#but i also think there's just no strong incentive to tank 500s

[rolandkaros]

Sorry this is the same anon from before LOL i wanted to clarify something!! When i said incentivize tanking i meant it encourages players to show up to smaller tournaments that they don’t actually intend to put full effort into. Because like you said, the majority of 500s are right around slams/masters! So why would an Iga or Aryna want to go all out in those tournaments knowing that if they’re tired or hurt for the big ones they’re leaving points on the table. It’s just hard on the players all around

Sure, but I mean now we're just back to the scheduling issue which the one thing I think everyone can all agree on (season too long! why 6 mandatory 500s??). But still, I don't necessarily think there's clear incentive to tank 500s for the sake of satisfying the mandatory 6. I just don't think there's any motivation to tank tournaments that are going to count towards your point total anyway, and even if there is, then that's the player's loss (that is, if you're taking the effort to show up, you might as well play). From what we can see, it seems more common for players to just skip 500s entirely if they don't want to play, and accept mandatory zeros.

Of the current top 10 players, only Emma, Dasha, and Bia have actually played 6 or more 500s. I'm pretty sure more of them reached 6 through other means (e.g. Qinwen is allowed to count Ningbo because she did promotional events there, Jess and Elena both have multiple extended periods of inactivity due to injury which might add to their tally). But my point is, I don't think the WTA making it mandatory to play 6 500s even makes much of a difference, because clearly the players are willing to drop points and take mandatory zeros for the sake of scheduling. Which again, circles back to the rather annoying conclusion of "well...those are the rules I guess" when it comes to Iga losing #1.

But the truth is I really don't think any of these players want to tank. Even just going to a 500 event and losing in R1 expends a lot of time and energy. Plus, a lot of these players get first round byes, so they're usually having to stay until mid-week anyway. At that point, I think most of them would rather just skip, take the zero, and prepare for the next tournament. And even if they do go to 500s and tank...then I think that's kind of their problem? Because ultimately they're the one losing out on points. So it could be a strategy employed by some, but it really seems that most of these players prefer skipping to tanking.

[newstfionline]

The bridge of desperation

By Katy Watson, BBC, Aug. 23, 2018

The humanitarian crisis in Venezuela has led to one of the largest mass migrations in Latin America’s history.

President Nicolás Maduro blames “imperialists”--the likes of the US and Europe--for waging “economic war” against Venezuela and imposing sanctions on many members of his government.

But his critics say it is economic mismanagement--first by predecessor Hugo Chávez and now President Maduro himself--that has brought Venezuela to its knees.

The country has the largest proven oil reserves in the world. It was once so rich that Concorde used to fly from Caracas to Paris. Now, its economy is in tatters.

Four in five Venezuelans live in poverty. People queue for hours to buy food. Much of the time they go without. People are dying from a lack of medicines. Inflation is at 82,766% and there are warnings it could exceed one million per cent by the end of this year.

Venezuelans are trying to get out. The UN says 2.3 million people have fled the country--7% of the population. More than a million have arrived in Colombia in the past 18 months.

Many of those Venezuelans have come over the Simón Bolívar International Bridge.

The bridge is about 300m long and 7m wide. It straddles the Rio Táchira in the eastern Andes, a river that snakes along the border between Colombia and Venezuela. The river bed can sometimes dry up but heavy rains soon change that.

The two small towns the bridge connects--San Antonio del Táchira on the Venezuelan side and Villa del Rosario in Colombia--are in two very different worlds.

Colombians rarely pop over the border to do their shopping in Venezuela like they used to. It’s almost entirely one-way traffic nowadays.

Every day at 05:00 Colombian time, (06:00 in Venezuela), the sound of a fence being dragged across tarmac breaks the silence in the valley and marks the opening of the bridge to pedestrians.

The queue from Venezuela into Colombia usually builds steadily overnight. When the gates open, it’s like athletes out of the starting blocks. Venezuelans can’t get over quickly enough.

Some people are stopped by guards and told to open their bags. While most do so without drama, you can see panic in some faces when people realise they are about to be caught.

With Venezuela’s economy in crisis, there’s an incentive to smuggle staples like meat and cheese into Colombia so it can be sold for higher prices. The people doing it aren’t Mr Bigs--they’re mostly just Venezuelans desperate to raise money to buy other essentials.

One woman, whose meat is confiscated, wails: “What am I meant to do?” The guard replies gruffly: “This is a humanitarian corridor--you can take food into Venezuela but you can’t take it out.” And so it repeats throughout the day.

Those with nothing to declare--or perhaps just the lucky ones who aren’t stopped--walk on through. The trundle of suitcase wheels is the soundtrack of this bridge.

When you get to the end of the bridge, you reach what’s known as La Parada, or “the stop” in English. It’s a bustling community that makes its money from border trade. Market sellers, pharmacies, shops and bus companies all vying for sales from those crossing the bridge. Most of the street traders here used to be Colombians--this is after all Colombia.

But increasingly, Venezuelans have also started setting up shop here, trying to sell their wares in a country where the currency hasn’t been decimated.

Right at the end of the bridge, amid the chorus of street-sellers, one man shouts: “Who wants to sell their hair?”

In front of a metal barrier protecting the bridge, Laura Castellanos sits on a plastic stool. The 25-year-old has long wavy brown hair to the bottom of her back. She looks uneasy.

A woman is stood behind her, scissors in hand. Laura is about to lose most of her hair.

She’s nursing her two-month old daughter Paula who is wrapped up in a big fluffy blanket and wearing a stripy pink hat. She yawns as she lies patiently in her mother’s arms, unaware of the border chaos around her. Laura’s husband Jhon Acevedo is nearby looking after their two older daughters.

The hair-cutter is lifting up the top layer of Laura’s hair and cutting what’s underneath right back to the roots. She doesn’t want to talk much.

With every snip she hands a chunk of hair to another woman standing next to her. The hair buyer says nothing and looks away. It feels like a cold transaction, nothing more.

Laura is getting paid 30,000 pesos ($10) for her hair. It’ll be sold on to make extensions or wigs.

“It’s the first time I’ve done it,” she says with a mixture of nervousness and embarrassment. She’s come for the day from the town of Rubio, about an hour from the border.

Laura is selling her hair because her eldest daughter, eight-year-old Andrea, has diabetes and the family needs to raise money to pay for her insulin which she takes three times a day. The family has run out of supplies and it’s been three days since little Andrea last had her shots. Jhon’s salary as a saddler doesn’t always stretch to pay for his daughter’s drugs.

“There’s no medicine, it’s hard,” says Laura. “People are dying in Venezuela because they can’t get the medicines they need.”

After five minutes of cutting, the family heads off to find a pharmacy. At first glance you can’t tell Laura’s had most of her hair removed. The hair-cutter has left a thin layer of long hair on top to hide the truth. Laura admits she feels a bit sad.

“It will pay for something at least,” she says. Her husband Jhon says they’re looking for a “pirate” pharmacy--an informal stall that sells drugs in plastic cabinets on the street. Insulin pens will be cheaper there than in a walk-in drug store.

But on the streets around La Parada there’s no way of knowing that what they are buying is the real deal. Counterfeits abound but it’s a risk Laura and the family think is worth taking.

“There’s no insulin back home, you can’t get it anywhere,” Laura says as she eyes the best-before date on the side of the insulin pen. They pick up two dark blue pens for 8,000 pesos each ($2.65) and go on their way. That will last them nearly two months before they have to begin the search again. It’s not enough time for Laura’s hair to grow back.

“President Maduro is the worst thing Chávez left us.” That’s a feeling shared by many. When Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999, there was hope. He was a man who championed the poor in what has always been a deeply divided society. He was a vibrant and controversial figure who wanted to lead a socialist revolution in Venezuela.

But Chavez was helped by strong commodity prices that funded his ambitious social programmes. With a fall in oil prices, President Maduro has had no such luck--and little of the charisma his predecessor had. During his leadership, the country has fallen into economic decline.

“The government does whatever it wants, it has all the power,” says Celene. “Only God can help us--it’s the only thing left.”

But Celene has a lifeline. Her mother-in-law lives in the US and sends back $500 every couple of months. With her new baby, and two older children who are four and eight, Celene is unable to work. So she relies on that money to keep her afloat. It’s money that she also shares with her sister, her brother-in-law and their baby.

Ten minutes’ drive away into the centre of the nearest city Cúcuta, the Erasmo Meoz hospital is creaking under the pressure.

In the emergency ward, patients are lined up in hospital beds along the wall and in front of doors. Family members are gathered around the beds, comforting their relatives.

Those who are able to are sitting on a row of plastic chairs. Other patients are in wheelchairs, attached to drips. Outside the ward, in the hospital courtyard, more people are waiting. In among the mass of people, a group of prisoners, chained by the wrists, is guided to another part of hospital for treatment.

The emergency ward has capacity for 75 beds. But there are currently 100 patients in this room. There’s hardly any space to move.

In a room off the main ward, a dead body lies waiting. Covered in a white cotton sheet, and tied tight around the neck and feet, it’s there for all to see until a member of staff finally wheels it through the crowds of beds and on to the mortuary. There’s no space or time for a peaceful exit in this chaotic hospital.

Each bed is marked with the patient’s nationality.

Ángel Escobar, 28, is one of the Venezuelans. His mother is wrapping bandages around arms which are red-raw, blistered and weeping.

Ángel, his brother Teobaldo and their mother Cecilia recently made the journey from the city of Barinas, 350km from the border. They didn’t have the money for a bus ticket, so instead they hitched several rides, nursing Ángel and his wounds along the way.

Ángel used to be a motorcycle mechanic. Five years ago, he was fixing a bike in his workshop when a spark caused a petrol tank to explode.

“I got second and third degree burns,” he explains. “I waited in hospital in Venezuela for help--it never came.”

Instead his situation got worse. He contracted three infections in hospital and he went downhill rapidly.

The injuries he’s got look so red and recent but this has been five years of daily pain. The seeping raw skin is the aftermath of the infections, not the burns themselves.

“They didn’t treat him because they didn’t have supplies,” Cecilia explains.

Ángel has got large scaly scabs on top of his skin that are slowly coming off now he’s in hospital.

His arms are deformed because of an error made by the doctors in Venezuela. In Colombia he says he’s being looked after at last.

Dr Andrés Eloy Galvis Jaimes, who is in charge of the emergencies ward, says the situation is getting out of hand.

“Thirty per cent of our patients in emergencies are Venezuelans,” he says. “The national government isn’t giving us extra money. There’ll come a moment that we won’t have any more resources for anyone. That’s a real fear.”

Around the corner, a middle-aged man is lying on a bed in the corridor waiting for a gall-bladder operation. He came over from San Antonio, the town just across the bridge. He’s been lying here for four days.

“In Venezuela you can’t get anything, you just die,” he says. “There aren’t even sedatives,” he adds laughing. He used to work in a bag factory but it closed down.

Now, he earns his money smuggling petrol.

“There’s nothing else to do,” he says. Every night he works in “las trochas”--the word used for illegal trails that cross the border. It’s a journey of 20 minutes, there and back, he says. He does the trip two or three times a night.

“They give it away in Venezuela,” he says, of the heavily-subsidised fuel.

While hyperinflation has seen prices of most goods soar in Venezuela, petrol prices have remained low. A bottle of water can cost 30,000 times the price of filling up a tank in Venezuela.

To smuggle 250 litres, he says he pays off the soldiers with 15,000 Colombian pesos ($5) and gets 20,000 pesos himself.

Smugglers earn a tidy sum reselling fuel over the border. It’s one of the reasons President Maduro said earlier this month that he wanted to get rid of universal subsidies and allow prices to rise to international levels.

President Maduro and his administration often paint themselves as the innocent victims in this story of Venezuela’s decline. And they paint those who leave as deserters of the socialist cause.

As the day goes on, the queues carry on building on the border. Hundreds of people wait in line at immigration for a stamp in their passport to make their onward journey more straightforward.

There are queues at money transfer houses where Venezuelans wait patiently to pick up much-needed funds from relatives and friends who live abroad.

And there are queues for buses--people waiting with suitcases piled up high, their entire possessions carefully packed as they head to meet their friends and families across South America.

But for every Venezuelan lucky enough to be moving on, there remain dozens who don’t have the resources to go anywhere.

Johnny, Angel and Yember are hanging around the middle of the bridge, waiting for Venezuelans to come over. Dressed in T-shirts, ripped jeans and trainers, they’ve each got a luggage trolley in hand with rope wrapped around the handles--they’re ready to tie up the heavy bags of incoming Venezuelans and help them get to the nearest bus stop.

They’re all recent arrivals from the capital Caracas, Valencia and San Cristobal. They’ve stayed by the border to earn some money before moving on. But business as a “maletero” is slow.

“The people coming from Venezuela are immigrants with nothing,” they say. They’re coming in search of money and better lives so few nowadays have the spare change for a luggage-handler.

On a good day, they earn 15,000 pesos ($5) but on a bad one, not even a cent.

They’ve given up hope of change back home. With President Maduro winning the elections, he now has another six-year term they think he’ll complete.

“If things could end peacefully, then that would be the best thing,” says Johnny. He dismisses the idea of the military turning against the president. “A coup could mean lots of people, including children, would die. But if things could end, well...” he trails off, thinking of the options.

From the bridge where the maleteros are, you can see a blue-painted cage. Inside is a figure of the Our Lady of Mount Carmel (Virgen del Carmen). She’s the patron saint of drivers and of the Army in the Andes. In a part of the world where hope is fading, faith remains strong. Fitting too that her home is an insecure frontier town, an area where soldiers operate around the clock.

The virgin sits across a dirt road, in front of a metal yard where Pompilio Rincón is throwing slabs of aluminium on to a scrap heap.

He says there are lots of metal collectors that come over from Venezuela.

“Before, Venezuelans would come in their cars and trucks,” he says. Now, people are bringing metal on their backs--women and children too.”

As he chats, a young teenager in a smart checked short-sleeved t-shirt comes in with a big bag and dumps his treasure on to the massive set of scales on the floor of the warehouse. He hopes to get 1,500 pesos (50 cents) per kilo of his metal.

Breiner Hernández, 15, comes from San Cristóbal in Venezuela. He goes to school in the morning and when he’s not studying, he’s looking for metal. Every few days he jumps on the bus with his bag to sell on the other side of the border here in La Parada.

“With scrap metal, what I make in one month in Venezuela, I make in one day here,” he explains, adding that the money goes to help his family eat. He lives with his grandfather who looks after Breiner’s two younger siblings so his salary matters.

He’s been doing this since the start of the year.

“The situation is really difficult,” he says. He can’t vote but it doesn’t stop him having an opinion on his country’s politics.

“No one wants Maduro, he treats people really badly,” he says. “We need a change.”

As the sun starts to set, more and more Venezuelans head back over the bridge, their jobs done for the day. Food purchased, medical appointments met. One passer-by loaded with nappies shouts “what a humiliation”--people having to leave their country to buy basic goods so they can survive.

But even as the afternoon fades, there are still plenty of people still trying to enter Colombia. They’re queuing up along a bright yellow metal fence, like corralled cattle, waiting for their turn to show their documents and be allowed in.

The Bolivarian National Guard--Venezuela’s army--usher them through to the Colombian side. On one fence, there’s a billboard.

“Territory of peace” it reads. But one soldier mutters. He sounds fed up. He may work for the government but he suffers the same as his compatriots. His salary doesn’t stretch and he can’t eat a decent meal.

“I wonder how long I can last here,” he tells me as he too contemplates his escape.

[opedguy]

Stocks Tank on Trump’s No China Deal

LOS ANGELES (OnlineColumnist.com), Dec. 3, 2019.--Signaling he has no plans to end the China Trade War, 73-year-old President Donald Trump showed he’s a great impresario when it comes to the U.S. economy.  With growing numbers of economists predicting a slowdown or recession in 2020, Trump’s doing everything possible to avoid that scenario. Trump knows he needs a strong economy for reelection, when mainstream voters chose a president Nov. 4, 2020. Wall Street nosedived nearly 400 points, it the biggest one-day loss in months, dragging the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 279 points to 27,503, only 500 points off its record high. Wall Street scratched back 120 points, losing only 1.02% for the current session.  More importantly, the recovery shows there’s still bottom-feeder buyers looking for bargains after a sell-off.  Wall Street periodically sells off when price-to-earnings multiple get too high.

             Inflated share prices usually result in profit-taking, keeping stock averages more attractive to investors.  When the market gets frothy, making new market highs, major funds typically take profits, making stocks more affordable.  If the market rockets up without any sell-offs, it would cause a major sell-off, maybe leading to recession.  Bond traders like billionaire Jeffrey Gundlach always warn about market sell-offs and possible recession.  But unlike other predictions, Gundlach lowered his probability of recession from 75%.to 40%, a good sign for equity investors.  While Gundlach expects to buy-and-sell more bonds, currently trading about $150 billion for DoubleLine Capital, he also downplays the likelihood of a slowdown or recession in 2020.  Gundlach thinks a strong economy in an election years would practically guarantee Trump four more years, looking at what he sees as a lackluster Democrat field.

             Delaying a China Trade Deal gives the economy the best chance at recovery. Showing how Wall Street’s easily manipulated, Trump signaled he had no interest in forging a trade deal before year’s end.  Delaying the China trade deal keeps markets guessing, with fund traders likely to sell off.  “In some ways, I like the idea of waiting until after the election for a China deal, but they want to make a deal now and we will see whether or not the deal is going to be right,” Trump told Reuters. Trump’s remarks caused the Dow to drop 1.02%, with the tech-rich Nadaq dropping only 47 points to 8, 520 or 0.55%, a lower-than-expected drop.  With the Dow losing twice the percentage as the more volatile Nasdaq, it shows that traders aren’t serious about a prolonged sell-off.  Trump’s decision of hold off on a trade deal with China speaks volumes about what he wants the Federal Reserve Board to do.

               Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell has already cut interest rates three times in 2019, going in the opposite direction as 2018 when he hiked rates three times.  Trump blamed Powell for sabotaging 2018 Gross Domestic Product [GDP] hiking rates in the 2018.  When you consider that no China deal could create more selling, it looks like Trump wants Powell to continue cutting rates into 2020.  If Trump gets Wall Street to sell-off due to the China trade deal or whatever, he’ll provide more monetary stimulus heading into the Election Year.  “It’s all about the economy. And I think that if the economy holds together—and it just might—into the election, I think Trump’s going to win,” said Gundlach.  Gundlach sees Trump delaying the China trade deal to push the Fed into cutting rates again in 2020.  Periodic profit-taking helps Walls Street prolong its bull market.

            Gundlach sees Trump ‘s moves with China as political, hoping Wall Street sells-off, giving Powell the best excuse to slash rates. Lowering his prediction of recession from 75% to 40%, Gundlach sees the economy as doing well enough to avoid recession in 2020.  When you get bears like Gundlach to up his view of the economy, it’s a positive sign heading into 2020.  Whatever happens in Europe or Asia, the U.S. seems uniquely poised to ride out global economy problems.  When you consider that Democrat presidential candidate, California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris, dropped out today, it tells Gundlach that none of the remaining Democrat candidates have the staying power to beat Trump.  Once considered a Democrat favorite, Harris’s fall from grace shows that the current Democrat impeachment strategy could backfire, giving Trump a real advantage heading into 2020.

            Trump’s strategy of delaying a China trade deal indicates that he’s laser-focused on getting more help from the Fed.  Trump wants to see GDP at 4% something currently running at under 2%.  Delaying a China Trade deal gives markets more time to sell-off, creating more incentive for Powell to cut rates in 2020.  If Trump signaled he’d complete a China Trade Deal, markets would rally but only briefly.  Keeping periodic profit-taking on Wall Street, Trump gives himself the best chance of getting more rate cuts.  Cyclical profit-taking, as much as 15%, helps keeps share prices from getting overly inflated, unattractive to investors.  “So the Fed’s cut rates three times.  Maybe that lag will be enough to keep the economy going into the election.  He also has those tariffs on, which he can remove,” Gundlach said, exposing Trump’s economic strategy of keeping the economy strong into 2020.

About the Author

John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.

[saviorownsoul]

My Thoughts on Nerfs/Buffs for OW Heroes

For the most part I think Blizzard has done a great job of balancing the game with its diverse set of heroes and unique abilities. Yes the dive meta is very annoying and feels much more luck-based than the other seasons but I think once people begin to optimize their synergies with diverse team comps, dive comp will have less value. That being said, here are my proposed buffs/nerfs/reworks for each hero as they stand now (btw this is from the perspective of a Master rank support/tank player):

Doomfist - Really hard to say how he’ll pan out in the grand meta of the game, but he seems like a potent bruiser who can peel for his backline or get a cheeky flank initiation for his team. His 4-sec instakill seems a bit much…maybe extend it to 6 seconds and give him slightly more health.

Genji - Seems alright atm, though his ult feels like one of the few dps ults that practically guarantees at least one kill everytime he uses it due to having the best initiation tool in the game (swift strike) along with cleave damage that ignores shields and matrix. Perhaps a slight nerf to it, but I wouldn’t mind if he stays the way he is.

McCree - Decrease flashbang timer, a slight buff to his damage falloff and he’ll be good.

Pharah - Honestly pretty balanced atm, a lot of ppl just don’t know how to deal with her optimally so it tends to be frustrating to fight against.

Reaper - After his life steal buff he’s super viable but I still think his teleport is booty other than for setup purposes. Just decrease the time it takes to actually teleport and I think he’ll be perfect.

Soldier 76 - Very solid right now but not broken, maybe a very small damage nerf. I wouldn’t mind if Blizz just left him alone for now.

Sombra - Honestly, I think she may need some nerfing. Yes she’s hard to play, but her ult has very little counter play except for Widow’s ult to alert you to her EMP positioning. I think once people begin to optimize her she’ll get an ult charge nerf but we’ll see.

Tracer - At the highest levels of play she is godlike. Insane mobility coupled with great damage makes her a huge asset. A good Tracer has no true counters, so I propose that she gets a slight damage nerf but her ult charge rate is increased so that she’ll have more reliable burst damage. If that’s not enough to mitigate the damage decrease they could decrease the time between her blinks so that she’s more harass-oriented.

Bastion - Honestly, he’s fine right now especially after his rework.

Hanzo - Strong and viable but scatter arrow will probably get changed sooner or later. It’s the next one-shot ability that people will call out once Hanzo makes his way further into the meta. They’ll probably just nerf its raw damage output.

Junkrat - The hero most in need of buffs/rework imo. Grenades need to be faster because they are impossible to hit anyone with that isn’t within Symmetra beam range. Also I think he should have access to two traps instead of just one, at least 50 hp buff to his tire ult, and his martyrdom passive should have more of an impact like a direct explosion upon death instead of just a bunch of grenades that never hit anyone.

Mei - Fine atm, maybe her freeze could proc slightly faster?

Torbjorn - Super underrated, I really don’t think he needs any buffing/nerfing but perhaps a quality of life change for his armor packs so that teammates know where they’re laying on the ground.

Widowmaker - Pretty good atm, I think venom mine should do a little more damage because it’s one of the least impactful skills in the game other than for calling out flankers.

D.VA - The hero most complained about atm for her unrivaled ability to completely shutdown 90% of heroes due to her matrix. Put her total health back to 500 (keep the hp:armor ratio tho) and let her matrix for 3 seconds continuously instead of 4. I think that’ll do the trick.

Orisa - Pretty solid atm, only reason she’s not played more is because dive is such a mess. Wishful thinking wants me to have her original damage output back, but as it stands now she’s fine.

Reinhardt - Once his 10% swing speed buff, charge hitbox changes, shatter debugs, and general jankness reversal hit live he will be awesome. A great change to charge that I think would make it the ultimate high risk high reward ability would be to give it a “shishkebab” effect where he can pin more than one person in one charge. Just imagine the plays… Also quality of life change that allows his teammates to see through Reinhardt while his shield is up so there's more incentive to stay behind it.

Roadhog - After careful thought I don’t think they really needed to change Roadhog the way they did even though the one shot hook combo was frustrating to play against. If Blizzard intends on keeping Roadhog like this, they should lower his hook cooldown back to 6 seconds and give him even more hp so that he could have more of a presence in the thick of a team fight. At the very least, they should just give him back the 6 second hook cooldown.

Winston - Super strong atm but I think that’s mainly from the meta rather than Winston himself. I think he’s pretty balanced but if they have to nerf him, they should just lower his damage output a bit since his value comes from the ridiculous amount of space he grants his team rather than his killing ability.

Zarya - Once her graviton’s true root capabilities go through to live she’ll be right as rain. A CC ult that takes almost 3 minutes to build shouldn’t be countered by a hero movement ability with a 2 second cooldown.

Ana - Fine.

Lucio - Also fine.

Mercy - Rework her rez to be lower risk lower reward but give her an extra ability that gives her staying power in team fights.

Symmetra - Pretty balanced but I think she should have a “continuing ult” capability where she is rewarded for continuously damaging the enemy team while her tele/shield gen are active. It’s a bit awkward when she relies on spamming chokes with her orbs and cheeky flanks to build ult…and then you get ult and have it out for extended periods of time…

Zenyatta - Is fine the way he is.

[olliejennabn]

HK an insurance hub

There is a saying that "life is full of uncertainties". Just when everyone was predicting a bright outlook for the global economy at the beginning of the year, and such positive sentiments prevailed when I attended the World Economic Forum at Davos in January this year, the United States has now imposed unilateral trade measures against Mainland China and some other economies, casting a cloud over future economic prospects. While terrorist attacks and a trade war are of course of completely different nature, I think these events show that black swans do exist and there are always risks in the world. The increasing natural disaster risk, as shown by Typhoon Mangkhut, which was the strongest tropical cyclone hitting us in decades, is another case in point.

 We cannot avoid risks, so the best we can do is to understand, predict, calculate and manage them. It is no doubt a task which is easier said than done, but thankfully we have the help of actuaries. I know that the Casualty Actuarial Society and the Society of Actuaries - both organisations are well represented here today - describe an actuary as "part superhero, part fortune teller, part trusted advisor". I am not sure if actuaries can actually fly, but I think the description reflects the importance as well as the complexity and difficulty of their job. Being the leading professionals in finding ways to manage risk, actuaries do need to have very strong analytical skills, business knowledge and understanding of human behaviour in order to perform their functions.

 We live in a fast-changing world with emerging risks, but they also represent opportunities as we look for more creative ways to tackle them. The spectrum of topics at this conference proves my point, which range from artificial intelligence and cybersecurity to insurtech, longevity risk, the growth of online insurance in Mainland China and the Belt & Road Initiative. These topics and the issues they reflect underline three major developments, which are of interest not only to actuaries and the insurance sector but to policymakers as well.  

 I'm talking about the challenges of our ageing population, the impact of new technology and the burgeoning opportunities opening up, thanks to the continuing economic development of Mainland China. Allow me to share with you my thoughts on each of these areas for the next few minutes.

 The first topic is ageing population. There is no better place in the world to talk about this topic, for Hong Kong tops global rankings in life expectancy. Men in Hong Kong are living on average up to 81.3 years and women even longer, at 87.3 years, as of 2016. According to our projection, by the year 2066, the life expectancy at birth will be 93.1 for women and 87.1 for men here. In 2026, less than 10 years from now, the number of the elderly aged 85 or above will be the same as children aged below 5. The number of elderly aged 65 or above stood at 16.6% of our population at 2016 and will rise to one in three of the population at 2036, but these days I have chosen to refrain from using elderly figures at the benchmark of 65 as men and women at 65 are really not old. And I am approaching that age. We are seeing many centenarians in Hong Kong now, and they will be even more common in the future.

 Ageing population challenges

While we are glad to see our people live longer, society will need to get prepared. For one thing, the amount of money sufficient to support life for about 20 years after retiring at the age of 65 is very different from the amount needed when expected life is 100 years. For governments, the challenge involves redefining concepts such as middle age. Policymakers will also need to reconsider social and physical infrastructure to meet the needs of a population that is expected to live for 100 years.

 Several years ago, the Geneva Association, a think tank established by insurance institutions, addressed the "Challenge of Global Ageing," from funding issues to insurance solutions, in a report. The association's report suggested six critical strategies, namely reduce pay-as-you-go benefit burdens, strengthen old-age safety nets, increase funded retirement savings, encourage longer work lives, encourage higher birthrates and increase immigration.

 Hong Kong has been implementing policies that are more or less in line with these strategies. They include increasing the old age allowance for the elderly with inadequate retirement arrangements and increasing statutory paternity leave, reviewing statutory maternity leave and expanding child care facilities to better support parents. We recently launched a public life annuity, with a guaranteed monthly payment for life at an expected internal rate of return of 4%. The goal is to help the public enjoy a stable income after retirement. As actuaries, you know how difficult it is for business and insurers to issue commercially viable life annuities, given the low-interest environment and longer life expectancy. That's why this gap has to be filled by the public sector.

 We will also introduce tax incentives, encouraging people to take out deferred annuities from insurers and make voluntary contributions beyond the Mandatory Provident Fund system, Hong Kong's occupational retirement scheme. We want the people of Hong Kong to save early and save more.

 Naturally we would be interested in how insurance can hedge longevity risk. We believe that an ageing society will create opportunities for the insurance sector. Alongside long-term financial planning products, there could be new demand for insurance against infirmity risk. And for actuaries, my prediction is that your data analytics and risk-management techniques will be used more intensively for policy formulation by governments in managing their aging populations.

 Talking about predictions, the use of predictive analytics by actuaries to help insurers in pricing insured risks, detecting fraudulent claims and market segmentation has been developing fast. At the same time, insurtech applications, from conversational artificial intelligence to blockchain-based insurance contracts, are set to disrupt the insurance industry. Cyber-risks lead to the demand for cyber insurance, together with expertise to help the insured and insurer quantify their exposure to cyber risks. How best to use technology and encourage innovation is critical to both public- and private-sector decision-makers.

 Boosting insurtech talent 

Hong Kong embraces technology and welcomes talent. At the regulatory level, the Insurance Authority has introduced a sandbox approach, as well as fast-track approval arrangements to encourage insurtech start-ups. And my Government is targeting a range of measures to promote innovation and technology. These include tax incentives to encourage R&D, with a 300% tax deduction for the first HK$2 million eligible R&D expenditure by corporations, and a 200% deduction for the excess. There’s no limit on the expenditure eligible for this tax deduction.

 The Government will make use of a HK$2 billion scheme under the Innovation & Technology Venture Fund to invest, together with venture capital funds, in local technology start-ups. We have also introduced a HK$500 million Technology Talent Scheme to boost our technology talent. And we’ve just announced a Talent List, which has been designed to attract quality professionals to Hong Kong to accelerate our development into a high value-added and diversified economy. That list currently focuses on 11 in-demand professions, including actuaries. So, for any of you who would like to practice in Hong Kong or plan to start an insurtech company, you are most welcome here.

 Still with technology, we are developing with the Shenzhen Government the Hong Kong/Shenzhen Innovation & Technology Park, which is located in a place called Lok Ma Chau Loop between our two cities. Shenzhen, a fast-rising innovation hub, is home to IT giant Tencent and the innovative insurer Ping An. The technology park will play a critical role in the emergence of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, which links Hong Kong, Macao and nine prosperous cities in the Guangdong province. Together, the Greater Bay Area counts a population of close to 70 million and a GDP of some US$1.5 trillion. Such economic and consumer clout can only mean bigger market potential for Hong Kong companies and the global companies that partner with Hong Kong.

 Greater Bay Area access 

That certainly includes insurance. We are now actually working to gain greater and wider access to the Greater Bay Area for Hong Kong insurers. In particular, we are working to get agreement from the Mainland regulatory authorities to allow Hong Kong insurers to set up service centres in the Greater Bay Area, which will help Mainland policyholders and Hong Kong policyholders working or residing in the area in making claims and accessing other after-sale services. At the same time, we are in discussions with the Mainland authorities to enable the distribution of Hong Kong insurance products throughout the Greater Bay Area, and to allow Hong Kong-headquartered life insurers to establish majority-owned entities in the Mainland, thereby expanding both opportunity for the industry and choice for the people.

 Then there's the Belt & Road Initiative, which will create opportunities for Hong Kong at a considerably more expansive geographical level. I know that a plenary session on the Belt & Road Initiative will follow my speech, so I'll keep this brief. I would just emphasise that Hong Kong will play a significant role in the initiative. We are an international financial centre, regularly cited as the world’s freest economy. We are also China's international financial capital, home to the largest pool of offshore Renminbi. In short, Hong Kong is a natural fund-raising centre for infrastructure, investment and production projects, and a natural hub for project management, given our extensive professional services prowess. That includes risk management, insurance and dispute-resolution services that our Belt & Road partners and their projects may well need.

 In this regard, my Government has been working very closely with the Insurance Authority chaired by Dr Moses Cheng to enable the development of captive insurance, marine insurance and the underwriting of specialty risks in Hong Kong. We are now considering new tax incentives to fast-track these lines of insurance, together with measures to promote the issuance in Hong Kong of such insurance-linked securities as catastrophe bonds. These and other measures are sure to boost Hong Kong's status as an insurance hub and risk-management centre, and will surely help us seize the boundless opportunities arising from the Belt & Road Initiative.

 Ladies and gentlemen, chance favours the prepared mind. Hong Kong has been sharpening its competitive edge to capture opportunities ahead, and our fundamentals as an insurance hub will be further strengthened. So for actuaries like you, Hong Kong is where you want to be, today and long into this 21st century of opportunity.

 Chief Executive Carrie Lam gave these remarks at the 2018 Asian Actuarial Conference opening ceremony on September 17.

from news.gov.hk - Business & Finance http://www.news.gov.hk/eng/2018/09/20180917/20180917_155737_401.html

[theconservativebrief]

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) set off a familiar cycle in progressive politics last week when he unveiled his Stop BEZOS Act, a bill to force big companies like Amazon and Walmart to contribute to the cost of social services their low-wage workers use.

Right on cue, a large number of left-of-center academics and professional policy experts — backed up by a range of columnists and Twitter users — denounced the bill as another unworkable Sanders proposal.

Bernieworld clapped back with allegations of corruption. Sanders’s senior policy adviser, Warren Gunnels, tweeted that criticisms of the plan from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) — progressive Washington’s premier source of policy analysis of poverty and social welfare programs — were motivated by Walmart’s donations to CBPP.

It’s not radical to demand the Walton family of Walmart and Jeff Bezos of Amazon get off of welfare & pay their workers a living wage. It’s not surprising an otherwise friendly think tank that gets at least $2 million from the Walmart Foundation disagrees. https://t.co/qQnpibLke7 pic.twitter.com/70ahcqyCrt

— Warren Gunnels (@GunnelsWarren) September 6, 2018

This is one of Sanders’s biggest new policy ideas since the 2016 primary campaign. On the trail, he unveiled a number of once-distinctive ideas that the center left rejected, only to later adopt. It’s a mark of success for Sanders, but it also means he’s got to come up with new ideas to make the case for himself as a unique and necessary figure ahead of the next presidential election cycle. Specifically, he needs ideas that other liberals will reject.

For all the discussion Sanders’s self-description as a “socialist” has created, he’s genuinely neither a socialist nor a social democrat in the European sense. He’s a very American kind of populist whose specific policy proposals are best understood as props in a larger moralistic narrative rather than well-designed cures for specific ills. (It’s best to take him seriously, not literally, to coin a phrase.)

Democrats’ intraparty conflict is partially about ideas and partially about people and who governs them. Sanders and his camp, on a fundamental level, don’t trust the leaders of the Democratic Party or their aligned institutions. They instinctively see criticism as an effort by insiders to freeze him out, rather than a good-faith debate about priorities and proposals.

And the party establishment, conversely, is much more hostile to Sanders personally than they are to his specific ideas — alternately piling on heavily against flawed ones while eagerly co-opting others. And they really, really, really don’t want him to take over.

The main provision of the Stop BEZOS Act (an acronym for “Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies”) is an attempt to get big companies to raise worker pay. It would impose a tax on any company with more than 500 employees whose workers draw means-tested social assistance benefits — Medicare, food stamps, housing aid, etc. — of $1 for every $1 worth of benefits the workers receive.

But if implemented, it wouldn’t work because of how benefits payments are structured. Instead, it would create a lot of perverse incentives, due to the way benefits eligibility works.

The implicit presumption of Sanders’s proposal is that paying a low-wage worker an extra dollar would result in a dollar less of benefits usage and thus a dollar less of tax burden. Therefore, it would make sense for companies to respond to the bill by paying up.

But in the real world, the programs in question are structured to mostly ensure that $1 in extra earnings does not reduce your benefits by a full dollar. After all, if benefits were fully crowded out, then the programs would massively disincentive working.

This is a sort of a boring technical point, but it’s important: While raising the minimum wage would force employers to pay their low-wage workers more, under the Stop BEZOS Act it would still be cheaper to pay the tax than to hand out raises.

But it gets worse. The proposal conceptualizes low wages as the sole driver of benefits eligibility, but that’s not the case. Benefits eligibility is determined at the level of household income versus household size, which is related to but quite different from hourly wages.

Your household income is determined by your wages, but also by how many hours you work in a year and, crucially, by how much money your spouse makes. Household size, meanwhile, is driven by both marital status and how many children you have. All else being equal, two households with the same income get more benefits if they have more kids.

Consequently while in practice the Stop BEZOS Act would offer only a weak incentive to raise pay, it would offer a very strong incentive to favor hiring married and childless workers over single workers and parents.

The bill attempts to prohibit employers from directly discriminating against benefits-eligible hires. But it would be almost comically easy to engage in successful “statistical discrimination” against people who are likely to be benefits-eligible (single parents and young, unmarried women with limited education) and at best generate a morass of litigation.

Last but by no means least, benefits eligibility varies by state. Under Sanders’s proposal, employers in a liberal state like Vermont would face very high tax bills because Vermont has expanded Medicaid eligibility up to 138 percent of the poverty line. Employers in a stingy state like Texas could combine lower wages and a lower tax bill thanks to Austin’s much more restrictive benefits packages.

Sanders very clearly does not believe that states should be making their public sector health insurance programs stingier, but in a practical sense, his legislation would create a huge incentive to do that.

Back in the real world, Sanders is trying to make a point about Amazon — not craft a bill that makes sense.

Dating back to before the release of this bill, Sanders has been waging a multi-front campaign against Amazon. He argues that there’s something fundamentally obscene about the legion of workers toiling away for low pay in often bleak conditions in its warehouses while the founder of the company becomes the richest man on the planet.

The legislation itself is clearly meant to put some policy meat on the bones of that moralistic point, but in addition to being poorly designed, it also targets a much larger universe of companies than just Amazon; there are more than 18,000 firms with 500-plus employees, and they collectively employ about half of all US workers. And Sanders’s thoughts about Amazon go well beyond the pay levels.

The issue about Amazon is not just that the wealthiest person on earth, Jeff Bezos, is paying workers unlivable wages. It’s about the “new economy” and the degradation of the human spirit—breaking down people, spitting them out and simply replacing them with new bodies.

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) September 7, 2018

Indeed, though Amazon warehouse workers are obviously not getting rich, the company does pay meaningfully above minimum wage for those jobs. For that matter, so does Walmart with its $11-an-hour entry-level salary. Critics of Amazon typically point to brutal working conditions, which is a subject Sanders has also discussed recently but that the Stop BEZOS bill does not address in any way.

Meanwhile, it’s fairly clear that a big part of Sanders’s outrage about Amazon is specifically about inequality; Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world. Walmart is also noteworthy because the Walton siblings, heirs to the company’s founder, are collectively the richest family in the world.

But, of course, lots of low-wage workers are toiling away for companies whose owners aren’t nearly that rich. Indeed, research shows that chains and big-box stores generally pay higher wages than mom and pop retailers.

Rather than thinking systematically about the structure of low-wage work in America or the general plight of low-income households, Sanders is keying in on the morally outrageous juxtaposition of vast fortunes and bleak prospects for workers. (As Matt Bruenig shows at Demos, the vast majority of poor people don’t have full-time jobs at all, and in most cases can’t realistically get one.)

But that inequity is addressed much more effectively by other tools, tools that both Sanders and his critics in progressive wonk world agree on.

Sanders’s critics on the right would say that the whole idea of the government stepping in to try to force employers to pay higher wages is silly, and that means-tested social assistance programs should be cut to encourage low-income workers to learn the value of self-reliance.

But his supporters on the left would say that they share Sanders’s goals, while simply believing there are more effective ways to accomplish them. The odd thing about the debate is that Sanders himself supports those more effective alternatives.

Sanders’s Medicare-for-all proposal, for starters, would eliminate Medicaid’s existence as a separate program for poor families, thus in one stroke getting rid of the most expensive means-tested social program. Raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, meanwhile, might have downsides in terms of reducing the pace of job creation. And it would unquestionably create a situation in which virtually every full-time worker earned too much money to be eligible for SNAP (food stamps) or housing vouchers.

And the most direct approach to tackling the problem of Bezos’s vast wealth — if you think it’s a problem — is to levy higher taxes on rich people, which Sanders certainly supports. He’s also on the record as supporting making the earned income tax credit more generous and making the child tax credit fully refundable. Both of these would directly target poverty much more effectively than the Stop BEZOS plan because they are scaled to family size.

None of these ideas are about to pass in Congress tomorrow. But all of them have considerably more support from elected officials and the left-of-center policy community than the Stop BEZOS Act. Plus, their passage would make the proposal irrelevant.

Since it’s basically impossible to imagine a scenario in which Stop BEZOS passes without redundant, but more effective, alternatives already passing, the Sanders camp is not too worried about whether all the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed on their plan.

It’s a message bill whose main point is to highlight Sanders’s criticisms of Amazon’s labor practices. Whatever you think of the merits of the legislation, you have to admit that introducing such a provocative bill earned Sanders a lot more attention than he would have received for simply reiterating his support for a higher minimum wage and a more generous EITC.

In doing so, he managed to successfully emphasize some of the ways he is most distinct from other progressive Democrats in the US Senate.

Hillary Clinton had some daunting advantages over Sanders in the 2016 primary, but the dynamics of that campaign also left him with a lot of open space to play in. Clinton had voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq, her husband’s administration was associated with NAFTA and “tough on crime” policies, she was personally involved in negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and she spent President Barack Obama’s second term doing off-the-record buckraking speeches at big banks.

If Sanders runs again in 2020, he’ll be up against a phalanx of rival Democrats who, like most Democrats, are not guilty of the sins he painted Clinton with.

Meanwhile, his three highest-profile policy proposals from that campaign — Medicare-for-all, free college, and a $15 minimum wage — have all been widely adopted by other Democrats.

One virtue of the Stop BEZOS Act, in that context, is that it puts distance between Sanders and his adversaries. It does so in part on the level of policy, but also, importantly, on the level of affect. Sanders is a politician who relishes a fight against the plutocracy, and who, even in the Trump era, regards a guy like Jeff Bezos primarily as the class enemy founder of Amazon rather than a pillar of civil society who owns the Washington Post.

And then there’s the question of the act’s relationship to experts and the mainstream media.

Way back in 1980, President Ronald Reagan promised that he could cut taxes, increase military spending, and balance the budget. These claims were regarded as outlandish at the time because they’re ridiculous, but Republicans George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney all ran on the same promise.

By the time Donald Trump ran on the platform in 2016, it hardly seemed noteworthy. During the 2017 “tax reform” debate, congressional Republicans uniformly shrugged off questions about the budget deficit by professing to believe that a large tax cut would — by magic, or something — reduce the deficit. When subsequent deficit numbers came in, nobody was surprised or embarrassed.

It’s not that no competent economists or tax policy analysts work in Republican Party politics. It’s just understood that policy experts play a subordinate role in the coalition. They are not supposed to scold elected officials about basic errors of math or logic — they’re expected to try to constructively shape policy behind closed doors after elections are won.

And because the mainstream press takes its cues from the communities of partisan experts, a Romney or a Paul Ryan can garner a reputation as a wonky numbers guy while spouting total nonsense. On the other side, Sanders obtains a reputation for economic illiteracy in virtue of taking hits from Democrats’ more vocal wonk community.

To some left-of-center Americans, Trump’s rise to power illustrates the weakness of the conservative approach in which a no-guardrails and bullshit-soaked political culture left the party open to a takeover by a canny fraudster.

But to others, it suggests the party should stop playing the sucker’s game of treating electoral politics like an academic seminar where you need to acknowledge trade-offs, make your numbers add up, and defer to media fact-checkers.

Most Democrats would be saddened to see a signature proposal denounced by the CBPP and characterized by Vox as “unworkable nonsense.” Sanders almost certainly won’t care, and part of the core of his appeal is a sense that this is the correct and appropriate way to think about politics.

Original Source -> The controversy over Bernie Sanders’s proposed Stop BEZOS Act, explained

via The Conservative Brief

[footballleague0]

Kevin Pelton’s weekly mailbag, including Carmelo Anthony, superstars, and more

This week’s mailbag features your questions on the ranking of Carmelo Anthony, bad position groups on playoff teams, and more.

You can tweet your questions using the hashtag #peltonmailbag or email them to peltonmailbag@gmail.com.

#peltonmailbag Do u feel the #64 ranking of #CarmeloAnthony is justified?I can’t see it. U can’t even trade 3 players ahead of him for him.

— Steven Curie (@GooniTunes) September 14, 2017

I do. First off, let’s be clear that we’re not talking the prime Carmelo Anthony that was a deserving All-Star and finished with a better ranking in previous editions of #NBArank.

Let’s take a look at the two primary components of scoring — efficiency and volume — graphically over Anthony’s career with the Knicks (starting in 2011-12, his first full season in New York).

Kevin Pelton

Oddly, Anthony’s share of the Knicks’ offense has moved downward almost in lockstep with his efficiency (measured here by true shooting percentage plus, or TS+, Anthony’s true shooting relative to league average). In 2012-13, when New York won 54 games, Anthony led the league in usage rate while still scoring at above-average efficiency. By last season, despite playing a smaller role in the Knicks’ offense, Anthony still scored with the worst relative efficiency of his NBA career.

Here are the players with the most similar seasons to Anthony’s 2016-17 in terms of usage and TS+:

Players similar to Anthony’s 2016-17 seasonPlayerSeasonUsageTS+Carmelo Anthony2016-17.293.969Andrew Wiggins2016-17.292.967Tony Campbell1989-90.290.968Baron Davis2004-05.296.973John Wall2012-13.294.974World B. Free1984-85.294.974Terry Cummings1988-89.289.965Jamal Mashburn1994-95.287.968Antoine Walker2000-01.292.975Cliff Robinson1980-81.295.975

It’s telling that besides Anthony, Terry Cummings is the only other player on this list to be chosen as an All-Star that season — and Cummings was chosen as an injury replacement. It’s also interesting to note that Cummings was the only player on the list whose team was .500 or better, showing the difficulty of building an effective offense around an inefficient, volume scorer.

Given Anthony has always been an indifferent defender, it’s difficult to make a statistical case that he’s still a top-50 player at this stage of his career. If you want to make the case that he belongs somewhere in the 51-to-60 range, that’s perhaps reasonable, particularly if you believe he can make the transition to better efficiency in a smaller role on another team. But I don’t think Anthony’s ranking should be cause for outrage if you’re evaluating his current ability rather than his legacy.

@kevinpelton Are there more superstars in the NBA today, or do I just feel that way because of recency bias? #peltonmailbag

— Todd Wight (@toddwight) September 11, 2017

The trick here is defining what constitutes a “superstar.” Unlike Penny Hardaway, I’m not going to incorporate off-court popularity as part of the definition. And because they’re constant from year to year, we can’t utilize subjective factors like All-Star appearances and All-NBA selections. So I’m going to look at players who met various thresholds of production as measured by my wins above replacement player (WARP) metric over time.

Here’s a look at three thresholds: the number of players with at least 10 WARP, at least 15 WARP and at least 20 WARP per season dating to 1977-78.

Kevin Pelton

I feel a little like Goldilocks looking at that chart. The first cutoff, 10 WARP, is too low. A couple of dozen players qualify on average; these players are stars (and typically All-Stars) but not necessarily superstars. The last cutoff, 20 WARP, is too high to be useful here; only a couple of players qualify most seasons.

(The outlier was 1989-90, when an incredible seven players surpassed 20 WARP, more than the past three seasons combined. It’s not a coincidence this came shortly before the 1992 USA Olympic men’s basketball team was nicknamed “The Dream Team.”)

That leaves 15 WARP as just right to capture superstars, as I see it. And indeed, the number of such players was up last season: 12, tied for third most behind 2001-02 (13) and 2005-06 (an improbable 16). That reversed a recent trend of decline among players with 15-plus WARP, which can be attributed largely to stars playing fewer minutes and tending to get injured more frequently.

“When the NBA addresses tanking, don’t you think they need to expand the discussion beyond draft lottery reform to also include trade reform? Allowing trades involving conditional draft picks and protected draft picks can provide the same incentive to tank as the draft lottery provides. For example, this past year, if the Los Angeles Lakers’ first-round pick had landed outside the top 3, they would have lost both their 2017 and 2019 first-round picks because of past trades. That gave them a very strong incentive to tank.”

— Russ Needler

I wouldn’t separate those two issues. While I agree that protected picks tend to often create the most blatant examples of tanking we see in the NBA, of course that’s partially because of the structure of the lottery. In a world where the Lakers wouldn’t increase their chances of securing a top-four pick by finishing with the second-worst record instead of the third-worst — as would be the case under the proposal the NBA’s board of governors will vote on later this month — there is certainly less incentive for them to lose additional games.

If the proposal is approved, it’s worth monitoring how that affects traded picks and considering additional changes to the rules.

“Listening to the Dunc’d On New Orleans Pelicans outlook with Mason Ginsberg, the glaring lack of a small forward on the roster really sticks out. What team(s) have gotten the lowest production from one position and still made the playoffs?”

— Mike Girard

Mike asked this question before the Pelicans signed Tony Allen earlier this week as another alternative at small forward, but I think it still stands. Believe it or not, the bar for the Pelicans to clear — if they make the playoffs despite as poor play from their small forwards as we expect — is actually quite high (or low).

Here are the team positions with the most negative combined WARP in a single season:

Worst position groups, playoff teams (WARP)TeamSeasonRecordPosWARPOrlando2000-0143-39C-7.5Orlando1993-9450-32PF-7.4Utah1992-9347-35SG-6.2New Jersey2004-0542-40C-5.5Utah2001-0244-38SG-5.4Since 1977-78

1. 2000-01 Orlando Magic centers (minus-7.5 WARP)

This counts John Amaechi (minus-4.6) and Michael Doleac (minus-2.9); you could also count Andrew DeClercq, who would help that rating slightly with his plus-0.4 WARP. This was all the more painful because one of the league’s better centers was Ben Wallace, who left the Magic for the Detroit Pistons via a sign-and-trade the previous summer.

2. 1993-94 Orlando Magic power forwards (minus-7.4 WARP)

The best team on this list, the Magic won 50 games with Shaquille O’Neal in his second season and the aforementioned Hardaway in his first. With Nick Anderson and Dennis Scott on the wings, Orlando had four positions covered. So when the Magic signed Horace Grant to replace the trio of Anthony Avent, Larry Krystkowiak and Jeff Turner, it helped propel them to the NBA Finals the following season.

3. 1992-93 Utah Jazz shooting guards (minus-6.2 WARP)

How does a team with John Stockton and Karl Malone in their prime win only 47 games and get bounced in the first round of the playoffs? A terrible set of shooting guards helps explain that. An aging Jeff Malone (no relation) provided nothing beyond scoring, averaging 2.4 rebounds and 0.6 steals per 36 minutes. Jay Humphries, also Stockton’s backup at point guard, started 20 games at the 2 and was little better. The next season, the Jazz swapped Malone for Jeff Hornacek in one of the most lopsided challenge trades in NBA history, setting the table for the Jazz to reach greater heights later in the 1990s.

4. 2004-05 New Jersey Nets centers (minus-5.5 WARP)

This is one case where WARP doesn’t tell the whole story. Nets center Jason Collins had minus-4.1 WARP but also rated as the NBA’s best defender, according to ESPN’s real plus-minus (plus-6.9). Collins consistently performed better in plus-minus stats than in terms of box-score output.

5. 2001-02 Utah Jazz shooting guards (minus-5.4 WARP)

Two years after Hornacek’s retirement, the Jazz found themselves back at square one at shooting guard. In his second year, prep product DeShawn Stevenson had minus-2.7 WARP. So too did John Starks, signed late in the season after being waived by the Chicago Bulls. (His whole total counts here.) Bryon Russell isn’t included, but he also played regular minutes at shooting guard and rated worse than replacement level too.

The post Kevin Pelton’s weekly mailbag, including Carmelo Anthony, superstars, and more appeared first on Daily Star Sports.

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[giantsfootball0]

Kevin Pelton’s weekly mailbag, including Carmelo Anthony, superstars, and more

This week’s mailbag features your questions on the ranking of Carmelo Anthony, bad position groups on playoff teams, and more.

You can tweet your questions using the hashtag #peltonmailbag or email them to peltonmailbag@gmail.com.

#peltonmailbag Do u feel the #64 ranking of #CarmeloAnthony is justified?I can’t see it. U can’t even trade 3 players ahead of him for him.

— Steven Curie (@GooniTunes) September 14, 2017

I do. First off, let’s be clear that we’re not talking the prime Carmelo Anthony that was a deserving All-Star and finished with a better ranking in previous editions of #NBArank.

Let’s take a look at the two primary components of scoring — efficiency and volume — graphically over Anthony’s career with the Knicks (starting in 2011-12, his first full season in New York).

Kevin Pelton

Oddly, Anthony’s share of the Knicks’ offense has moved downward almost in lockstep with his efficiency (measured here by true shooting percentage plus, or TS+, Anthony’s true shooting relative to league average). In 2012-13, when New York won 54 games, Anthony led the league in usage rate while still scoring at above-average efficiency. By last season, despite playing a smaller role in the Knicks’ offense, Anthony still scored with the worst relative efficiency of his NBA career.

Here are the players with the most similar seasons to Anthony’s 2016-17 in terms of usage and TS+:

Players similar to Anthony’s 2016-17 seasonPlayerSeasonUsageTS+Carmelo Anthony2016-17.293.969Andrew Wiggins2016-17.292.967Tony Campbell1989-90.290.968Baron Davis2004-05.296.973John Wall2012-13.294.974World B. Free1984-85.294.974Terry Cummings1988-89.289.965Jamal Mashburn1994-95.287.968Antoine Walker2000-01.292.975Cliff Robinson1980-81.295.975

It’s telling that besides Anthony, Terry Cummings is the only other player on this list to be chosen as an All-Star that season — and Cummings was chosen as an injury replacement. It’s also interesting to note that Cummings was the only player on the list whose team was .500 or better, showing the difficulty of building an effective offense around an inefficient, volume scorer.

Given Anthony has always been an indifferent defender, it’s difficult to make a statistical case that he’s still a top-50 player at this stage of his career. If you want to make the case that he belongs somewhere in the 51-to-60 range, that’s perhaps reasonable, particularly if you believe he can make the transition to better efficiency in a smaller role on another team. But I don’t think Anthony’s ranking should be cause for outrage if you’re evaluating his current ability rather than his legacy.

@kevinpelton Are there more superstars in the NBA today, or do I just feel that way because of recency bias? #peltonmailbag

— Todd Wight (@toddwight) September 11, 2017

The trick here is defining what constitutes a “superstar.” Unlike Penny Hardaway, I’m not going to incorporate off-court popularity as part of the definition. And because they’re constant from year to year, we can’t utilize subjective factors like All-Star appearances and All-NBA selections. So I’m going to look at players who met various thresholds of production as measured by my wins above replacement player (WARP) metric over time.

Here’s a look at three thresholds: the number of players with at least 10 WARP, at least 15 WARP and at least 20 WARP per season dating to 1977-78.

Kevin Pelton

I feel a little like Goldilocks looking at that chart. The first cutoff, 10 WARP, is too low. A couple of dozen players qualify on average; these players are stars (and typically All-Stars) but not necessarily superstars. The last cutoff, 20 WARP, is too high to be useful here; only a couple of players qualify most seasons.

(The outlier was 1989-90, when an incredible seven players surpassed 20 WARP, more than the past three seasons combined. It’s not a coincidence this came shortly before the 1992 USA Olympic men’s basketball team was nicknamed “The Dream Team.”)

That leaves 15 WARP as just right to capture superstars, as I see it. And indeed, the number of such players was up last season: 12, tied for third most behind 2001-02 (13) and 2005-06 (an improbable 16). That reversed a recent trend of decline among players with 15-plus WARP, which can be attributed largely to stars playing fewer minutes and tending to get injured more frequently.

“When the NBA addresses tanking, don’t you think they need to expand the discussion beyond draft lottery reform to also include trade reform? Allowing trades involving conditional draft picks and protected draft picks can provide the same incentive to tank as the draft lottery provides. For example, this past year, if the Los Angeles Lakers’ first-round pick had landed outside the top 3, they would have lost both their 2017 and 2019 first-round picks because of past trades. That gave them a very strong incentive to tank.”

— Russ Needler

I wouldn’t separate those two issues. While I agree that protected picks tend to often create the most blatant examples of tanking we see in the NBA, of course that’s partially because of the structure of the lottery. In a world where the Lakers wouldn’t increase their chances of securing a top-four pick by finishing with the second-worst record instead of the third-worst — as would be the case under the proposal the NBA’s board of governors will vote on later this month — there is certainly less incentive for them to lose additional games.

If the proposal is approved, it’s worth monitoring how that affects traded picks and considering additional changes to the rules.

“Listening to the Dunc’d On New Orleans Pelicans outlook with Mason Ginsberg, the glaring lack of a small forward on the roster really sticks out. What team(s) have gotten the lowest production from one position and still made the playoffs?”

— Mike Girard

Mike asked this question before the Pelicans signed Tony Allen earlier this week as another alternative at small forward, but I think it still stands. Believe it or not, the bar for the Pelicans to clear — if they make the playoffs despite as poor play from their small forwards as we expect — is actually quite high (or low).

Here are the team positions with the most negative combined WARP in a single season:

Worst position groups, playoff teams (WARP)TeamSeasonRecordPosWARPOrlando2000-0143-39C-7.5Orlando1993-9450-32PF-7.4Utah1992-9347-35SG-6.2New Jersey2004-0542-40C-5.5Utah2001-0244-38SG-5.4Since 1977-78

1. 2000-01 Orlando Magic centers (minus-7.5 WARP)

This counts John Amaechi (minus-4.6) and Michael Doleac (minus-2.9); you could also count Andrew DeClercq, who would help that rating slightly with his plus-0.4 WARP. This was all the more painful because one of the league’s better centers was Ben Wallace, who left the Magic for the Detroit Pistons via a sign-and-trade the previous summer.

2. 1993-94 Orlando Magic power forwards (minus-7.4 WARP)

The best team on this list, the Magic won 50 games with Shaquille O’Neal in his second season and the aforementioned Hardaway in his first. With Nick Anderson and Dennis Scott on the wings, Orlando had four positions covered. So when the Magic signed Horace Grant to replace the trio of Anthony Avent, Larry Krystkowiak and Jeff Turner, it helped propel them to the NBA Finals the following season.

3. 1992-93 Utah Jazz shooting guards (minus-6.2 WARP)

How does a team with John Stockton and Karl Malone in their prime win only 47 games and get bounced in the first round of the playoffs? A terrible set of shooting guards helps explain that. An aging Jeff Malone (no relation) provided nothing beyond scoring, averaging 2.4 rebounds and 0.6 steals per 36 minutes. Jay Humphries, also Stockton’s backup at point guard, started 20 games at the 2 and was little better. The next season, the Jazz swapped Malone for Jeff Hornacek in one of the most lopsided challenge trades in NBA history, setting the table for the Jazz to reach greater heights later in the 1990s.

4. 2004-05 New Jersey Nets centers (minus-5.5 WARP)

This is one case where WARP doesn’t tell the whole story. Nets center Jason Collins had minus-4.1 WARP but also rated as the NBA’s best defender, according to ESPN’s real plus-minus (plus-6.9). Collins consistently performed better in plus-minus stats than in terms of box-score output.

5. 2001-02 Utah Jazz shooting guards (minus-5.4 WARP)

Two years after Hornacek’s retirement, the Jazz found themselves back at square one at shooting guard. In his second year, prep product DeShawn Stevenson had minus-2.7 WARP. So too did John Starks, signed late in the season after being waived by the Chicago Bulls. (His whole total counts here.) Bryon Russell isn’t included, but he also played regular minutes at shooting guard and rated worse than replacement level too.

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