Some random things I'm hearing/reading

[jmost]

In no particular order...

Al reiterates that he's never said this will be his last year and that as long as he's feeling good he wants to keep playing. I won't complain about that.

JT says he's been reworking his outside shot, and observers say his release looks quicker this year. Good news on that front.

Joe is as quirky as ever, showing the team videos of killer whales hunting together to show them the value of focused aggressive team effort. Joe's just different, but that's ok.

KP is feeling good and possibly ahead of schedule. Just don't rush things, big guy.

I'm sure you all saw that Shaq said we had the easiest path ever to a title. That's fine. Let others try to diminish what our guys did. Just more motivation if you ask me.

Scheierman says he's put on 20 pounds of muscle since summer league. I don't know how guys do that so fast. Wish I could put on muscle like that. Edit: This has now been corrected to 10-15 pounds of muscle. That sounds more plausible.

Pritchard had good things to say about our two draftees. Says they work hard to get better.

Celts are back!

[CelticsLoyalist]

Shaq, as Kobe said, was lazy and it cost him more 'chips and was part of the reason Kobe had a bit less respect for him as a player and a teammate. So, I take anything Shaq says with a really small grain of salt. To that end, he also seems not to have actually seen the stats on that. It's already been disproven that it's nothing more than a hot take on podcasts. We are compared among the best ever Bulls, Bird era Celtics and even Warriors for most dominant championship teams ever.



Don't make it our fault players went down due to injury! We also had injuries too! It's not our fault team's other stars couldn't step up or role players didn't step up or their coach never found a winning rotation to overcome an injured starter. The outcome wasn't going to be different becuz this team was just better than everyone. They act like Halibutron would've made a difference or Jimmy Buckets would've saved Miami somehow. Why didn't Dallas beat us and only win one game if it was so easy? weren't they healthy for the most part? I thought Dallas was gonna cake walk us?

ALSO!!!! Do they forget that we demolished everyone in the regular season? I seem to recall the twin towers Shaq & Barkley losing their minds when we were beating teams by 30 on the regular. Not just scrub teams either. Like how do they forget our domination of the league all season? Like we completely dominated the Western Conference that was supposed to be tougher. Here are those stats...

[CelticsLoyalist]

Schei has been specifically working with Hauser. They both had pretty complimentary things to say about each other and Sam is basically opening himself up to being his mentor. This is gonna abe so interesting.

[CelticsLoyalist]

Adding on to Jmosts points, both Jrue and DWhizz seem to have some form of relationship with Lonnie. White obviously from his days with Walker in San An, but also Jrue and Lonnie were already friends and it seems both Celtics guards say he is cut from the same cloth and have been pulling for him.

Makes me wonder if one of the major reasons he is here is that Lonnie was in a really desperate predicament due to no FA interest and in my mind it's possible he reached out in some way maybe indirectly asking White and Holiday who then gave him a recommendation to the Celtics front office.

Either way Jrue seems to truly believe he can make the cut.

[jmost]

I guess I'd rather have people trying to diminish the Celtics' title than praising them to the heavens. More motivation to repeat. I would just say that the Celtics were actually even more dominant than the stats indicate. Consider all the "maintenance" games Al and KP took off. Then consider that we had a lead of at least 20 points in almost exactly half of our games, leading to many games where the bench played the fourth quarter. I really don't think people understand how good this team was.

[CelticsLoyalist]

Really good point!

When your bench is getting mins and still getting W's, like we did last year, you know your team is good.