Seems like the meat of this particular back and forth, which (this discussion) is probably pretty far down in the weeds, is whether Nico and Kidd have told us things that reflect what they're actually attempting to do, or that they're simply repeating things fed to them by the PR department and that the things said do not reflect their behind the scenes efforts. 

Like I said, maybe I'm a patsy, but I believe they're efforting to do the things that they're telling us that they're doing. And I like some things about what they say they're trying to do. 

Whether or not they're successful within a reasonable time span is a different question.

Yeah, I don't think we disagree. 

When I say "hype," I don't mean "lying." I mean more like "advertising," where you emphasize what you think are your salient points, and talk up the quality of your product. Without going so far as whole-cloth lying, a certain amount of "puffery" is expected. 

I think they are/were trying to do what they said they were aiming for. In the process of advertising, they may have created expectations that turned out to exceed their actual ability to deliver. Not a particular knock on them -- this is pretty much the way retail businesses operate, isn't it? More of a reminder that there is an advertising element in all of this, and that, as discriminating fans, we should be aware that, to some extent, we are being told what we want to hear. 

I don't think that Kidd and Nico are just parroting the PR department and following their "orders." Kidd is actually surprisingly honest, sometimes. Having said that, I don't think I have ever heard Nico say anything that didn't seem like the kind of standard, non-answer pablum that executives deliver. That's not particularly a criticism. That's just a way of dealing with the press. I don't know if Nico has undergone media training at any point in his career, but executives who do are taught how to deliver non-answers in ways that encourage audiences to think they have said more than they really did. 

I still maintain hope and belief that, during this season,  the Mavs will turn into something better than they are currently showing. How much better is a question. I don't rule out the possibility that they really have undergone a significant downgrade in coaching, but hope that is not the case.