The Golden State of Mind guys

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[From Vinsanity. This is a maybe-weekly chat with one or more of the guys from Golden State of Mind, who have a team in dreamleague Bay Area...]

Just a little disclaimer: This chat took place shortly after Game 2 of the Western Conference Semi's pitting the Utah Jazz vs. the Golden State Warriors. The Jazz were victorious in the end (winning 127-117 in OT) but were no doubt aided by the free throws woes of Baron Davis and Mickael Pietrus...

Fantasy Junkie: Hey Vinsanity, it's Fantasy Junkie from Golden State of Mind. What a horrible end to that game, someone needs to go practice free throws.

Vinsanity: Hey Fantasy Junkie...yeah...we definitely should have won that game. First Pietrus could have iced it, then Baron...

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TrueHoop: Baron Davis

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Ever since TrueHoop got assimilated into the Borg that is ESPN.com, there hasn't been one single post where you could just forward to your friends without further debate. After all, TrueHoop was supposed to be the facilitator of stories, where one thread could explode into a much bigger, well-rounded, knowledge-enfused medium with the help of its valued commenters. Now in the ESPN cube, you can't so much as make an educated guess as to what to type into your URL box to get there (what's with the "myespn-dot-go-dot-com" nonsense?) -- this is just the tip of the iceberg and Poor Man's Commish promises to make a full frontal assualt on TrueHoop's Borg assimilation in the future.

But let us not digress. Baron Davis has truly been playing like a perennial NBA MVP lately, in the most important games of his career and of the modern era of his franchise, against the best team in the NBA which has the consensus real MVP on its team. If you were watching last night in the closing moments when BD hit a clutch drive-and-fade swish, then surgically dismantled the proud Mavs' defense by finding Andris Biedrins for a dunk-and-one, you were sitting there shaking your head in disbelief of how good he his. The number of highlights this guy had from just this one game approached Michael Jordan's level, making it a similar sacrilege to leave your seat from tipoff to final buzzer.

Alas, there's really nothing to add, no extra comment to make about TrueHoop's post, "The Baron of Davis".

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What's with all the Warrior hatin'?

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[From Stephen B. Snyde...]

What's with all the Warrior hatin' these days?

It's amazing how people who have no first-hand knowledge of what a 13-year playoff drought feels like, write as if no 13-year drought occurred. Every anti-Warrior article contains something to the effect of...

"What the Warriors (or Warrior fans) fail to realize is..."

No, no, no. What Warrior-haters fail to realize is, after 13 years, we'll gladly accept -- RE-ACCEPT! -- Nellie ball even though it has no justifiable championship-level future.

Let's wait until the Warriors are the #8 seed for the next 13 consecutive years before you can start wiping the euphoric grin off Warrior fans' faces.

Didn't anybody see The Pursuit of Happyness? After so many years of livin' on the streets, we'll gladly take a decade of living paycheck to paycheck. It's no high-life mansion, but at least there's a roof over our heads.

Go pick on some other team, you cowards.

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Guess this means the Mavs will win the championship

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The #8 Golden State Warriors just beat the #1 Dallas Mavericks by double-digits (12, to be exact), leading to much joy in the Bay Area today. Which got me wondering, when was the last time the team with the best record in the NBA lost its first playoff game?

Let us preface by noting ESPN's Elias Says, embedded in the game's boxscore, which mentions the following...

Only one other team in NBA history lost its first playoff game following a season in which it won more than 63 games. The 1966-67 Philadelphia 76ers won 68 games during the regular season and went on to win the NBA title despite dropping their playoff opener to the Cincinnati Royals (120-116 at Philadelphia, March 21, 1967).

If you look up the last 10 years of playoff results on Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_NBA_Playoffs, where you can type in your desired year in the URL], you'll see that there are only two instances in the last 10 years when the team with the best record lost its first game in the playoffs...

• 2003: The Stephon Marbury-led Phoenix Suns defeated the San Antonio Spurs, 96-95, on Marbury's buzzer-beating bankshot trey.
  
  
• 1998: The Houston Rockets, behind Hakeem Olajuwon, Clyde Drexler, Charles Barkley coming off the bench (?), and -- believe it or not -- an 18-and-14 by Kevin Willis, defeated the Utah Jazz by 13, 103-90. Utah tied the Chicago Bulls for the best record in the NBA that year and had the tiebreaker over the Bulls.

So now that they have botched Game 1 against the #8 seed, this means the Mavs are guaranteed to reach the Finals, because we know the 76ers did it 1967, Jazz in 1998, and Spurs in 2003.

Both the 1967 76ers and 2003 Spurs won the championship. Since the 1998 Jazz don't count because they faced Michael Jordan's 2nd three-peat and impending retirement, as well as the Willis factor (remember, he's now on the 2007 Mavericks!), this means the Mavs will win the 2007 championship. I'm not a Mavs fan, I'm just showing you the voodoo.

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#1 GSW "shoulda woulda coulda"

If you check out the GSOM blog today, aside from a theoretical trade involving Adonal Foyle (among others) for Kevin Garnett, you'll see this reference to a blogpost from last June, perhaps the greatest "shoulda woulda coulda" ever made: Jordan-Pippen 2.0. In other words, the Warriors could have drafted Kobe Bryant in 1996 and Tracy McGrady in 1997.

dreamblogue did the due diligence for you. Only two other teams had draft picks earlier than the GSW in either year: Vancouver (now Memphis) and Philadelphia. In theory, either of those teams could've also drafted "Jordan-Pippen 2.0" as well, but at least Vancouver got Shareef Abdur-Rahim (who was eventually traded to Atlanta for, yes, Pau Gasol) and Antonio Daniels. Philly got Allen Iverson and Keith Van Horn.

Bear in mind, though, that Vancouver had the #3 and #4 picks those years while Philly had #1 and #2 -- back in those days, no way do you spend a top-five pick on a high schooler (which actually makes the Warriors picks stink even more). We all know how far AI took Philly and Pau took Memphis, so you can't really fault either of those teams. Meanwhile, the Warriors had picks #11 and #8 and chose Todd Fuller and Foyle. Obviously, no playoff appearances, let alone consistent starting contributions.

A quick glance at both drafts suggests that as a GM, you are best off drafting for basketball skill, not size. But then again stating the obvious is beyond the scope of dreamblogue. "Jordan-Pippen 2.0" is the best shoulda-woulda-coulda I've ever heard.

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Wat the Ute, not Yuta!!!

While looking for some blogs about whether or not people think the Golden State Warriors are, at this rate, going to get into the NBA playoffs (I personally don't think so -- to finish, say, 4 games above .500 and if they keep going barely above the Mendoza line on the road at .250 or so, they would have to finish 16-3 in their final 19 home games and there are at least 4 elite teams left to play at home), I ran across this post at The City blog:

"Notable players on [Warriors draft pick Patrick O'Bryant's NBDL Bakersfield Jam team] are Syracuse PG Gerry McNamara and Yuta Tabuse — the first Japanese player to play in the NBA."

Well, we know from A-Mac's history lesson about Wataru "Wat" Misaka, former Utah Ute national champion and New York Knickerbocker, that that's not true!...

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A bunch of Allen Iversons play in dreamleague

Over the Thanksgiving holiday (Fri Nov 17 to be exact), I was watching the Philly vs Phoenix game on ESPN when Jim Gray reported that Allen Iverson was paying for the funeral of Kevin Johnson, a kid who got shot refusing to give up the AI jersey he was wearing...

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First story dedicated to James Love

Back about one week before the Warriors' Nov 16 game against Sacramento, we got another yearly donation of 25 tickets from Abusheri Ohwofasa from Warriors Community Relations. I sent out the usual Evite to all the dreamleaguers who have helped us, encouraging them once again to bring out the kids they work with.

I hadn't used the Evite since last season and noticed that James's sister Inez was still on the list, the only one in the Love family with whom I had an email address. That prompted me to call Ibyn, but his phone number had since changed...

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Goals and "Ground Rules"

In case you didn't know, we're in the midst of a website revamp here at www.dreamleague.org. Things are going rather smoothly, but when our web guru Big Monkey T said he didn't think we'd launch until March, I just had to scratch the blog itch. After all, I had been commenting on TrueHoop.com with the moniker "DRMLG" for quite some time now...

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