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By: John Eby
No Hard Feelings - Leading up to the showdown against L.A. on Thursday night, Pau Gasol is cool with Dwight. From ESPN Los Angeles:
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"He made his decision and felt like that was the best choice for him and so you respect him for it and that's it," Lakers forward Pau Gasol said. "A lot of things went wrong last year for sure. There was a lot of adversity. Nothing really clicked. So it was a tough year for everyone. Not for one individual. Pretty much for the entire team it was a tough year to go through."
Kobe Bryant? Not so much. He and Dwight aren't on speaking terms.
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Bryant told reporters during the team's media day in September that he didn't "really give a s---" about Howard's decision anymore, but delved further into the subject Tuesday during an interview with NBA TV.
"We have two different personalities," Bryant said. "There's a certain way that I believe you have to approach the game in order to win championships. He had a different way that he felt like would be best and because of that it was tough to see eye to eye on [a] daily basis."
The world is so much easier to navigate when people act like caricatures of themselves. Thanks, Kobe.
ICYMI - This is what Harden and Howard did to Portland on Tuesday night.
Harden's last shot--a stepback over Nicolas Batum--was absolute trolling. If Batum is known for anything, it's his insanely long arms and ability to close out. Harden went right at his opponent's greatest strength and neutered it.
Trends - At Hickory High, Andy Liu examines Houston's counter-cultural move to play Asik and Howard together.
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But the point here remains that Morey is unafraid to see where the league is heading; each team chock-full of shooters or defenders, or both in one, and looking to push its tempo at all times, and go against the grain, relatively. Morey has already used his assets to acquire his top-level talent while teams are just now attempting to do the same. While teams are going small: like Carmelo Anthony at power forward (though we’re still not sure what Mike Woodson is doing this year), some clamoring for Harrison Barnes at the four, and numerous other teams opting for shooting over size at traditional power positions; the Rockets have somewhat bucked their own trend in trying this experiment.
Liu's article kind of dances around another related issue about roster building. How much are effective lineups determined by matchup trends across the league? Right now, there is a decent body of evidence to support the evidence of smallball, especially on offense. But as traditional twin towers lineups become more and more rare, will smallball lineups run afoul of the law of diminishing returns?
Basketball is never played in a vacuum. Sometimes a lineup that produces wins for 81 games can be destroyed by a bad matchup in game 82. The question for Daryl Morey is whether to trade Asik for a player who can make the starting lineup purr, or keep him so Houston can bludgeon small teams with a mismatch.
Tweet That - Daryl Morey with the ambiguous tweet of the night.
GOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!!
— Daryl Morey (@dmorey) November 7, 2013
This tweet came around the same time that Stephen Curry went to the locker room with a foot injury against the T-Wolves (honestly, the biggest things standing between GSW and a championship are Curry's ankles). Or maybe he was just rooting for the Houston Dynamo, which was playing the New York Red Bulls last night. You can draw your own conclusions.
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