Culture

AKABAS | The Top 50 Players in the NBA: Part 1

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We know how to rank teams: my team beats your team, therefore my team is better. Just rooting for our teams carries an old-school sense of hometown pride and loyalty, but ranking players is overwhelmingly more interesting and fun — it’s a combination of statistics and intuition, of situational evidence and conjecture. How does one even begin to try to rank basketball players? One obvious way is to determine which players are most valuable to their own teams. That’s what the Most Valuable Player award tries to do, at least in theory, but does anyone really know what that award means? This metric is fairly quantifiable, since we can look at team performance with a certain player both on and off the court.

Entertainment

AKABAS | Stop Complaining About A Perfectly Good NBA Finals Matchup

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Since when did NBA fans become so spoiled? All I see online is people kvetching about another “boring” finals rematch between the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers and how Kevin Durant has ruined the NBA. Said people are dumb. First off, this is the best option we had. The Celtics are fun, but they would have gotten romped by either Western Conference team.

Entertainment

AKABAS | 10 NBA Offseason Questions, Asked and Answered

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For how many more finals do you anticipate the two teams will be the Warriors and Cavs (i.e. the next 3,4,5 years?)
– Kyrollos B.

Basically the Warriors’ entire roster is entering free-agency this offseason. Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant are going to do what it takes to both re-sign, but what about the other guys? Andre Iguodala seems to be seriously considering offers from other teams. In the 2015 Finals, his insertion into the starting lineup swung a series in which the Cavaliers were underratedly close to going up 3-0. In this year’s Finals, the Warriors were +60 with Iguodala on the court and, drumroll please… -26 with him on the bench!!! It’s surprising, but not unexplainable.

Entertainment

AKABAS | 10 NBA Finals Questions, Asked and Answered

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When the NBA season came to a close on Monday night, I had too many thoughts to sort out, so I decided to let my friends do it for me by sending me questions. Below are my answers to 10 questions about the 2017 NBA Finals, ranging from most simple to most complex. Very Simple Questions

Is ball even life? – Brian R.

Yes. Ball is still life.

Entertainment

AKABAS | Let’s Clear Up A Few Things About Kevin Durant Joining the Warriors

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NBA fans constitute one of the most delusional groups of people, along with people who think Chicago-style pizza is pizza, people who don’t like pizza at all, and people who think that Gary Johnson or Jill Stein is anywhere close to knowledgeable enough about how anything works to be President of the United States. Rarely has this delusion been more palpable than in the aftermath of Kevin Durant signing with the Golden State Warriors in free agency this summer. Last year, the Warriors went an unprecedented 73-9 and narrowly defeated Durant’s Oklahoma City Thunder in the Western Conference Finals before losing a heartbreaker in the Finals to the Cleveland Cavaliers. Many fans were angry that Durant joined forces with the team that beat him, and this is justified. A lot of people, however, have said a lot of other things about what Durant did, and most of them are inaccurate, so let’s debunk these myths, one by one.