Chris2K

Piastri has a (fully expected) 3 place grid penalty for impeding K-Mag, which sort of ruins McLaren's good day.

It's just nice to see people so close to Max, even if it's just one lap.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the combination of MJ and Shaq was enough for the Cavaliers to win the championship, sweeping the Rockets in the finals. Larry Bird, Moses Malone and Adrian Dantley then all retired in the off-season.

The big 1996 draft resulted in the following, the Pacers falling to #4 really didn't help their big move to trade Jordan.

Allen Iverson to the Grizzlies (the 76ers AI tried to trade for him later on)
Kobe Bryant to the Raptors (joined by Alonzo Mourning who left the Rockets in free agency)
Antoine Walker to the Pistons
Marcus Camby to the Pacers
Jermaine O'Neal to the Heat
Stephon Marbury to the Mavericks
Shareef Abdur-Rahim to the Magic
Peja Stojakovic to the SuperSonics
Ray Allen to the Jazz
Erick Dampier to the Timberwolves
Steve Nash to the Suns (he fell so far because he was so low ranked I didn't even see him for the first 10 picks)
Zydrunas Ilgauskas to the Clippers

Shaq was a free agent, but unlike real life he didn't leave the team that drafted him at the first opportunity, he stayed with the Cavaliers. The 23-32 combination continues into 1997...

I've been enjoying it, perhaps in different ways to other series. They've all been great in their own ways, I'm in awe at Steve's imagination, Nick is such a sweetheart, one with monstrous thighs apparently, Sophie is chaotic good, Joanne is chaotic evil, and John wants to win so much it's quite endearing.

Umbrella.

I can understand Ange's frustration from a "want to win every game" mentality, but given the way we have been playing for the last two months I have no issue with anyone taking solace in scuppering Arsenal by losing this game. 

If we had been on a five match winning run, then went into the Man City game with a losing mentality purely to disrupt Arsenal, then I'd understand any negativity towards fans enjoying this defeat. Instead we've only won 3 games out of the last 10 (against the current 17th, 18th and 19th placed teams, all at home), haven't kept a clean sheet since March 10th, and don't look like a squad capable of being any kind of threat in the Premier League let alone the Champions League. 

So why not have a slight smile that this particular bad result in the sea of many has affected our biggest rivals? 

Gosh darn it. There goes our Champions League chances, a competition that our current squad would have been woefully unprepared for.

I hope this result hasn't adversely affected any other clubs.

Oh no. How unfortunate. I hope we get back in the game.

Utter insanity that Ederson didn't get taken off straight away, I wish I knew what it would take for concussions to be taken seriously, but I'm also worried about what that would be.

56 minutes ago, Jimmy said:

Good morning fellow Man City fans. 

Ange's "100% of Spurs fans want us to win the game" comment certainly had me looking around nervously.

It somehow feels win-win, and lose-lose.:

If Spurs win, then we get 5th guaranteed and still the chance of 4th, but we also probably get mocked for helping Arsenal. If Spurs lose, then we hamper Arsenal's title bid, but also run the risk of finishing 7th.

Given our performances in the last 5 matches I wouldn't expect City to have too many problems to be honest.

David Croft is missing his first race since Sky took over the live TV rights in 2012, and extending the streak back to his BBC days, his first missed race since 2007 when he missed the European Grand Prix for the birth of his son. The BBC's Harry Benjamin is replacing him, which is a bit weird when Alex Jacques is the F2 commentator for Sky, or they could have had Martin and Alex Brundle together.

Regardless of what you think of Crofty, that is one hell of a streak of consecutive races.

5 minutes ago, Lineker said:

Ferrari slowly assembling Hamilton's dream team. Just need to announce Newey.

And Bottas as his team-mate .

It's hard for me to answer really, as I play as all the teams because I really enjoy doing the drafts and free agency side of things, so I've done all the drafts myself and used my knowledge of their future ability to draft players accordingly. You can of course do it as a true simulation and let the CPU do everything, you still need to play as one team I believe but can apply all the simulation settings to that team as well.

It's also worth noting that the official 2K draft classes only contain players who are part of the NBPA and have signed up for their likenesses to be used in 2K games, so while you mention Charles Barkley, he's not in the game unless you use a user-created draft class because he's refused for his likeness to be used. Same with Reggie Miller and Anthony Mason (and some others listed here) for the same reasons as Chuck, and pretty much every second round pick or undrafted player (even some late 1st rounders aren't there) because I guess there's a limit to how detailed 2K are willing to go. Unfortunately this means that the draft pools are filled with fake, randomised players, some of which have the potential to be MJ/LeBron levels of talent and completely disrupt the accuracy of the simulation as a result. All of the above goes for the starting rosters as well, which have fake players in them to make up the numbers to a 15 man squad unless you start from the present day.

You get the option to download user-made draft classes before every season which adds in the major missing players and, in the case of the ones I use (Huff Hoops), the fake players are still there but have their attributes lowered to rock bottom so the CPU never plays them. Unfortunately the level of detail still isn't there, as I can't get through the first round without having to start picking players from the fake player pool.

Shockingly, it's possible the defending champion Nuggets may be a better team than former Play In specialists the Timberwolves, especially when the referees seem to have been told to be much stricter than they were in the opening 2 games.

Nuggets in 6 seems a guarantee at this point.

Fun fact - the Timberwolves had the draft pick before the Nuggets selected Jokic in 2014, and we used it on Glenn Robinson III, currently starring for the G League's Wisconsin Herd.

Meanwhile the Pacers are absolutely obliterating the Knicks and the reserves are already out for both sides. Saying that, Jericho Sims has just scored a follow-up dunk to cut the lead to 34 with 8 minutes remaining, so the comeback is on.

I'm sure the Hawks will be happy, but I'm unreliably informed that this draft class is hardly spectacular. One year earlier and this kind of shock outcome would have had the conspiracy people going crazy.

I'd say the Pistons lack of lottery success is a punishment for their constant tanking, but I think the Wizards were a worse team barely trying from Game 1, so their #2 pick rewards the tanking concept.

James Anderson to retire after the 1st Test this summer.

Let's just say this doesn't appear to be a mutual decision, with the optics being that it's either "retire after the next game or you won't be picked to get a farewell match". The annoying thing is that he's still good enough to get in the team on merit. 

Anyway, that test against the West Indies in July is going to be an emotional one. It's at Lord's as well.

Heading into the 1996 playoffs in my 2K sim and I made a drastic decision - after 11 consecutive trips to the play-offs and no championships, I blew up the Indiana Pacers - which meant trading Michael Jordan. I offered him out and the best deal came from the Cavs (although I added a couple of extra draft picks manually), so now MJ is teamed up with a man named Shaq. For the Pacers, they have ended up with the second worst record, and multiple first round picks with a draft featuring Kobe Bryant, Allen Iverson, Steve Nash, Ray Allen and Ben Wallace on the horizon...

Thankfully for my sanity the Lakers/Blazers dominance in the West has ended, and now it is very much open with the Rockets, Spurs, Warriors, Lakers and Blazers all having good teams. In the East the Bucks have emerged as the big team and have won the last two NBA championships behind Mark Jackson, Danny Manning and Dikembe Mutombo, however a resurgent Celtics, the dream team Cavaliers, and a "where did they come from" Washington Bullets have taken the top 3 seeds, the Bullets had only made the play-offs once since 1985 and now they're the 3 seed.

Also the Timberwolves were able to draft Kevin Garnett, which was nice.

Here's the list of teams and their three best players:

Oh reality, how I hate you.

The only glimmer of hope is that I don't think we could have played any worse. 

Frank Vogel has been fired after one season with the Suns, because as we know, any defeat is absolutely not the players' fault in any way, shape or form.

Granted I play things to excess, but it took me 68 hours of gameplay before I had unlocked the final "????" item on the main menu. So yeah, lots to do...

1 hour ago, Colly said:

Is the finale next week or is it all out now, I'm up to 7 and was hanging on to binge the last few.

Next week's drop on Wednesday will be the last one of the season. Sounds like a nice way to spend a bank holiday weekend...

Well X-Men '97 is escalating to monumental levels.

@Colly I think the show may have got to the point of being a bit much for your 8 year old...

Also, after weeks of trying to match the tune in my brain, I've just worked out that the end credits themes sounds a lot like the Crystal Maze theme.

He apologised afterwards which was decent, in those situations it's understandable that the emotion gets the better of you.

His little boy going over to shake Jak Jones' hand may be the most adorable thing in the history of sport.

The Nuggets only scored 80 points. We didn't even have Rudy Gobert. We have a 2-0 lead without playing at home yet.

What is happening?!

Perhaps my reaction was a little much, but I'm still pissed that Crofty "hilariously" chose to give Trump a name-drop when Lando crossed the line, meaning that any archive footage of Lando's first win will always have that dickhead mentioned as he wins.

From the "we can't have nice things" collection, we now have:

(The quote is from Lando by the way)

Well this is quite insane. Captain America 4, formerly nWo, spoilers: