Your Morning Dump... Where it's close but no donut for IT

Every morning, we compile the links of the day and dump them here… highlighting the big story line. Because there’s nothing quite as satisfying as a good morning dump.

Only two guards are selected to each All-NBA team. Given the state of the NBA’s backcourt play, cracking the top six was tough, as evidenced by the fact that James Harden — who averaged 29.0 points, 7.5 assists and 6.1 rebounds — was left off all the teams.

MassLive

Jay King with a dose of perspective. It’s a golden era for guard play in the NBA. For some reason or another. Good centers, on the other hand, seem to be about as rare as hen’s teeth. It finished 23rd among all players and 8th among guards. Players who finished ahead of him:

Curry/Westbrook (first team)
Chris Paul/Lillard (second team)
Thompson/Lowry (third team)
James Harden

Kind of tough to argue most of those choices, although I tend to think that Lillard is a bit overrated at 2nd team All-NBA in the same way I think that Stotts was overrated in coach-of-the-year voting. But, in fairness, they did make it to the second round of the playoffs after a major exodus of talent. But in fairness to that fairness, they also faced a Clippers team in the first round that had been hit by a bus. And then kicked by a mule.

Page 2: Where Ainge is scouting players from A[nte] to Z[izic]

Zizic, a center, has posted some strong numbers as a 19-year-old in the Adriatic League

MassLive

If you follow the twitter account of friend of Red’s Army Igor Mitic, you’ve seen tweets in a language you probably don’t speak about the Adriatic League (ABA). It’s a league in which better national league teams from the Balkans qualify to compete in, so in that respect it’s like the Euroleague but smaller and, of course, that much farther from NBA style play.

And, frankly, that’s where we’re at these days. The Celtics have a bazillion picks late in the draft and aren’t playing basketball anymore. So, get ready for blurry and jumpy highlight reels of overseas players, everybody! And get ready to have loud shouty opinions about those players!! (note: your humble scribe has his own loud shouty opinion about people having loud shouty opinions of players based on context-free highlight reels, but that just means he’s ‘meta’, at least in his own mind)