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AC TITTICOCK'S WEEKLY FREE NBA BASKETBALL PICKS AND WINNERS
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AC's Wagercom 2006-2007 NBA Picks Season Record
Wins: 93 Losses: 93 Ties: 2
NBA Picks Winning Percentage: 50%
Record updated Saturdays and Mondays
Contact AC at ac@wagercom.com or post your questions/comments on the Wagercom Message Board
Read AC's Bio
AC's outlook on the NBA is an entertaining original column featured here at Wagercom. If you are prone to NBA betting or even just an NBA fan, make sure you come back often to read his articles and free NBA Basketball picks against the spread. AC will be providing us with a weekly outlook during the basketball season including free NBA Basketball picks on some of the weekend games each Friday and Saturday.
Our NBA expert AC has had 3 consecutive winning seasons picking NBA games against the spread for a combined 317-281 record yielding a 53% winning percentage which would have won you money including the VIG. AC does this out of the kindness of his heart and for the naked pictures of your girlfriends you send him as a token of your appreciation. So enjoy the columns and the picks..
AC'S NBA BASKETBALL FREE PICKS PLAYOFFS WEEK 2:
What a first week we have had so far in the NBA playoffs. The Warriors have outplayed and outhustled the Mavericks, the Bulls have picked apart the Heat, and even the Nuggets have stolen one from the Spurs. There haven’t been this many upsets in the NBA since Brian Scalabrine made a roster. It is a great start to the playoffs in what has been one of the worst and most unpredictable NBA seasons. We finally may have reached a level of parity where any team can win, which makes the games more exciting than Jessica Simpson making out with Jessica Biel, ok, not that exciting, but you get my point.
Anyway, with awards season upon us, it is time for AC’s fourth annual NBA regular season awards. So sit back, put your reading glasses on, and enjoy AC’s breakdown of the best and worst in the NBA this season.
MVP (The Bird Award):
There are a number of good candidates for this award though none of them have really stood out from the pack. Kobe, Dirk, Nash, LeDong, McGrady, Yao, Arenas, Duncan and even Chris Bosh all had terrific years. More players had MVP caliber seasons than Michael Vick has healthy dogs (which may or may not be that many, tough call).
To get to the MVP, we have to go through a bit of a process of elimination and the first one to go is LeDong. While the Cavs had the second best record in the East with a team less talented than a Scary Movie cast, they should have won 8-10 more games and the reason they didn’t is because LeDong coasted through the beginning of the season. If he played as hard in the first few months as he did in the final months, he would clearly have been MVP, but you can’t get outhustled by Vince Carter for two months and win this award, just won’t work.
The next candidates to drop out are Yao and Bosh. If Yao had been healthy all year, this award could have been his. Seriously, you can’t stop a seven foot six inch athlete, it just can’t be done. It’s like trying to chew nuts and gum. As for Bosh, his Raptors were the most improved team, and Bosh is their leader, but so many players played well for Toronto that you can’t single one out. Bosh suffers from my Nowitzki rule, if you took Bosh off the Raptors and replaced him with another all-star caliber forward, they likely would have played just as well. Which brings me to Dirk. Put Bosh, Duncan, or even Paul Pierce on Dallas and they win the West. Dirk is good, but the Mavs are so good at every position that it is hard to determine exactly how much Dirk means to Dallas.
So we are left with Duncan, Arenas, Kobe, McGrady, and Nash. McGrady kept the Rockets in the hunt without Yao and he really learned how to distribute the ball and make his teammates better. However, he still suffered from the occasional night off and the proclivity to shoot too much. He is definitely one of the top 5 players in the game, but falls just short of MVP this year. Duncan had a solid year and the Spurs performed better than I would have expected, but Manu is the player who gets the Spurs going. He is the cherry on their sundae, the rims on their Escalade, and the money shot in their porn. Duncan is critical to the Spurs, but without Manu, they struggle to make the playoffs. As for Arenas, if you allow for personality, he is a runaway MVP candidate. While he was a scoring machine, and finally got the Wiz some respect, he just didn’t do enough to make his teammates better. Swap Kobe and Arenas and the Wiz win the East while the Lakers are still the 7th seed. Scorers can make bad teams good, but can not make good teams great.
So Kobe and Nash are left and if you read the last sentence, you can see where this is going. Kobe is the most unstoppable player in the league, hands down, but he is a victim of circumstance here. Take him off of the Lakers and they are the worst team in the league, replace him with Gilbert Arenas and the Lakers are just as good. In other words, Kobe was surrounded by such an awful team, he couldn’t show all of his skills because he had to score. Compare this to Steve Nash who no matter what team he is on, makes everyone around him better. You can’t replace Nash on the Suns, there is just not another point guard who is even in his league. Sure he has Stoudamire, Marion, and Barbosa, but he is worth 10-15 wins a year by himself for simply running the Suns machine. For that reason, Nash is the most valuable player. Maybe he is not the best, but he is the most irreplaceable.
Least Valuable Player (The Mokeski):
Like usual, there was a lot of competition for this award. Mike Dunleavy Jr. produced his usual extra subpar year, Shelden Williams played like he was auditioning the for the lead role in a Jerry’s kids movie in his rookie year with the Hawks, Melvin Ely somehow made it through 30 marijuana haze filled games, and Marcus Banks proved your boy AC right once again by making himself completely worthless. However, the least valuable player this year was the Philadelphia 76ers Chris Webber. Webber was nice enough to sit out for half of the games in which he was a Sixer while shooting an Adam Morrisonesque 39% from the floor. However, numbers can’t measure the overall lack of effort, intensity, and teamwork he showed in Philadelphia. While his numbers with the Pistons are not too different from his numbers with the Sixers, he has become a key player on a top team rather than the worst player on the worst team. He should donate his salary this year to the fans of Philadelphia for making them watch his no effort 20 game stretch with them.
Most Improved Player (The Michael Redd Award):
Towards the end of the year I broke down the most improved players which included Andre Igoudala, Deron Williams, and Al Jefferson . However, I left off two important players in Monta Ellis and the Latvian Assassin Andris Biedrins. Ellis has gone from a marginal second round pick to a solid scoring option. I am sure Danny Ainge is thrilled he drafted high schooler Gerald “If I only had a brain” Green 22 picks ahead of Monta Ellis, again, a great job by Danny. As for Biedrins, he blocks shots, he rebounds, he hits lay-ups, and he fouls like Greg Kite in his prime (in other words early and often). With many good candidates to choose from, I have to go with Deron Williams though. Point guard is the hardest position to play and Deron had a ton of pressure on him being a semi-flop as the #3 pick in last year’s draft. He was able to make significant strides and for that he is the most improved.
Least Improved Player (The Kedrick Brown Award):
This is a tough one this year with three outstanding candidates. There is Kendrick (no relation to Kedrick) Perkins who in his 4th year averaged a robust 4 points and 5 rebounds a game which was marginally worse than his 5 points and 6 rebounds a game averages of last year. There is Marvin Williams who put up better numbers than in his rookie year, and even averaged 13.5 points a game, but still looked lost on the floor and still is not a solid NBA player. But the winner, in a landslide, is Marcus Banks. Banks went from averaging 12 points and 5 assists per game with the methodical Timberwolves to averaging 5 points and 1 assist per game with the run and gun Suns. In other words, by moving to the best offensive team in the game, where even a third grader could average 10 points and 4 assists and not just any third grader but an undersized third grader with a bum knee, Marcus Banks saw his number cut in half and his minutes move to almost zero. Banks is really not a good player and he proved it this year.
Rookie of the Year (The Jordan):
This was not a great year for rookies, but there were two who stood out (and I am not counting Garbajosa because he is like 50 years old), Andrea Bargnani and Brandon Roy. Bargnani’s late season injury really hampered his numbers as he was starting to make significant progress, while Roy played solid after coming back from early season leg injuries. That said, Roy was really the more consistent player and meant more to his team, so he gets the rookie of the year award.
Worst Highly Drafted Rookie (The Chris Washburn Award):
Can I choose all of them here? I mean really, there were more bad highly drafted rookies than there are bad Rob Schneider movies. That said, there were two who were head and shoulders above the rest in Shelden Williams and Adam Morrison. Williams came in with best pedigree having played 4 years at Duke but he was only able to average 5 points and 5 rebounds per game which is rather Kendrick Perkinsian. As for Morrison, he missed more shots than a redneck misses dental appointments. He shot 37% from the floor while dishing out 2 assists per game. So not only could he not shoot, but he couldn’t make his teammates better and he played worse defense than an 80 year old with no legs and a bad case of arthritis. Morrison is easily is the worst highly drafted rookie and I would be surprised if he is not missing shots in Europe in 4 years.
Best Coach (The Auerbach):
Mike D’Antoni, it’s that simple.
Worst Coach (The Isiah Award):
Glenn “Doc” Rivers is so bad that this award may be renamed for him, and that says a lot. His in game strategy is, to be complimentary, confusing, his player rotations are, to be nice, bizarre, and his team’s improvement is, to be polite, just god awful. Doc has now been a part of two of the six longest losing streaks in NBA history as his Celtics dropped 18 straight games at one point this year. Let me repeat that, the Celtics dropped 18 straight games and Danny Ainge wants to give Doc Rivers and extension. Doc has led the Celtics from 45 wins, to 33 wins, to 24 wins. I can not explain how maddening this is. He is just awful and epitomizes the delusions of Celtics owner Wyc Grousbeck who this week claimed the Celtics were a “winning team in a losing team’s body.” Ugh. They are more like a horrible team, in a horrible team’s body, with a horrible coach.
And this year we have two new awards:
Best GM/President (The Auerbach II):
Brian Colangelo wins this in more of a landslide than when Sitting Bull took out General Custer in Little Big Horn. Colangelo added experienced but overlooked Euros, drafted Bargnani, and traded for TJ Ford. Just making one of those moves would probably have won him this award but pulling off all three makes this an easier decision than deciding not to go to a Robin Williams movie.
Worst GM/President (The Chris Wallace):
In honor of the great Chris Wallace, who is actually somehow still the Celtics GM, this award goes to Danny Ainge who was able to turn Raef LaFrentz and likely ROY Brandon Roy into Theo Crapliff and one year of Sebastian Telfair. With Telfair unlikely to be part of the Celtics next year due to his 3rd run in with the law in two years and also his horrible play, Ainge gave away the rookie of the year for nothing. In four years Ainge has taken a marginal playoff team to a 24 win team, so congrats Danny, Red would have been proud, and by proud I mean the exact opposite of that.
Friday Night NBA Playoff Picks:
Toronto +4.5 at New Jersey:
Jason Kidd has a slightly injured knee and Chris Bosh is really good. Honestly, it's that simple. Teasing the under 191 is a good idea here as well while teasing Mikki Moore about what a crappy player he is probably isn't. This should be a close game so take the points and hope the Raptors slow Richard Jefferson down.
Chicago at Miami -5.5:
If Dwyane Wyane Wade has any pride, this is a 20 point blow out and we all know Wade comes to play. The Bulls have outhustled, outshot, outrebounded, and frankly, just outed the Heat as a less than heterosexual team (and there is nothing wrong with that). When Antoine Walker is your second most effective player and it is not 1995 and you are not Kentucky, you know you have some problems. I am pretty sure Jason Williams is going to come out of his weed induced slumber and at least one other Heat player not named Wade or Shaq will step up. Wade is going for 45 tonight, so as long as his teammates don't forget to show up, this should be a Heat blow out.
Dallas -3.5 at Golden Shower State:
I have to admit, the Warriors have really surprised me with how well they have played. Gone are the days of Alton Lister, the days of Vonteege Cummings, and even the days of Adonal Foyle (uhh, actually scratch that last one). However, in looking at the box scores, the only thing the Warriors have really done better than the Mavs is shoot 3 pointers. They have been outrebouned, committed more turnovers, and have only 23 assists in 2 games. That's right, only 23 assists. In other words, if the Mavericks decide to play any perimeter defense and cut down on turnovers, this game is a blow out. Take the Mavs and root for Jason Terry to get hot from three and Jerry Stackhouse to actually hit a shot (3-15 in the series from the floor, though 11-13 from the line).
Saturday NBA Playoff Picks:
Wow, AC got shellacked last night so tonight we’re going to have to win it all back. Who knew Dallas would choke like a newbie in Monsters of Cock video.
Detroit -4.5 at Orlando:
Sorry Orlando, but this series is over. This game will be close until the Pistons pull away at the end. The Magic just don’t have the scorer they need to keep them in games while the Pistons understand how to win. Just root for the Pistons to try today.
Cleveland -5 at Washington:
It is a shame the Wiz’s season was derailed by injuries because they could have made this a great series with a healthy Arenas and Butler. Instead we are treated to Jarvis Hayes and DeShawn Stephenson so take the Cavs and give the points.
San Antonio -2 at Denver:
This is a tough game to judge, it really is because it is still not clear how good Denver is. They went 11-1 in April but many teams were tanking then so it is hard to say exactly how many of those games were real wins. The Nuggets certainly have enough talent to pull off this upset and this is the game that will tell us what to expect. Given that the Nuggets are a big question mark, stick with the safe pick and take the Spurs. You know the Spurs are going to play hard so just hope they can low the pace down.
Houston +3.5 at Utah:
Yep, I am taking all 4 road teams. Nope, I am not on crack. Enjoy Yao.
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