A relatively quiet game out of him. He seemed put-off by the physicality (obvious fouling) of Boston and had a tough time with Morris who is a similar athlete with a decent jumper as well. Good learning game for him.
When Kuzma was taking those shots in the fourth while we trying to catch up, I was expecting them to go in and they were make-able ones too. He'll adjust.
Yes I was kind of waiting for this type of game from Kuzma. He had been playing so well it was only a matter of time.
That's one thing Kuz will need to develop, some physicality. He needs to develop a little bit more strength to keep up with NBA level SF/PF's, because these are grown a#$ men on the floor now.
He needs to start making his 3 again or else the rest of his game will take a massive hit with the rest of the league noticing his game. Luckily his shooting form is great and most of his shots look like they are going in.
yeah, washington was definitely paying attention to him defensively. i spoke at length about this in another thread. i agree that his stroke is pure enough that it's going to take some balls for the opposing coach to ignore him, but i expect to see it soon. he needs to punish them with a 20 point half.
He's going to get manhandled by bigger PF's for awhile. Abused. Hopefully he'll be able to make them pay on the other end.
So Mike Trudell sat down with Kuz for an interview on Lakers.com....go check that out, but here is what's really interesting about how he came our way.... First of all, I noticed during the Kuz/Hart/TB intro presser how much Magic was beaming over Kuz, so the interest was there from the jump #MagicEffect...plus Jesse Buss had his eye on Kuz much earlier on and that guy has been on fire with late draft picks. Secondly, if the Spurs were interested (they were picking at 29th overall and when Kuz was off the board they ended up going after Gay in the offseason), then it just validates our Kuz pick even more. SA's basketball ops has been the gold standard for a minute. Lastly, I'm not so sure Kuz would be sitting there at 28 if we just sat on our hands. Lets not forget that Magic/Pelinka got that 28th pick via Lou and there were some fans that were not happy with that deal last year. They could have sat on their hands then but didn't. Pair that with Brooklyn dealing the 27th pick to us, which means BK was shopping that pick. If SA was sitting there at 29, they might have leap-frogged our 28th pick to go get Kuz. There was tons of activity late in round 1 where teams were trading up to jump into some action...that BK 27th pick could have had many other suitors if we did not deal for it. Some would argue that we could move up from 28 to make sure SA (or any other team) didn't move up too high to get Kuz, but that means we would have to give up even more trade capital just to secure our guy. With the BK trade, we got our guy in Kuz, as well as changed the culture and selected our unequivocal leader in Zo, all while dumping a terrible contract. The same folks keep harping about how it was a bad deal to trade DLo for a chance at 2018 free agency, that may never come to fruition. However, how can you guys ignore that DLo liked a tweet that denounced the Lakers picking Zo? Not only would that potentially fracture our locker room if they ended up playing together, but it also tells me that DLo learned nothing from his Swaggy social media blunder. Why the f*** would you go on social media and do something like that, knowing how much it affected the team the first time. I'm happy that tool is gone off this team (cause the culture has noticeably changed) and its even better that we got to lock up a great character guy in Kuz as a part of that deal....as well as Brook.
