Heard It Through the Grapevine

Posted by Rob Mahoney on October 21, 2009 under The Grapevine | Read the First Comment

  • I  completely missed the tail end of SLAM Online’s Top 50 player rankings, but SLAM’s commenters did a great job of pointing out a travesty: Kevin Durant and Carmelo Anthony were ranked higher than Dirk Nowitzki. In most cases, I understand the tendency to put Dirk on the back end of the top ten. I do. And I have lots of love for both Durant and Anthony. But Durant is almost completely one-dimensional at this point, and Anthony only marginally more versatile. And when it comes to flat-out scoring, I’m not even sure that either is more skilled than Dirk. Nowitzki carries a 50-win team on his shoulders as the team’s best player, and Melo and Durant can at best only claim one of those qualifiers.
  • Kevin Pelton chimes in with a reminder on preseason statistics, in light of yesterday’s post: [Preseason statistics] mean more than you might think, but are limited by the small sample size, making shooting percentages potentially misleading.” You can read Pelton’s previous studies on preseason performance here.
  • Pun fun with Marquis Daniels.

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  • Cynthia

    Slam is one of the most USELESS magazines on the market. My son had a subscription and after ENDLESS covers of Kobe, LeBron, Durant and Paul (especially the 1st two) he cancelled. Trouble is, they keep sending him magazines anyway saying “this is your last one, please hurry up and renew”. Before you know it, he’s going to have another years worth of USELESS and not even going to have to pay for it. Apparently they are desperate for readers….and after browsing through a couple of issues I can definitely see why.

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