Nuggets Basketball

Blackjack Strategy Card Team asked:


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SAMMY

Ally White asked:


The NBA and its players represent a game of extraordinary skill, athleticism and grace, and, for good or bad, set an example for the entire basketball world, on the court and off of it. Like everything there must be balance between the positive side of things and the negative and it is even better if the positive side outweighs the negative.
On the NBA we have on the positive side, the players’ passion for the game, their commitment to the fans and respect for the history and tradition of the game. In regards to the negative, while the NBA has worked meticulously to eliminate fighting from the game, incidents such as that Saturday night at Madison Square Garden between the Denver Nuggets and the New York Knicks show the public there is still much more to be done, or maybe tell us that the solutions are not being the ideal ones.

As a result NBA scoring leader Carmelo Anthony was suspended for 15 games and six other players were penalized as commissioner David Stern came down hard on both teams after the Nuggets and Knicks brawled at Madison Square Garden.

It is a shame for the fun of the game but the NBA is in it’s obligation to take the strongest possible measures to avoid such spectacles in the future and to make a statement to all who follow the game of basketball that they understand their obligations and take them seriously.

The main concern should be for the safety of the players and the fans, because when things such as these get out of hand you cannot predict or project where they’re going to go.



JIMMY

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GERARDO

Steven Zoine asked:


This is really #1 vs. #2, but by now we all know the storyline behind the division rule, so I’ll skip that argument. This is truly a series to make some money if you are looking to gamble. The Spurs pulled out of game one 87-85, while being favored by 5 points. If I were a gambling man, and that I am, I would absolutely take the team getting points in each game. This series is destined to go seven and in a close fashion. Don’t think Game One was a fluke. I would even be inclined to take Dallas straight up in Game Two. Tim Duncan looked like the old Timmy, scoring 31 points and grabbing 13 boards, but this type of play might not last with his recent injury trouble. In summation, I still like the Spurs’ bench with Michael Finley, and I still like the Spurs to take the series in seven.

#2 Suns vs. #6 Clippers

OK Phoenix. You ruined my bid for a perfect first round, but you guys are going down in round two. The Suns are favored by 6 points for Monday’s Game One, which I think is terribly inflated. The Clippers are a much more complete team than the Lakers. If Phoenix struggled with the one-man show of the Lakers, what are they going to do against Elton Brand and company, which includes veteran star Sam Cassell. Cassell was brought in for just this reason: to win playoff games. Cassell averaged 15 points and five assists per game in the series against the Nuggets and is a proven winner. The Suns expelled way too much energy in the first round, with their three-game comeback against the Lakers. If you are about sports betting, do yourself a favor and put your money on the Clippers in game one. This series will be another nail biter; Clippers in six.

Eastern Conference

#1 Pistons vs. #4 Cleveland

Here we have the only easy series to predict. The Pistons are the overwhelming favorite to win it all, and they look like it too. They blew out the Cavaliers in game one, 113-86. This series could turn out to be a slaughter. Lebron was held to only 22 points and averaged less than 20 points per game during the regular season against the Pistons. You get the feeling that the only way the Cavaliers can win a game in this series is to have Lebron go absolutely nuts, which won’t happen against a defense like Detroit’s. With this series, I don’t care how many points the Pistons are favored by; take the Pistons and they will cover the spread. They only covered the spread by 17 points on Sunday. This series will not be close, especially if the pistons go 15 for 22 from three point land again. Pistons in five.

#2 Heat vs. #3 Nets

This is another incredibly hard series to predict, but it’s what I get paid for. Both of these teams really struggled in the first round against inferior opponents. Shaq showed flashes of brilliance in the Heat series but also showed his age. But Shaq is still Shaq and still leads the league in field goal percentage at 60%, which will help the Heat to step up in this series. Shaq also upped his rebounds from 9.2 to 10.8 in the first round, which should continue to give Miami second chance points. Even with this, I think the five points the Heat are giving up in Game One might be too many. Vince Carter increased his points average by more than five in the first round all the way up to 29.2 per, Game and I think the Nets could shock the Heat with a Game One victory. Take the points and take the Nets in this series. Nets in seven.



SALVATORE

Tim Cryper asked:


 So it’s my task to write the review for Sports Betting Champ so you can read it and i can convince you to go and buy the product right? Wrong!!

  

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CARTER

Daphne Greene asked:


When it comes to card games, Hold’em is king. I apologize to all of you Go-Fish sharks and master pineapplers, but when it comes down to gross games and money played, it is not even close — Texas Hold’em reigns supreme.

While the global numbers are nigh impossible to get at, Party Poker, one of the three major online poker sites, reports numbers like these: of the 8,619 cash game players online as of 1:00pm MST, January 21, 2008, 8,196 were playing Hold’em, with 6,454 participating in a No Limit game. More than 20,000 cash game players will log on and move money on Party Poker on the average Monday, with nearly 95% of them doing it in Hold’em rooms.

Why? Why does Hold’em so dominate the world of poker? The following two part series will explore both the history of Texas Hold’em and poker as a whole as well as the qualities of the game itself which have contributed to its meteoric rise.

As far as the history books are concerned, poker as we know it began sometime in the 1820s in New Orleans. Some sailors began to bet on who they thought possessed the best three card hand dealt from a deck of somewhere between 20 and 32 cards. There were no suits on the cards, and in their minds there was no such thing as a straight.

Then poker took to the river. Fueled mainly by the Mississippi River Boat, by 1850 poker had grown into a national game, the 52 card English deck had been introduced and the term “river boat gambler” had been coined. During the course of the American Civil War, the flush, the straight, the five card hand, stud and draw poker were all integrated into the way the games were played. As far as we can tell today, the most popular games of the pre-1900 period were a French cousin of poker called faro - kind of a cross between baccarat and craps - and five-card draw. Some of the early five-card draw champs remain notorious even today, most notably Wild Bill Hickok. Recently, Ole’ Bill was at the center of the first season of HBO’s acclaimed “Deadwood” series, where he once again met his demise at the poker table, famously holding two pair, Aces and Eights, forever known as “The Dead Man’s Hand.”

Then the joker came in 1875, lo-ball around 1900, and in 1925 Texas Hold’em was officially recognized by Dallas, Texas when community cards were introduced. In actuality, Texas Hold’em was born around a decade earlier in Robstown, Texas, a town of about 13,000 people that still stands today.

Not much is known about Poker history between 1920 and 1955, probably because it was considered a dirty form of entertainment and was marginalized by mainstream media. Then in 1955, a strapping young man courted by the Minneapolis Lakers who shattered his whole leg at once and would go on to change the face of poker forever.

Doyle Brunson was born in Texas in 1933 and had plans to be a basketball player until he broke his leg in 1954 performing some manual labor, an injury for which he still needs a crutch. Over the next 13 years, Doyle would travel the country playing in largely illegal games with his friends Amarillo Slim and Sailor Roberts until 1967, when Doyle Brunson came to Las Vegas.

Until 1967, Hold’em did not exist in Las Vegas. Brunson, a Texas boy who’d been playing Hold’em for fifteen years by 1967, first brought the game to the Golden Nugget Casino. Despite his growing reputation as a high-stakes gambler, Hold’em was relatively obscure in Vegas, so Doyle and friends mostly played stud. Only occasionally could they find enough interested strangers to get a Hold’em game going. But Doyle loved his home state’s game, and was confident that it would grow.

The first big turn came in 1969 when the Gambling Fraternity Convention, which would be renamed the World Series of Poker the following year, began playing Texas Hold’em for a number of its tournaments. In 1972, the now World Series of Poker Main Event became No Limit Texas Hold’em, and the growth has been exponential ever since. The first main event was a table of 8 players, where the winner was voted on by the players – now the tournament is regularly above 6,000 entrants.

The next major step up for Hold’em occurred again through Doyle Brunson: as Texas Dolly published a series of books, from Super/System to “How I made One Million Dollars Playing Poker” Doyle was legitimizing both the card player career and Texas Hold’em the game. By 1982, 104 players were buying into the main event. The figure grew consistently by 15-50 entrants each year until 1998, when the movie “Rounders” was released. The following year saw the field grow by 119 entrants to 512 total players.

By 2003, that number had grown to 839, an already impressive number more than 100 times the original field. Players like Phil Hellmuth and other so-called Hold’em specialists or gamblers who only played Texas Hold’em had risen up to claim international fame. It seemed as if the WSOP Main Event was on pace to hit 1,000 entrants in the next 5 years, a staggering number considering the $10,000 price tag that came with a seat in the tournament – then came the NHL strike.

Outside of anything Doyle Brunson did, the NHL strike was the single most important event in the history of Hold’em. With the NHL on strike, ESPN2 had a huge slate of programming that needed to be filled. Enter Chris Moneymaker.

Moneymaker gained entry to the Main-Event through a satellite tournament as he had nowhere near enough money to his oh-so- appropriate name to pony up the $10,000. 3 days, 1 unbelievable call on a Dutch Boyd bluff and a big bluff of his own on runner up Sammy Farha later, Chris Moneymaker had won $2.5 million and the coveted Main-Event bracelet. Much to the surprise of the ESPN network, when the numbers finally came in, the Nielson ratings for the 2003 WSOP had been higher than the previous year’s NHL showings. With that, No Limit Texas Hold’em became a nationwide craze.

Chris Moneymaker became the poster boy for the rags-to-riches, anyone-can-do-it poker star; the following year, a mind boggling 2,576 people paid the buy-in, only to be dwarfed by the following year’s 5,619 and 2006’s small city of 8,773.

More than just an explosion of WSOP entrants, there was an explosion of online gaming as well. In 1998, there was only one online gaming site, Planet Poker, played on regularly by less than 2,000 players per day. In 2000 and 2001, there was the rise and fall of Dutch Boyd’s infamous Poker Spot. It was not until Party Poker began its exhaustive television advertising campaign in 2003, capitalizing on Chris Moneymaker’s Cinderella story, that online gaming became the entity that it is today. With 20,000 players on a slow day, Party Poker and other major sites have become the largest arena for poker in the history of the world.

So why is Texas Hold’em so by far and away the poker game of choice? In part, because of the work of Doyle Brunson, in part because of the WSOP Main Event, online giants like Party Poker, even Chris Moneymaker and the NHL strike played a role. In part two of the series, we will investigate the inherent qualities of Texas Hold’em itself which have contributed to its rise.



WM

Jeff Zell asked:


In baseball, it has come close (see 2005 San Diego Padres, 1973 NY Mets). In the NFL, only two .500 teams have made the playoffs since 1991 (1991 NYJ, 2004 STL). In the NBA, however, it has been the norm to find teams with a losing record compete in late April and into May.

Below, a table of the number of .500 win percentage teams, the number of first round games they have won, and the number of series they have gone on to win.

First Round Playoff Stats Last 10 Years

Year Teams at .500 or under Total first round games won Series Won

1996 2 2 0

1997 3 2 0

1998 1 2 0

1999 1 1 0

2000 0 0 0

2001 1 1 0

2002 0 0 0

2003 0 0 0

2004 4 4 0

2005 0 0 0

2006 3

Courtesy: Basketball-Reference.com

Parody just hasn’t existed in the NBA playoffs. These 15 teams in the last 10 years have combined to win just 12 playoff games and have never advanced. In 2004, four teams in the East had the shot and surely one could pull off the upset? Not even the four vs. five could do it.

The last time a team with a losing record entered the playoffs and won a Series was 1988. Then, the Seattle Supersonics boasted a 39-43 record as the 7-seed and made it all the way to the conference finals. They upset both Dallas and Houston, before being swept by Pat Riley’s Los Angeles Lakers. Since Seattle, a total of 31 teams have entered the playoffs with a record at or below .500. And these teams are 0-31 in playoff series.

So, how good of a chance do Milwaukee (40-42), Chicago (41-41) and Indiana (41-41) have this year? I’m not going to say “none,” because that’s why they play the game—but let’s delve into these match-ups.

(1) Detroit vs. (8) Milwaukee

One-seeds haven’t lost since 1999. But there was a technicality about that year: First, 1999 was the NBA lockout year, and only 50 regular season games were played. Second, three other teams had the same 33-17 record, but Miami won by a tiebreaker.

In a full 82-game season, it was the 1994 Denver Nuggets who upset the top-seeded Supersonics to advance to the second round.

With Flip Saunders at the helm, we’ve seen the Pistons play looser offensively, but still maintaining impressive defense—leading them to their best regular season record ever (64-18). Don’t worry about the nonsense concerning Ben Wallace not getting along with Flip: This team is focused when it comes to the playoffs.

Having said this, Milwaukee has their hands full. Let’s just look at player vs. player matchups.

Detroit Milwaukee Advantage

PG Billups Ford Detroit

SG Hamilton Redd Detroit

SF Prince Simmons Detroit

PF R. Wallace Bogut Detroit

C B. Wallace Magloire Detroit

Billups will substitute size for speed and can dominate Ford. Hamilton is a workhorse. Prince is undoubtedly better than Simmons. And I’ll just point out the experience from the front court to suffice my argument for the Wallaces.

To make matters worse, the only type of success they had against Detroit was when they played Toni Kukoc at the three. Kukoc is already banged up and will miss the first game, so his health will be a definite factor.

Prediction: Pistons in a sweep

(2) Miami vs. (7) Chicago

Chicago is the hottest of the East’s bottom-3, finishing 12-2 in their final 14 to slip into the show. They had a similar run in the final month of the season last year, winning 15 of their last 19 games. The Bulls’ only win against the Heat in the regular season came back on April 15 when the Heat rested most of their stars.

In the playoffs, it comes down to defense and though the “Baby Bulls” are young, they do buckle down, leading the NBA for the second straight season in defensive field-goal percentage (.426).

Offensively, the Bulls’ patented “drive-and-kick” out game has given opposing teams a hard time. Ben Gordon ranks 2nd in the Eastern Conference, hitting 43.9-percent from 3-point land, and point-guard Kirk Hinrich has shot 42.9-percent from behind the arc in his last five games.

Although the Heat have been locked into the No. 2 spot since basically January, I don’t see them having trouble kicking into high gear. Even when the Bulls shut down Wade in their meetings this year (12.3 ppg), the Heat have found a way to win.

The Bulls have no answer for Shaq, who had 14 points and 6 rebounds in just 20 minutes of action on April 15.

Prediction: Heat in 5

(3) New Jersey vs. (6) Indiana

This might very well be the best shot for a team at the .500 mark in the regular season to win a Series. The Nets came from the weak Atlantic Division that sent no other teams beside themselves to the playoffs. The two teams have similar defensive work ethics, as they are 5th and 6th in points allowed, respectively, in the NBA. The interesting thing about this series is the way they view each other: New Jersey players have said the Pacers are a good transition and look to slow it down, while Indiana players have said the exact same thing about the Nets! Wow, this should be a fun series to watch!

Jermaine O’Neal looks to be healthy into the playoffs, having played 30-plus minutes in his final 11 regular season games, but I don’t foresee him being the difference. The difference must come from the defense side of the ball, in particular, the ability to stop Vince Carter.

Peja Stojakovic and Stephen Jackson must play top-notch to pull the upset.

I have a feeling this series will go seven. The Nets were 29-12 at home, fourth-best home record in the Eastern conference, so that’s the way I lean.

Prediction: Nets in 7

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CLAYTON