Disagreements are the lifeblood of this forum. If you want to see this place at it's most boring, go back to 2008. Forum activity took a nose dive. There was nothing to complain about. We all just kind of stood around staring blankly at each other. "This team is pretty good, yeah?"... "yeah". I think the only time stuff got interesting was when someone declared that Kendrick Perkins was a better fit for our team than Hakeem in his prime. Then I had to dust off the ol curmudgeon cranky-pants and see if I still had my disagreement sea legs.
I'm going to be right sometimes. I'm going to be wrong sometimes. I'm a hardcore Celtic fan, but I'm an admitted pessimist and I don't take this all that seriously. Nobody should take me all that seriously either. I try to add to discussions whenever possible and it just so happens that my point of view usually goes against popular opinion. It's not like I scan a thread, look for popular opinion and then intentionally argue against it. Sometimes, it's surprising to me what the popular opinion actually is... like recently when I expressed satisfaction about the David Lee trade, looked around and saw that a lot of people were inexplicably unhappy with it. But Boston fans notoriously slant towards optimistic homerism... so it shouldn't be a shock that an admitted pessimist would often disagree with the popular opinion. (FWIW, Bill Simmons seems to be in the Boston pessimistic camp as well... which is probably why I tend to agree with him and why a large chunk of Celtic fans dislike him in spite of his obvious Celtic fandom).
I liked Noel and Embiid well before they were on Philly. I liked them when they were Celtic targets. I still believe Noel is going to be a perennial all-defensive big and people are underselling his potential. I still want Boston to get him. People who know a lot more about basketball than I do insist that Embiid is a transcendent prospect. Everyone was quick to bury him, because he plays on Philly and because the comparisons to Greg Oden are there... but I still maintain that nothing I read about Embiid coming from the actual team suggested this was a doomsday scenario. And it's still not clear on the severity of his surgery. Nonetheless, it seems I was wrong about Embiid. It's not the first time I've been wrong. But I don't regret any of the Embiid posts I made. Was I naive to gloss over the media tweets about Embiid possibly needing surgery? Should I have just joined along with everyone else and pre-maturely danced on Embiid's grave? I mean... maybe? I admitted many times that both sides were speculating. I just happened to be speculating based on what I read directly from Embiid's camp, Bill Self, Hinkie and the 76ers CEO. It didn't seem like surgery was a certainty. GIven that it took several weeks and several doctors to apparently pull the trigger on surgery, I think I was right to be skeptical. I'm still rather confused on what this surgery is about, though. If it's to fix a re-break, it means that all the stuff I was reading for the 76ers camp (where they explicitly said he didn't re-injure himself and they were just seeing "different" results in the routine CT scan) was inaccurate.