Friday, November 8th, 2019

In today's email...

• R/Adamsilverfanpage is the latest streaming casualty

• A Redditor did some amazing reporting on James Harden’s love of strip clubs

• A look at the lineups with the best offensive ratings so far

• Is Charlie Brown of the Atlanta Hawks the first player to share a full-name likeless with a Peanuts character?

Tonight's must-watch game

1. Did we witness the first Peanuts-NBA crossover last night? 

A player named Charlie Brown made his NBA debut last night, playing four minutes and scoring two points for the Atlanta Hawks.The Blockhead’s debut got us thinking: Has there ever been another NBA player (or WNBA player) who has the same first and last name (when applicable) of a Peanuts character, or is Atlanta’s Charlie Brown the first?Our findings, with the infinite help of Basketball Reference: 

• There has never been a Sally Brown. 

• There has never been a Linus van Pelt, though there has been a Linas Kleiza.

• There has never been a Lucy van Pelt.

• There has never been a Peppermint Patty, though Patty Mills is pretty close. 

• There has never been a Woodstock (first or last name). 

• There has never been a Pig-Pen. 

• There has never been a Snoopy, though a ‘90s player named Paul Graham was apparently nicknamed Snoop. 

• There has never been a Violet, though there has been a Cory Violette, who, mind you, was a G-League All-Star in 2008. 

• There has never been a Frieda. 

• There has been a Franklin Edwards in the NBA, which is as close as we’ll get, since the Peanuts’ Franklin doesn’t have a listed last name.

• There is a (Dennis) Schröder, which brings us to the same conclusion as Franklin, because the piano-playing Schroeder is also last name-less. 

• And, lastly, there was a Marcie Alberts in the WNBA, which, again, leaves us wondering what the Peanuts’ Marcie’s last name might have been. 

In conclusion: Of all the NBA/WNBA players, Atlanta’s Charlie Brown is the Charlie Brown-i-est.  

2. The five highest-rated lineups so far, by offensive rating 

Here are the five best offensive five-player lineups so for this season, by offensive rating*, with a minimum of 50 minutes played together, via NBA.com/stats. 

1. Sacramento: Nemanja Bjelica, Harrison Barnes, Richaun Holmes, Buddy Hield, De’Aaron Fox (74 minutes): 125.5 offensive rating 

2. Phoenix: Ricky Rubio, Aron Baynes, Dario Saric, Kelly Oubre, Devin Booker (95 minutes): 120.6 offensive rating

3. Brooklyn: Kyrie Irving, Joe Harris, Caris LeVert, Taurean Prince, Jarrett Allen (79 minutes): 118.3 offensive rating

4. Houston: P.J. Tucker, Russell Westbrook, James Harden, Clint Capela, Danuel House (83 minutes): 117.6 offensive rating

5. Toronto: Kyle Lowry, Marc Gasol, Pascal Siakam, Fred VanVleet, OG Anunoby (123 minutes): 115.9 offensive rating

*Offensive rating = points scored per 100 possessions; the average amount of possessions per game this season is 102.6; the per-game scoring for every team is 110.4. 

3. The latest way to pirate NBA games

During the preseason, we put you on to the newest NBA-streaming subreddit, r/adamsilverfanpage. It bubbled up in the wake of Reddit's cancellation of everyone’s favorite, r/NBAstreams, over the summer.Adamsilverfanpage’s name was funny, snarky and self-aware, and served as a perfect ancestor to NBAstreams, but it was too funny, snarky and self-aware, and has since been shut down.So, where now can you watch crystal-clear HD NBA games for free on the internet?We’ll tell you, but first a question: 

• What would you call a theoretical website made for watching and streaming free NBA games? 

The fine mystery people chose NBA4FREE.com, which just seemed to us like an apt name.So, if you want to watch the Celtics game tomorrow but aren’t a boomer with a cable package, head to NBA4FREE.com and just click through a few “SINGLE WOMEN IN YOUR AREA WANT TO HANG OUT” ads.(FYI: They don’t.)

4. Here's the best piece of NBA journalism this season

Yesterday, a dedicated Redditor released his lengthy report on James Harden’s road performances in correlation with the Google-reviewed quality of strip clubs in said city. Disclosure: We are merely aggregating his findings. Here is the link to his full report.And here was the Redditor’s basic plan of action: 

“First I extracted all of James Harden's game logs for the past 4 seasons from Basketball Reference, cleaned up the data a bit (a bunch), and appended it into a single worksheet.”

“Next, I filtered out all Home games and all games Harden was inactive or DNP. For the purpose of this analysis we did not look at home games.”

“Poor Performances were determined by variances in 6 stats: Points, FG%, 3PT%, FT%, Assists and Turnovers. For each of these stats I compared Harden's overall season average to the city-specific season average.”

“City Strip Club Rating was determined by the average google review rating for the first 10 strip clubs in each city based on the google search “[CITY] Strip Clubs” (e.g., “Detroit Strip clubs”). Yes, this did involve me making like 30+ searches for strip clubs on my work cpu…”

"Finally, I put the City Strip Club Rating into the pivoted game log data, performed a regression analysis and visualized it into charts.”

His conclusion: 

• “James Harden's box score declines in cities with high quality strip clubs.” 

And he made a bunch of fancy graphs to prove it.

  Quick Hits 

• Tristan Thompson, though seven games: 16.9 PPG/11.6 RBD/2.7 APG

• Pascal Siakam, through seven games: 25.6 PPG/9.1 RBD/3.6 APG

• Luka Dončić, though seven games: 26.7 PPG/9.9 RBD/9.1 APG

• David Fizdale’s record with the Knicks: 18-72

• Chuck, on what Hassan Whiteside does well: “His strength is going to the bank twice a month and stealing money."

• Poor Carmelo still wants to play in the NBA.

• Jalen Rose on load management is an interesting perspective.

 Concrete Reads 

• Zach Lowe: 10 things I like and don’t like [ESPN]

• Kemba Walker has never witnessed anything like playing in Boston [NBC Sports Boston]

• The five most interesting teams this week [The Ringer]

• The mystery man at the center of the Sonics sale [The Ringer]

  Podcast Pick

Pacers president Kevin Pritchard joins the Woj Pod [ESPN]