NHL/NBA Finals Open Thread

I have little to add to Andrew Berkshire’s comprehensive preview. The Blues are good, and the Bruins are on a bit of a goaltending/special teams heater that may cool off (although neither is a complete fluke or anything either.) But I think Boston is better and would pick them to win in 6.

On our postseason theme, Elliotte Friedman notes that the Bruins are not built around elite draft picks:

Boston took Patrice Bergeron 45th in 2003 and Brad Marchand 71st in 2006. One’s going to the Hall of Fame and the other is building a resumé. The Blues’ late picks don’t have those pedigrees, but they snare important pieces out of nowhere. They latched onto Colton Parayko where most of the NHL missed. No one left in the post-season hits like Samuel Blais: six per game, behind only William Carrier (6.1) and Matt Martin (6.8). As a 17-year-old, he spent most of the year playing Quebec Triple-A, then was brought to QMJHL Victoriaville for Les Tigres’ final 25 games. The Blues gambled on his offensive skills and sense, taking a chance with the 176th pick in 2014. He scored 26 as a first-year pro in AHL Chicago, and they are confident that touch will come at the NHL level.

The Blues did get Piterangelo 4th overall, but otherwise the key players are O’Reilly (acquired in a trade that rivals the-trade-is-one-for-one-Hall-for-Larsson in franchise-crushing disasters from Buffalo’s perspective), Tarasenko (16th overall), Schenn (trade), and Bozak (FA). And Rob Thomas, one of the best young players in the game, was taken 20th overall.

But what about the NBA? The Raptors are built around Leonard (acquired in trade, 15th overall pick) and…we can probably stop there but for the record Lowry was a 24th pick acquired in a trade. The Warriors are built around a 7th pick, a trade acquisition free agent, an 11th pick, and a 35th pick. (And to state the obvious, trying to claim Curry as a triumph of tanking is moving the goalposts to Pluto. The whole point of Silicon Valley tear-you-non-contending-team-down-to-the-studs tanking is to minimize your chances of ending up with the #7, the kind of pick you can get through an ordinary rebuild or accidental off-season.)

Anyway, the idea that tanking represents the best method of team building has precious little empirical evidence behind it. The basic problem is that the TED types focus on one obvious truism (“all things being equal higher draft picks are better than lower draft picks”) and overlook other equally true truisms (“many elite players are acquired without ultra-premium draft picks,” “it’s easier to build a contending team when you start with some talent than when you start with none.”) Good for all of this year’s finalists for consistently trying to compete.