🍾The Bubblies
So long, Bubble, we hardly knew ye. We toast the Lakers, roast our questionable takes, and celebrate the most enjoyable moments of the last three months.
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Programming Note: this issue concludes our coverage of the 2019-2020 NBA season. Thanks for subscribing. We appreciate your support and thoughtful feedback.
After this week, we’re taking a brief hiatus to join the players in Cabo and will be back with our NBA Draft coverage in November.
OPENING TIP
Almost three months, $170 million, and 260 games later, the Bubble has finally produced a champion: the Lakers! Just as we expected! With our incisive and unconventional takes, being right all the time can get monotonous. Fortunately we occasionally mix things up.
Back in July we wrote:
THE LOSERS
Los Angeles Lakers (2/1 to 12/5; -4% championship odds)
Did the public get an early peak at Graybeard Lebron and get spooked? More likely, lack of home field advantage and the high uncertainty surrounding the bubble make the tails fatter on season outcomes.
Hmmm. Do we get partial credit for being right about fatter tails, given the two different 3-1 comebacks, massive round 2 upset, and a five seed making the finals?
The very next week, we prophesized:
3. Which teams will be most impacted by losing home court?
Our early candidates:
The Lakers. Going from potentially 7 home games to empty virtual seats has gotta sting.
The altitude teams. Sorry, Nuggets/Jazz, your season long conditioning advantage is suddenly meaningless.
The Celtics. It’s much harder to get away with the time-honored Boston tradition of cheating away from home.
😬😬😬
The only thing that has aged worse than that take, is our mocking of the Lakers’ teambuilding approach:
“Home-growing” a star is the preferred (and most likely) way of getting one; the average second round playoff team has one such player on their roster. By contrast, free agency—long viewed as the panacea for teams desperately scrubbing their future cap sheets in search of a franchise savior—is much less likely to land you a star and more likely to land you Kentavious Caldwell-Pope.
He actually goes by “Finals Savior Kentavious Caldwell-Pope” now. So what have we learned from the Bubble? You can’t make an omelet without being wrong about the Lakers a lot.
TWEET OF THE WEEK
So much to enjoy about this chart. Where to begin?
Best of luck stopping LeBron at the rim.
Chris Paul from the elbow!
AD is really a master of the lost art of the midrange. Amazing how much purple he covers.
Jokic is going to be tough to stop if he can keep making 40% of his threes after setting the high screen at the top of the key.
Worst player to earn a hex: Reggie Jackson! Danny Green and Jae Crowder are fighting over the silver medal.
THE BUBBLIES
Congratulations, you’ve just won the NBA Championship. What are you going to do now?
We’re going to Disn… nevermind.
We’ll be leaving the Bubble for good (we hope!), but before we do, we wanted to send it off with a Viking funeral. Without further ado, we present The Bubblies, STL’s awards for the best of the bubble.
Best Game
The nominees:
And the Bubbly goes to: Lakers-Heat Game 5
The Celtics and Raptors went to two overtimes, featured multiple final-five-seconds buckets, and had more than one bench clearing. The whole world waited for the Clippers to turn it on in Game Seven and watched amazed as the Nuggets toyed with the Clips, who had nothing left.
But Lakers-Heat Game 5 was legitimately one of the great NBA finals games ever. The confetti cannons were stored in one corner. The Black Mamba jerseys were on. Much of the press had already booked their tickets home.
Then Lebron James came out in terminator mode, and laid down 40 points, 13 rebounds, 7 assists, and three steals. Anthony Davis put up 28 and 12, with three steals and three blocks. And it still wasn’t enough. The Heat refused to go home. Jimmy Butler wrote his name into NBA history with a 35-13-11-5 stat line. He was out of the game for a total of 48 seconds. He checked LeBron most of the game. By then end, the iconic image was Butler collapsed below the basket, absolutely nothing left. Now that was a game.
Best Shot
The nominees:
Dame Lillard’s high bounce (Points 59, 60, & 61)
And the Bubbly goes to: Anthony Davis’ buzzer beater
OG Anunoby’s miracle was a higher degree of difficulty shot, but his team ended up losing the series, as did Luka’s Mavs. Meanwhile Davis’ shot was the dagger through the heart of the Nuggets, who had become the Michael Meyers of the Bubble. If that shot doesn’t go in, the Larry O’Brien might be on a party bus circling South Beach right now.
Best Series
The nominees:
Nuggets over Jazz (4-3)
Celtics over Raptors (4-3)
Nuggets over Clippers (4-3)
Clippers over Mavericks (4-2)
And the Bubbly goes to: Jazz-Nuggets.
The most 50 point games ever recorded over the course of an entire NBA playoffs was three. Then 2020 happened. Jazz-Nuggets had four 50 point games in just one series. We would have all been amazed just watching Donovan Mitchell make the leap to star status, but Jamal Murray was simultaneously making the leap, and Nikola Jokic—already a star getting first team All-NBA votes—was somehow making another leap. Just a bonkers seven games.
Best Single-Game Performance
The nominees:
Jimmy Butler, Lakers-Heat Game 5 (35-13-11-5)
Lebron James, Nuggets-Lakers Game 5 (38-16-10)
Luka Doncic, Mavs-Clippers Game 4 (43-17-13)
And the Bubbly goes to: Doncic
Butler’s Game 5 performance was on a dramatically bigger stage, but Doncic’s masterpiece had absolutely everything. He was listed as doubtful after a bad ankle sprain had forced him out of the previous game. The Mav’s other star, Kristaps Porzingis, was a late scratch.
So Doncic laced them up and delivered 43 points, 17 assists, and 13 rebounds. Oh, and this:
You know you’re big time when you enter the Mike Breen double bang club. And the NBA’s best knew it too:
Biggest Level-Up
The nominees:
Jamal Murray
Donovan Mitchell
Tyler Herro
Jimmy Butler
And the Bubbly goes to: Murray
Chances are, if you were an occasional NBA fan, you were only peripherally aware that Jamal Murray was a person. The seventh pick in 2016, he was a solid starting point guard on a good team in the West. One time he won Western conference Rookie of the Month. Then he arrived in the Magic Kingdom and started doing this:
And that was cool. But then he started doing some of this:
And by the time he started with these, we knew we had a star on our hands:
Most Valuable Bubbler
The nominees:
Jamal Murray
Anthony Davis
Jimmy Butler
Damian Lillard
LeBron James
And the Bubbly goes to: Butler
Shout out of Dame here, who reminded us he leads the league in cojones circumference.
Also, Lebron, who changed the GOAT debate from “stop it” to “hmmmm”.
But the Bubble MVP was Jimmy Buckets. He led a team that started the season at 80-1 championship odds right to the brink (for reference, the Atlanta Hawks have 100-1 odds to win the title next season). Along the way, they knocked off the title favorite Bucks in five.
And of course, he took time to start a coffee franchise in his spare time. Get your t-shirts.
AT THE BUZZER
A farewell to the bubble, by a WaPo reporter who spent over 100 days there
Hollinger: how the Heat’s plans may change after their Finals run (Athletic, $)
Top 10 players of 2020 (video)
The infinite Timeout loophole that almost broke the NBA Finals