05-25-2024, 05:21 PM
(05-25-2024, 02:55 PM)Knutsen Wrote: I‘ll feel bad for them as soon as they are out. They are a wounded animal right now, but they came back after losing 3 straight to the defending champions, so there‘s still a whole lot of life and fight in them.
Concerning your discussions about Edwards: I do think this series is defining for him, not in the sense that it shows if he‘s a great or just a very good player, but in the sense that it will be fascinating to see what he’ll learn and take away from it. Hopefully not as quickly as in this series, but over the summer when he gets back to improving and working on his toolbox. Will he be able to add an inbetween game - and an inbetween pace, to keep defenses guessing and making them a half step slower to give him the advantage like Luka does masterfully? Now that he has seen and felt very early in his career what it takes to win on the biggest stage? Which is a great advantage for him by the way, compared to other guys his age. Same with Lively, in comparison to Wemby for example.
The jury on Edwards will be out for 5 or even 10 years, if he‘ll become the next Kobe Bryant or the next Tracy McGrady - who was my favorite player at the time, because physically and skillwise he had absolutely everything and was probably even more talented than Kobe. But he could never transform that into winning on the biggest stage when the going gets tough for various reasons.
To your TMac point, Edwards is already in the conference finals. TMac literally never did that until he signed on with the Spurs his last year of his career where he played less than 2 minutes total.
I agree we can't make any sweeping conclusions, either way, for Edwards yet. But he definitely seems closer to the Kobe side of that argument than TMac right now today.
14x All-Star, 12x all-NBA, 1x MVP, 1x Finals MVP, 1 NBA Championship: Dirk Nowitzki, the man, the myth, the legend.