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Thread: Zion back this Thursday January 16th?

  1. #26
    Pistol Pete Would Be Proud!! JunkHead's Avatar
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  2. #27
    Pistol Pete Would Be Proud!! kinglio21093's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by JunkHead View Post
    Lmao what happened to tomorrow?

  3. #28
    Everyone guessed wrong. LOL

    Griff. Trolling. LOL

  4. #29
    Can we update the title of thread now that we have our answer?

  5. #30
    So just confirms LESPN just says anything they want. To hell with actual journalism and facts.

  6. #31
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    i thought they were going to do it big and send him out against the clippers or boston on the 18 or 26 for the national tv games......

    the spurs game is a Wednesday so can they flex so espn or nbatv can pick the game up?...

  7. #32
    Are you kidding me? HE IS 100% HEALTHY. If we go out and go 0-3 until he returns, there will be the built in excuse to play a handful of games then rest him because we are realistically out of the playoff hunt. I’m not normally a conspiracy guy, but this seems like Griff trying to show how much smarter he is. I want my teams to try to win. I hated the way we were fed to Boston. Zion couldn’t have helped?
    For the people with the “we have him 7 years, and this will be better in the long term” argument, what does it matter if he isn’t playing? The things he will need to learn as a rookie have been moved to his second year. His “rookie wall” will happen next year. Then he sits again next year?
    FRUSTRATED!

  8. #33
    Pistol Pete Would Be Proud!! JunkHead's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by kinglio21093 View Post
    Lmao what happened to tomorrow?
    Don't worry. Tomorrow will still happen.

  9. #34
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    Quote Originally Posted by JunkHead View Post
    Don't worry. Tomorrow will still happen.
    lmao...

  10. #35
    Pistol Pete Would Be Proud!! kinglio21093's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by JunkHead View Post
    Don't worry. Tomorrow will still happen.
    Lol. Touché.

  11. #36
    At the minimum, he should of debuted against the Grizzlies. We are chasing them for that final playoff spot.

    Kinda disappointing but hey... I’m not a doctor. I’m not part of the staff....

    So this is just me talking out of my a** like the fan that I am haha.

  12. #37
    Quote Originally Posted by 6warddude View Post
    i thought they were going to do it big and send him out against the clippers or boston on the 18 or 26 for the national tv games......

    the spurs game is a Wednesday so can they flex so espn or nbatv can pick the game up?...


    Saturday is the LSU parade. Doubt ESPN picks game up. I think Griff. Wants to be low-key with this for cautious reasons. Not starting him and restricted minutes likely vs Spurs.

  13. #38

  14. #39
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    It's happening finally ...

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  18. #43
    Quote Originally Posted by 13 - 3 View Post
    Transcription of this:

    ''So, I wanted to let everybody know in light of all the speculation that's been going on out there and people frankly just taking wild guesses as to when Zion is going to come back, that based on today's practice - that was not terribly intense because we're still somewhat the walking wounded - we're going to continue trying to get him some reps in practice. We hope to have a slightly more intense practice on either the 17th or 19th. Assuming all goes well and that he is cleared by then, which he is not quite yet, our anticipation is that he'll play his first game on the 22nd at home against San Antonio. This process has been one that's been really really good, we've learned a lot more than we've probably taught him, frankly, but we're getting to the point where we actually think he's as ready as he feels he is, so everything's moving in the right direction.''
    Basketball.

  19. #44
    Gotta say though, I am getting a bit impatient by this point. I've tried to type up a comment kind of explaining why that is without sounding petulant a few times, and I can't it's a combination of feeling like the front office has been very opaque and evasive, along with the mild disdain Griff's comment in that interview seems to have about the idea of fan speculation, combined with the slippery inexactness of the ''our anticipation'' aspect of his comment.

  20. #45


    Full Griff interview. Will do transcript below.

  21. #46
    Transparency is a major issue at this point in the NBA. With the introduction of legalized gambling, online ticket services, twitter, etc., there is way too much at stake to have such an extreme divide between fanbases and front offices. I know that Nets fans are just as frustrated as we are with all of the Kyrie issues, same with Blake Griffin and the Pistons. Why not just come out on Monday when the tweets dropped and say hey this likely is not the case. We know David Griffin is on twitter and saw the news. Instead, thousands of people bought tickets in preparation for the game and those people essentially paid hundreds over value just to see Zion. Griffin had to have known that would be the case.

  22. #47
    Quote Originally Posted by Pelicanidae View Post


    Full Griff interview. Will do transcript below.

    You are 2 hours late

    https://www.pelicansreport.com/showt...anuary-15-2020

  23. #48
    Griff Transcript:

    He opens up with the quote that I already transcribed above, so I won't re-do that bit. Questions will be paraphrased, answers will be transcribed close to verbatim.

    Question: How frustrating has the speculation been, given the Pelicans history?

    Answer: ''Yeah, it's frustrating only from the standpoint of trust. You know, with the player and with our family here internally. Those decisions weren't even reached until this morning when the medical team got together with myself, with Zion, and we sort of arrived at a place where we can tell where we are. So anybody that was guessing before wasn't getting it from anybody that actually knew, so that's really frustrating, because the only people who actually knew anything during the process was the medical team and the player. So for us to have anybody say anything different it certainly didn't come from our side, so it was frustrating, and it obviously wasn't the player either, it was just people throwing darts trying to take a stab at it.''

    Question: How did you arrive at the 22nd?


    Answer: ''Based on where we're at based on timing, how far away he is, there are some league protocols in place from a return-from-injury, a return-to-play standpoint where you can't just go from 'out' to playing a game [my personal note: weird, cause that happens all the time on injury reports lol] and so as we look at the timeline and the liklihood for when he gets his best work and when we can put him in the best position moving forward we feel like that's the right time. Practice has been complicated, because of our schedule and then you add to it how many injured bodies we've had, we've obviously brought the G League 2 way guys here [...] yesterday the work that Zion did was as good as I've seen, better than he was in the pre-season, so we feel like he'll be a bigger better version of himself going forward but the timing has been difficult.''

    Question: What kind of thresholds has Zion had to meet?

    Answer: ''So I mean, I think in terms of the tests that we've been asking him to pass and things that we've been judging him on, there's several of them. Almost all of them are entirely objective, so just numbers from when he was healthy previously to now, and in every objective measure his numbers are better frankly. There are a couple of those tests that are a little more subjective and a little more about the eye test, and in those tests there are still things that we feel like since he's taken this long already, we've let him go through the process to the degree we have, and frankly it's not let him; it's put him through the process, if we've taken this much time we want it look right when we let him go.''

    Question: Do we know what the minutes restriction will look like when he comes back?

    Answer: ''Yeah, we won't do a minutes restriction and this is something that in general terms we sort of philosophically disagree on. It's not about a hard number, it's about what the bursts need to look like, it's what you're measuring him by. So when you return to play from a serious injury it's not going to be a number, it's going to be that he's going to play in bursts and you're going to judge those subjectively in terms of what he looks like.''

    Question: What has the atmosphere in the coaching staff/among players/among the FO regarding Zion's return and anticipation for it been like?

    Answer: ''I don't think our players had anxiousness at all because they know that when it's time he'll come back, I think there's a great deal of trust in that regard. From a coaching perspective, the anxiousness has been more related to the fact that they had to play a game the other night without 6 of our top 8 rotational players that we thought when we were coming into the season, so it's really complicated from a coaching perspective, so certainly their anxiety level's a little higher, they have to find a way to doctor up what we have and win a game in that particular situation and obviously they did, and I think the team has a great deal of grit and toughness and they know what it takes to win, and we're certainly cultivating more winning habits.''

    Question: When Zion returns what will management look like for the rest of the year?

    Answer: ''I mean I think from a sustaining health standpoint you're certainly going to teat him differently. His return to play protocol will be such that I don't think we're going to want to play him back to backs for example but you're going to just have to see how it looks. [...] Watching him go about his business will have a great deal of impact day to day. ''

    Question: Did you ever consider sitting him for the full year?

    Answer: ''No, and he didn't consider it either. The nature of his injury wasn't such that that was called for. You know, other players that have had to make that determination, in almost every case they had a much more significant surgery. Blake Griffin fractured a kneecap: that's a different issue. Zion knew from the very beginning that he was going to play and he's wanted to play; he's told you that he hasn't been overly happy with me that he hasn't played yet. So it was never a thought that he wasn't going to play.''

    Question: After 41 games how do you evaluate the team as a whole?

    Answer: ''I don't know that we know enough to know that. It would be disingenuous to say that I know what we are. Frankly a lot of the pieces that we have are going to look better in the presence of Zion, we built the team knowing what it was going to look like in that way and the absence of Derrick Favors for what basically amounted to a month of games you could see that we were just searching, so coming down the stretch where we're healthier, playing against a schedule that's not quite as difficult, for our coaches to have to field a team with the most games lost due to injury and the toughest schedule against at one point, that's tough. We just need to find out what we're capable of being. I think what's most exciting about our group is that you can tell we've got a lot of really good young talent, we've got veterans that love being with that young talent and we have a group that really likes each other. In the times when we weren't playing well, we didn't fracture, and I think that makes us optimistic that when we're healthy we can be pretty good.''

    Question: It's interesting you bring up Blake: with Blake, they said he had to get leaner but were worried about him losing his power. How does Zion keep that power?

    Answer: ''Yeah so I don't think in the Blake case it was necessarily a leaner situation that makes him share anything with Zion, it's the amount of torque they generate, they're so big and strong and explosive that they just generate more torque than other people. It's physics. So in terms of the similarities there are some but from our standpoint the thing that made it stand out and the reason I mentioned Blake is simply that, it's not really about the lean part. It's about how do you give a guy who manifests muscle as fast as he does to give him the power he needs.''

    Question: One of the benefits of being out so long is that it gives time to work on things outside the knee. What's been going on with his mechanics?

    Answer: ''Yeah so, we've already talked about the concept of 'teaching him how to walk again', which is sort of preposterous, but really it's just the whole kinetic chain. You're addressing everything you're addressing ankle flexion, then knees, then hips, then back, and everything else and I think what's happened is that his overall kinetic chain is in a much better position, and I think he's more flexible and when you make someone more flexible you have to give them the strength to control that flexibility and it's been a dance, it has been, but he's now able to do some things physically that he wasn't able to do before, particularly because of the flexion in his ankles and his hips.''

    Question: Can you understand why fans are a little confused when you originally said 6-8 weeks, then you said no setbacks, and now we're talking 13 weeks plus?

    Answer: ''Yeah, I get that, sure, and I'm appreciative of that, but at the same time my job isn't to stick to the initial timeline it's to put him in the best position to succeed, and I get the frustration of it but I'd also hope that we're at a trust level right now where we're going to do the right thing for the kid long term and that's what we made the determination to do.''

  24. #49
    Quote Originally Posted by pelafanatic View Post
    Transparency is a major issue at this point in the NBA. With the introduction of legalized gambling, online ticket services, twitter, etc., there is way too much at stake to have such an extreme divide between fanbases and front offices. I know that Nets fans are just as frustrated as we are with all of the Kyrie issues, same with Blake Griffin and the Pistons. Why not just come out on Monday when the tweets dropped and say hey this likely is not the case. We know David Griffin is on twitter and saw the news. Instead, thousands of people bought tickets in preparation for the game and those people essentially paid hundreds over value just to see Zion. Griffin had to have known that would be the case.
    Absolutely agreed. Especially when the front office goes silent over stuff. From Griff's interview mid-December where he said that Zion had to meet internal standards before coming back, we've heard from him (I think) once, basically to say that we wanted to have 2 or 3 practices before Zion played. During that time, multiple ''possible return dates'' have flown around in the media, whether from adventuring reporters looking for clickbait or from fans who think they have a pretty good guess.

    If Griff is online enough to respond to Shamit when he makes a tweet asking whether Frank Jackson does anything other than score, then he's online enough to see all this stuff and realise what a confusing mess it comes out as, and to clarify it. We know he's not shy, he's willing to talk: he did it all summer. So why be quiet now, when there are so many questions regarding the guy that many of us think is the core of our franchise for the next decade?

  25. #50
    Quote Originally Posted by pelafanatic View Post
    Transparency is a major issue at this point in the NBA. With the introduction of legalized gambling, online ticket services, twitter, etc., there is way too much at stake to have such an extreme divide between fanbases and front offices. I know that Nets fans are just as frustrated as we are with all of the Kyrie issues, same with Blake Griffin and the Pistons. Why not just come out on Monday when the tweets dropped and say hey this likely is not the case. We know David Griffin is on twitter and saw the news. Instead, thousands of people bought tickets in preparation for the game and those people essentially paid hundreds over value just to see Zion. Griffin had to have known that would be the case.
    Griff probably wasnt going to do anything until that network forced his hand with this clip. And apparently, they didnt check this info with the Pelicans. Its as if they tried to just will it to happen, s Griff basically had no choice but to address it.

    Last edited by luckyman; 01-16-2020 at 12:27 AM.

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