coolhandluke121

Could have been a long term thing, could have been short term. But his games and innings over the last 4 years just shows what I'm saying about him being overworked, because even in that role for years he didn't get as much use as last year. I mean, he was already on the high end for relievers before last year even started, and then he set a career high in innings and games before the playoffs even started. I don't remember him working over multiple innings on a regular basis like he did last year either. Arm fatigue with no structural damage is pretty hard to prove or refute either way, but for someone to suggest it's silly and I just have an agenda and there's no evidence of it is kind of ridiculous. It would honestly be hard to imagine the evidence aligning more perfectly with the theory.

No sign other than actually watching the game and seeing him labor in every single playoff appearance except one. And the fact that this happened at over 75 innings pitched on the year, which is a rare amount for relievers and was already his career high by 8 innings and was his first year being a regular reliever who also often pitched in multiple frames in an appearance. And the fact that it coincides with CC abandoning his philosophy of using the entire roster on the grounds that an average pitcher facing guys for the first time is often better than a superior but overworked pitcher facing them for the 2nd, 3rd, or even 4TH time in a short span. How did that work out with Puig again? How about 5.8 walks per 9 innings in the playoffs, including walking a terrible backup catcher with the bases loaded? Sure, he pitched well at the end of the regular season... and got worked into the ground in the process. That's the nature of overuse. You're fine until you're overworked. He wasn't overworked until the playoffs. His late season performance has literally nothing to do with the argument that he crossed the fatigue threshold at the very end. I didn't say he was fatigued at the end of the regular season, so why are you citing evidence that he wasn't? But that's when he peaked, and the signs of a letdown could not have been more obvious just a few games into the playoffs. CC completely ignored those signs. Very disappointing that they recognized the signs of Chase Anderson falling apart and benched him before he did, but couldn't do the same with JJ. And Anderson was a borderline ace in 2017. And now his arm just isn't "right" despite (apparently) no evidence of structural damage. How much more evidence of overuse do you want? It's a textbook case. Overwork is a nebulous thing that's hard to measure and therefore it's basically impossible to prove in the moment. You just have to go on common sense with regard to workload and performance. Maybe his velocity wasn't down in the playoffs, but that often doesn't happen until well after the overuse period.

Jeffress was clearly gassed for the playoffs last year but Counsell forced him out there anyway. Now his arm isn't right and he's throwing 85. Can you say Matt Harvey 2015? I love Counsell, but that was an unmitigated disaster. I'll never understand it.

Homer mentioned max deals. That post had nothing to do with you. I would not give him a max deal. Even so, long-term financial health is just money in the owners' pockets. If you really understand the CBA, you understand that. It has almost nothing to do with payroll flexibility. You have the right to spend a lot of money on Khris or not spend it at all. There's no "I'd rather spend it on someone else", and there probably won't be for many years. It would be a question of letting Khris walk on principle and starting a much worse player instead. I don't think you have to give him more than 4/$100m, which is fair. I'd probably explore other options if it gets around 4/$120m. And to be clear, if I'm starting a team from scratch, no way I'd give him either of those contracts, but the context could not be more diametrically opposed to starting from scratch right now.

I very much doubt Khris gets a max deal, but that would present a dilemma. The main reason guys on max deals don't get traded often is because they're either really good or because their teams stubbornly hang on to them too long instead of trading them when they have a chance to get a good return. Memphis, for example, could have gotten a lot for Conley and Gasol just a few years ago, but their front office was as hard-headed about rebuilding as their players were about competing for the 7 seed every year. The CBA rules still make it an easy choice if you don't evaluate the situation in a "Khris is worth x dollars" vacuum. The one exception that occurs to me is, literally, the exception (mid-level exception, that is). You get about $3m less if you pay the luxury tax. So if you think the difference between a $5m exception and $8m exception for 2-3 years makes up for the loss of Khris, then you can let him walk if he gets too much. I'll grant that it could work if the best ring chaser veterans want to come Milwaukee, but most ring chasers are content to play for $5m if the situation is right anyway.

Whose long-term financial health? The owners got their arena and personally I think they're obligated to pay as much luxury tax as it takes to keep the team together. They've been the best team in the NBA basically all year long, and none of them are past their theoretical prime except Lopez, Hill, and Ersan. I'll grant that there is a point where he would be so overpaid that it's not even worth it, but I think the odds of him getting a deal like that are under 5% given how he's played the last few years. But there are still some gm's who don't care at all about defense and overall impact, just like there were still front offices in baseball that hadn't caught on to analytics 10+ years into the revolution. It comes down to spending the money on Khris or not being allowed to spend it at all. Even if he has negative value on his next contract, you still have the option of trading his contract with some young guys for a better player. Don't have that option if you don't take advantage of your one chance to go way over the cap though. That opportunity is there this year and then it's gone for the foreseeable future, assuming Giannis gets a supermax deal.

I think experience matters a lot. Young guys might seem to move around better and look more flashy, and you still have that outside chance of them being really good because they're not known quantities yet. But team record and on/off stats usually show that you're better off with an experienced veteran like Hill or Ersan, despite their limitations. I don't know if you're suggesting that you're fine with letting Khris walk and starting a young guy, but even if you do think they'd be good enough, why not just keep all of them and continue to have the best bench in the NBA? I like DDV and love Wilson, but they both have to shoot the 3 more consistently well to beat out Ersan, Hill, Snell, or Gasol, let alone Khris. That's a skill that often peaks in a player's late 20's, and even then it's subject to a lot of variance. I expect them both to be good enough to be solid top-8 rotation guys on a contending team within a few years, but I don't think they're there yet. And neither one is really a true sf, so they don't make Khris expendable. And even if they eventually do, then why not wait until they prove it in a bench role for a year or two before you trade Khris? He's not old or anything, and I don't think his next contract is going to be an albatross. Brown is a sf, but I just don't think he's good. Just seems out of touch with the team concept or something, even when it seems like he's doing a lot. Regular breakdowns are very costly to a team's chances of winning. As an example, even when Jabari was scoring 20+ ppg on solid efficiency, the team was generally still better with him on the bench. Being lost on defense gives the opposing so many easy buckets every game that it's almost impossible to make up for it by doing other things really well.

Yeah, he gets too much credit for hitting 40% of wide open 3's on such low volume while being a liability in so many other areas. You're lucky if you get a neutral performance out of him overall, even when he's strictly a 15 mpg back-up at one position. Sterling Brown brings much more energy and contributes in other ways, but I think he gets completely lost on defense constantly and the team suffers when he plays, despite him looking like he's having a positive impact. If you could combine Snell's discipline with Brown's energy and toughness, you'd have a pretty good sf. D.J. Wilson is quick enough to guard sf's. I could see him being a really good player soon. But even then, it's not like you're choosing between him and Khris. You can easily have both, or you can just let Middleton walk for nothing to save the owners money, with no other way to spend the money saved on other talent.

That was actually the whole purpose of the debate. It was just a ruse to drop some new material. I'm glad you like it.

Anyway, back to Keuchel. I think I'd like to have him. I like how people mentioned Lohse because that would be my comparison. Just an effective, professional pitcher who's likely to give you at least one good year, probably two, before he really starts to decline. The difference would be that the Brewers seem to have a more sustainable strategy for success, so they can justify an occasional splurge without worrying about decimating their depth due to payroll constraints.

That's just the uncertainty of baseball though. It also kind of reinforces the point that people are making about things going right one year and changing the next. Nelson was hurt, but Anderson and Davies were probably just "career year" guys in 2017. Things don't all carry over. The fact that they could replace them is exactly what people mean when they say a lot of things went right. How often do we expect them to piece together a playoff supporting cast from rejects? How often do we expect Yelich and Cain to be arguably the two most valuable position players in the NL by WAR? Very few people praise the front office more than I do, but they can't control things like injuries and slumps and payroll constraints career years not being sustainable. I think they're arguably the best in the business, but it's going to be hard to continue to be that good. Last year did have a bit of a magical quality to it, which was part of the fun, but there's no reason they should be presumed favorites over teams that are just as talented, if not more so. They didn't have nearly the unexpected bad performances and crucial injuries that the Cubs did, for example, and they were tied after 162 games.

I think his player option makes an extension harder because technically he still has over a year left on his current contract. Extensions are more restrictive when you have more than a year left on your current deal. I cited that in a post above but it probably got lost in the great weight debate. Bottom line, it has nothing to do with whether the Bucks want him here or whether he wants to be here. It's just not a viable option for him under the CBA rules, and that's why it's probably not even discussed. He signed his deal at a time when teams were experimenting with contracts with descending salaries for guys like him, which is a rarity and one of the reasons unusual extension situations are factors for him.

I feel that the context has been completely erased here. Someone sarcastically called out all the "shoulder experts" on this board for expressing completely reasonable doubts about whether Jimmy is going to be "better than ever". People are also being called out for being too negative about it, but all we're saying is basically what you're saying - that the shoulder is an extremely complex joint, throwing is a complex motion, and shoulder surgeries have uneven success rates, so therefore we're skeptical of him returning to form. I think it was obvious from the context that I wasn't claiming to be a shoulder surgeon, but only claiming to be enough of an expert on it to express skepticism about Nelson bouncing back 100%. I'm probably about as much of an expert as one can be without actually working in the field. People jumped all over that expert comment without context. Honest question for the people who actually work in the field. If you were absolutely forced to make some kind of huge wager on Nelson's future, would you be willing to bet on him ever being close to his 2017 self again? Maybe some arbitrary cutoff like producing another 3 WAR season? Knowing what you know about shoulder surgeries, recovery, recurrence rates, and possible lingering issues like scar tissue and changes to proprioception? Based on my personal experience and the research I did before deciding not to have shoulder surgery again, I would never be able to bet on it even with very good odds. I'm with the people who think anything we get from him is kind of a bonus. And that's definitely NOT the same as saying I believe he's going to be bad; it's saying I'm not ready to be persuaded that he's going to be good by cliche spring training comments about how he's better than ever.

I personally agree that a lot went well for the Brewers. Of course they had some injuries. Everyone does. But most of the guys who got hurt were role players, and the team had replacements for many of them already on the roster. Guys like Anderson and Davies might have lost their roles anyway. You could argue they were lucky Davies got hurt. Ditto Thames. Who knows if we would have seen that amazing first half from Aguilar if Thames had stayed healthy. Miley might not have gotten his chance if Suter hadn't gotten hurt. Shaw, Yelich, Cain, Chacin, Hader, Jeffress all healthy pretty much all year except for one brief DL stay for Cain if I'm not mistaken. Compare that to the Cubs and what they got from their top guys (Bryant, Darvish, Quintana, and Rizzo) and it's hard to argue the Brewers didn't have much better luck. No telling how many of those guys bounce back for the Cubs, but I'll bet my salary they don't combine for roughly just 5 WAR again next year. That was crazy. How many teams can win 95 with terrible years from literally their 5 best players going into the year? They do have some negative regression candidates as well, but they still have a ton of talent. I do think they have a complacency problem though.

On a related note, we might need Khris to be more like the player he was against Boston last year just to get past them in the second round. Getting Hayward back to speed has been a case of taking 2 steps backward in attempt to take 3 steps forward later for them. They could be scary in the playoffs.

He has been doing this ever since he got his current 5 year, $70m (opt-out after 4) contract though. Showed up lazy and out of shape in 2015. Got benched by Kidd about a month in for chucking and lack of defensive effort, an annual fall rite of passage at this point. That's when he earned the sarcastic "Khobe" moniker for his delusions about his isoball game. Fortunately he was young enough to get away with bad training habits, and he was back to his old self for the second half of the season. Played great, was all over the court on both sides of the ball, looked like a true all-around stud in the making. Tore his hamstring that summer, which admittedly was a major blow. Came back before the season was over and I had to do a double-take because he had gotten kind of fat. I figured it was just because of the injury though, and assumed he would lose the extra weight with a full summer of being healthy and getting back to 100%. He played well on offense with his "old man game", but was slow and lethargic. Obviously it was excusable under the circumstances, but it's no excuse anymore. It's worth noting that the team got better when Jabari tore his ACL and Khris replaced him basically the same day. It's not that Khris is bad; it's that he could be so much better. Next year, same thing. It was really disappointing because they had a chance to be pretty good and because he had plenty of time to get in better shape. He was looking better by the end of the season, and was moving around really well against Boston. His success in that series wasn't just about hitting shots, as an outside shooter will always have hot and cold streaks, but more about looking like his old self again. He had trouble staying in front of Brown and Tatum, but lots of swingmen do. It should also be noted that he was allowed to play as much isoball as he wanted, so that's not an excuse for his lethargy in the Kidd era. I figured that was a good sign and he would come back in great shape for a contract year, but he still has these issues. You and others may be forgetting how good his defense was before this became an issue. It didn't show up in the box score and not as many people were paying attention to the Bucks in 2014-15. His defense was terrific. Now he looks like he's wearing concrete shoes. As for saying it may just be a mental thing, I would find that a more likely explanation if he didn't regularly look exhausted on the court. It's not exactly that he's not trying per se, it's that his legs seem to get heavy and he gets winded too easily to sustain the effort. Minutes are no longer an excuse, because Bud does a great job managing minutes. Having too much responsibility on offense is not an excuse either, because they have plenty of other options. He should be playing with much more energy and hustling more. The lack of an extension is also not the issue. The CBA rules constrain an extension to a certain raise over his current salary, which is very low by modern standards.That's because they would technically be extending him with more than a year left on his current contract. The reason he's not getting one is because the maximum raise the Bucks could possibly give him is probably on the extreme low end of what he would get on the open market. He has to opt out and officially enter free agency to get anything close to market value. You can pretty much guarantee the Bucks would do back flips if he said he wants to sign an extension for the maximum amount they're allowed to give him right now, which I believe starts at a little more than $16m per season (it's been a while since I read the CBA though). You and tmwiese have at least acknowledged that he probably could be in a little better shape. What I take exception to is people implying that I'm just making it up and pretending to see body fat and signs of poor conditioning that aren't there, or calling it confirmation bias. Why would I do that? What bias would I have in the first place? Most importantly, what's a more obvious, simpler, more likely explanation for why his defense has gone deteriorated so much since getting his current contract and why he has no muscle tone and looks so slow? He was never Westbrook as an athlete, but he was a lot better than this. All that said, I would still keep him. I think he would be a hall-of-fame talent if he would get in great shape and embrace a role shooting off the ball more. I could see him being almost as good as Reggie Miller. Actually, screw that... I could see him being just as good. More importantly, they either spend the money on him, or they spend it on nobody. You can go over the cap to keep him, but you can't go over the cap to sign someone else to more than a minimum contract.

I spent hundreds of hours with shoulder surgeons and physical therapists specializing in shoulder injuries. I've also experienced many of them first-hand and did a lot of research when deciding whether to have surgery again. That definitely makes me an expert by layman's standards, especially when it comes to responding to a condescending comment implying that those of us skeptical of Nelson's chances of a 100% recovery don't know anything about shoulder injuries.

Except isn't that exactly what people are doing when they say they can't see it and therefore imply it's not there? Eyesight is not some subjective thing like intelligence. It's easily tested and objectively verifiable. I can't get over people trying to tell me that I don't see what I see just because they can't see it.

I know you're being somewhat sarcastic but my eyesight and my ability to discern small differences is actually amazing by any measure. This is just an objective fact based on vision tests. I also have very intimate knowledge of the subtle differences when you go from, say, 5% body fat to 15% because I've been all over that range most of my adult life - even though most people couldn't tell the difference and I was pretty fit regardless.

This isn't what's happening at all. It may be what you're saying, but there's plenty of people acting like I'm completely pulling this out of my butt. The real issue is people acting like the absence of "proof" is evidence against the theory, even though the theory is overwhelmingly supported by the best available evidence. Furthermore, tmwiese linked several instances where similar theories were proved after the fact because the player literally admitted it, even though there was no "proof" at the time that it was happening. If looking like he's gained weight and playing like he's out of shape isn't evidence that he's gained weight and is out of shape (by NBA swingman standards), then what is? I have to go measure his body fat% and give him conditioning tests? I mean, of course I haven't done that... but neither have the people saying this is not an issue. The bottom line is making the best possible conclusion given the evidence we have. It's one thing to say the overwhelming evidence is not quite "proof"; it's quite another to say the evidence is not evidence.

Subluxated my left shoulder and then dislocated it completely a few weeks later in high school football. Had a bankart reconstruction but either subluxated or completely dislocated the shoulder about 10-12 more times over the next 25 years. The instability has occurred in multiple directions and under different motions. The effect on my overall proprioception and sense of balance/symmetry has been profound. There's a lot of scar tissue as well. And with all that, there have been times that I felt 100%, just like Jimmy Nelson is saying now. But it was never 100% structurally sound, no matter how good it felt, and that's usually the case with surgeries - especially shoulders, which have very poor success rates compared to, say, torn ACLs or UCLs. Also have a labrum torn in two places in my right shoulder. First had problems with overextending to stock high shelves for years, then tore the back of the labrum whipping a pass to someone behind me, followed by a minor anterior labral tear from lifting weights and then a more serious one from throwing too hard without warming up. I opted against surgery this time because it often doesn't make much difference for shoulders (and sometimes makes it worse). Bottom line, you just have to rehab the heck out of it, keep the rotator cuff as strong and healthy as possible, and hope for the best... but you can never have your original shoulder back, and trying to do the same things you did before will often lead to problems. So I don't know how many shoulder experts there are here, but you better believe there's at least one.

Great share. That shows exactly what I'm talking about. Of course his experience helped too, but losing that much fat made a monumental difference in his performance... even though he didn't look fat or out of shape (if you didn't know what to look for) at all before. I think this being a baseball forum has a lot to do with people not seeing the difference. NBA basketball is probably in the .005% of professions where that kind of body fat makes a huge difference, and MLB is obviously not. I also don't know how many people here have been in great enough shape to have experienced the difference, but that may be part of the reason it's so hard to make the point.

Athletes do that all the time. They need to believe it and talk themselves into it just as much as some fans do. It would probably be foolish to bet on him being really good again. Foolish on him being really good again... okey-dokey Pitching is hard enough without any structural damage to a shoulder. I'm not saying it can't happen, but acting like it's going to happen is incredibly optimistic no matter what he says. I don't care for gambling at all, but if I did and my money was on the line, no way I'd bet on him bouncing back completely.

Yep. I remember constantly trying to tell people how so many players were carrying more fat than guys like Jordan and Pippen, but people just kept saying "they look fine and they're playing great." The point, however, is not that they weren't playing reasonably well but that they could play better - and most of those guys, even before they shed the extra pounds, were much more tone and energetic than Khris is now. There's a certain range of effectiveness you're going to have given your talent, age, health, and experience. However, being at all out of shape and/or carrying extra weight is going to put you on the low end of that range every single time, whereas great conditioning will put you on the high end. And the difference is monumental in your overall effect on the team, despite the fact that superficial "box score" numbers don't change much.

Simple. His effort and stamina used to be a lot better and he used to be a lot leaner with better definition and tone. He should still be in his prime. The fact that other people don't see it means nothing to me. It takes a trained eye to see an extra 5% body fat on a guy wearing a baggy uniform, so I already know that most people can't see it. I also know many examples of guys who nobody said was fat, but who then lost 10-15 pounds of baby fat and said it made a big difference. Heck, even Kobe did it. Did anyone know he could afford to lose some fat when he was in his 20's? Very few people recognized it, but compare pictures of his body and muscle fiber to prime Jordan/Pippen and you'll see the difference. And if you think an extra 10-15 pounds of dead weight doesn't make a difference, try playing with a 15 pound vest and then see how different it feels when you get to take it off. Playing basketball so much doesn't mean you're in great shape, because you're obviously being compared directly with other people who play basketball just as much. It's all relative. No, I don't think he's fat and out of shape compared to you and me. I shouldn't have to clarify that. But his conditioning and tone leave a lot to be desired. Here's an example of why it's so hard to see the extra fat Khris is carrying: http://