It's almost here folks!
The season of the Jazz's rise back to relevance into the national spotlight.
This is the Jazz's best shot at getting back to winning playoff games since 2010,
We Jazz fans were spoiled at one point, but now we are famished. We are ready for the flourishing part of the cycle to commence once again.
We are ready for the first time in ages for...
DOMINANCE
The title of today's downbeat was inspired by an article I found that looked for the best (most) value players by dividing their salaries by number of win shares they provided last season.
Who was the Best/Most Valuable Player of last season?
Spoiler warning: He is the non-flopper envisioning his future as alpha dog of the NBA in this picture
Picture Source: Hardwood Paroxysm
Gobert crushes the league in value. I must emphasize the following:
Over 320 players will make more than Rudy Gobert next season, only 6 players in the NBA had higher Win Shares, Box Plus/Minus, and Value Over Replacement Player Stats than him!
For anyone who was wondering, the 6 players were Curry, Harden, Westbrook, Paul, James, and Davis.
Gobert was 10th in VORP, 15th in Win Shares, and 10th in BPM, absolutely incredible we have this centerpiece of our young talented core on this team. Our future championship hopes (despite how much of a longshot they are) live and die with Rudy.
Big ups to the Jazz for making one of the sneakiest trades heists backhanded slaps in the history of the NBA.
Source: Best Value Players in the NBA
France will play Latvia tomorrow in the quarterfinals of Eurobasket 2015. They crushed and cruised against Turkey on Saturday.
Expect Gobert's string of dominant performances to continue, also just in case any of you haven't OD'ed on Gobert content yet, #MuscleWatch
Good work today with the rook @mamjaiteh ! #ensemble https://t.co/RLQedwGSbt pic.twitter.com/rqH4ndqvgI
— rudy gobert (@rudygobert27) September 13, 2015
HOLY GUACAMOLE!!! THE TOP OF HIS HEAD CAN'T EVEN FIT IN THE SHOT!?!?!
Okay, to try to lessen the risk of Rudy filing a restraining order against me, I will do my best to talk about other topics for the rest of this downbeat. No promises though
On a more solemn note, the NBA lost one its all-time greats in Moses Malone over the weekend at the relatively young age of 60. I consider him as the one of the NBA's greatest rebounders post 1970s, and really only Dennis Rodman has a case for being on his level.
Some of our older and wiser readers will remember Moses' contributions to Utah Sports when he played for the ABA club Utah Stars his rookie season.
Here is an excellent article over at NBA.com that will be 10x better than anything I could say in honor of Moses Malone: http://www.nba.com/2015/news/features/steve_aschburner/09/13/moses-malone-feature-obit/index.html
In case it hasn't been mentioned here yet, I wanted to, on behalf of everyone here at SLCDunk, give a big congrats to Joe Ingles and Renae Hallinan in getting married!
A little peak into their big day:
Have a great week everyone and remember to keep calm and Jazz on!