Official Whine, Moan, Complain Thread 19/20-CLOSED "WE CHAMPS!"

I don't expect him to be great... I expect him to be competent.

We tend to default to iso LBJ and AD when things go wrong and although they are our best players... the offense becomes so predictable that it turns into blocks and turnovers because they know where the passes are headed when someone like Caruso has the ball.

If I were guarding Caruso... I'd always be watching my peripheral vision for players making runs towards the basket or open looks.

It's like someone who always chooses rock when they play rock, paper scissors.

You know he will only shoot ten percent of the time... so it's easy to gamble on him.

When he had a little confidence and was more aggressive on offense... he was harder to play because you didn't know where the ball was going.

The Pels offense looked really fluid tonight because they were passing the ball all over the place and no one knew who was going to shoot.

With us we know it's almost always going to be LBJ and AD.

 

Normally I'd agree but when we are giving up 140 points... I find it hard to believe we'd give up 160 points with them on the court.

This was an argument I always had with people who wanted to blame IT for our defensive breakdowns during his short stint with us.

We'd give up 40 points in the first before IT even got on the floor and people would start blaming him for the defense.

Similar to how people here blame Rondo when something goes wrong.

If Bradley were locking people down... then sure... leave him in... but these so called defensive specialists like Bradley and Green were unable to do anything defensively. At least Bradley has been shooting better recently... but his defense feels like a myth. Caruso has legit defense but if he's going to score zero points you can't use him either.

My point is when you are twenty or thirty down... you might as well put in the shooters and let it fly... instead of having LBJ, AD, and Kuz dive to the rim every shot. If someone gets hot... then bam... you are back in the game. If you keep trading twos for threes... you will never catch up.

 

Team is full of soft/weak players at least physically speaking outside of D12 and Bron ( who isn't interested in bringing it in the regular season) .

No wonder we're not really good on the boards despite our size .

And as you said , mentally speaking , it's not looking good either

This team has 2008 Lakers written all over itself ... yikes

 

This team isn't perfect, but last night's loss was all about effort. I lost count of how many steals the C Bags got on careless passes or dribbling at the top of the key. They had at least as many deflected, near steals as actual steals. Around the end of the 1st or early 2nd, the C Bags were reaching and going for literally every steal and the Lakers didn't adjust. Kept playing into at and got rattled. The game doesn't concern me in the big picture, but it was annoying as hell.

 

no pride cause most of these guys had no ties to the team as far as being drafted here but then with kuz, his pride seems to be more in line with how he looks than how he performs

 

I wonder how much of that is getting a HOF caliber player back, and taking a collective sigh of relief as well as a subconscious step back on their amped up effort while covering for the same player.

A guy like him, you let him come back when he's ready, but it doesn't mean there isn't a price to pay on reintegration. I would credit that for some of it, and not look too deeply otherwise.

This game is also about matchups, but a combination of a lack of intensity/energy and bad matchups sure is ugly.

 

I pointed out earlier that using Kuzma and Dwight roughly approximated the production on offense and defense that AD provides and annoyed a few people here. Again... I'm not saying that Kuzma or old Dwight is even close to AD... but I think they are able to replace those two aspects of his game without a huge drop off in quality.

So while people assumed a huge infusion of quality... plugging in still recovering AD was probably not much of an upgrade.

The problem as that twitter post pointed out is that we don't match up well against teams with quality long wings

We faced this with the Clippers... we faced this against Siakam... we faced this against Giannis.

Against many teams... no one has a matchup for our bigs. The Pelicans for example have looked good against the Clippers but poor against us.

I think this championship will come down to matchups. If we get a good draw... we can go all the way... if we get one of those long wing teams it will be difficult.

We did well without AD because our parts are able to do his role albeit at a lower level.

If we lost LBJ we wouldn't do well because no one can replace what he provides in terms of passing and creating his shot.

 

Yeah, I can live with the loss. But damn, there was no energy out from our guys. Body language was bad. No sense of fight or urgency. A smaller team punked us and made our defense look like the league's worst. With the vets and all defensive teamers on this roster, that's not acceptable.

 

Lebron was worried about his Dad, and it affected everyone.

 

Way too much angst over this loss: Lakers were due for a blowout and it was definitely one of those games where all the bounces and iffy calls went against them.

Plus AD looked out of sorts which led to everything looking out of sorts. Not much to be gleamed from this one IMO

 

That was awful to see. I'm with Kenzo and wish a good samaritan Polack had been around to deck the a-hole stomping his head in the middle of the busy street in front of many cars and onlookers just like it was OK.

 

I had an odd habit of missing most of the Laker losses this season... so I did the questionable (cruel?) thing and watched the replay of the Boston game. Wanted to see where it all fell apart.

Get off my lawn WMC: Chris Webber saying the C Bags are winning because of "C bag Heart" and "C bag Pride", I hate this type of lazy commentary. No you a**hat, it was a thorough defeat in terms of strategy and execution; the difference between these teams was not "heart">

Actual WMC: we definitely have trouble with teams with multiple forwards. Tatum and Hayward were disruptive on the perimeter in the 2nd, I was surprised to see our guards struggle swinging the ball on the perimeter. To me, Vogel going with AD at center + 3 guards is a pretty good sign that they are searching answers for the big forward lineups.

I really like the chemistry of this team. But there are at least 3-4 elite teams that put out multiple big wings/forwards, and our current roster can't deal with the size. I think we have to make a deal, as much as I don't want to.

 

They do lack an edge, especially Kuzma. Been saying it for weeks.

A dawg like Rose would help.

Still, just a regular season game. Had to ignore all articles and sports shows today. A beatdown like that has haters out in full force.