Me too. But I REALLY hope BI was watching how Kuz works with LeBron, moves without the ball and still got 20ppg.
My son and I have an interesting theory. Players that practice a majority of the time alone honing their skills don’t mesh as easily with those that practice with others. To explain: It seems BI is a loner personality, and works very hard. His teammates love him, and he’s highly skilled. But he doesn’t practice with others much, so integrating is harder. Playing without the ball in his hands is harder. Trusting others is harder. The natural feel for the flow of the game doesn’t come as easily. Kuzma is a more social personality and practices more with others. Same with Ball, Hart, etc. In an interview Kevin Durant did last year, he talked about this, and how one of his best friends growing up Michael Beasley has a better or more natural feel for the game. For the flow of a game. Where to be and when. KD was more gifted, but more mechanical in his approach. He wished he was more like Beasley and could just naturally read and react to the game. Great players can overcome this, but Kuzma has a more natural flow and feel to his game. With Ball and Lebron on the floor with him, a natural attacker like him is in hog heaven. BI has flashes of this, and you can’t teach his length. He will likely end up being the better all around player than Kuzma, but he has to put in the work. He’s willing to. So with the bigger picture in mind, are we better served with what’s good now or best for the future? Are we legit contenders this year, or more likely next year? Ownership, management, and coach’s call, but I think they think long term and go with BI to accelerate his growth.
As a follow up to that thought, I also think it’s why a player like Kobe struggled to maintain consistency as a distributor. He had the knowledge, the feel, the skills, and passing ability to be the top assist guy in the league, but he too was a loner. He only played with others in the offseason for the joy of destroying them. He could get 10 assists in a quarter when locked in, but 1 the rest of the game. We all default to who we are in the end. If you practice alone, integrating your game with others is just more of a challenge compared to those who mostly practice scrimmaging and add skill work vs vice versa
really interesting post. not to derail the line of thinking, but this could merge with whatever thread in which we were discussing basic personality traits and how they translate to basketball. ingram's lower "extraversion" (as scientifically more than colloquially defined) could be something of a hindrance in terms of integrating into a team framework. granted, these guys get chances to play together all the time, but those that spend most of their time in coordinated efforts are going to end up with different talents than those that work in isolation. i think darko milicic was an interesting example here, as, in isolation, he looked fantastic. but he never figured out how to play as part of a team on either end. i find durant's evaluations of beasley puzzling, though, as beasley seems to have a skill set that was developed ENTIRELY separately from real 5 on 5 basketball. he could go end the 3 on 3 league tomorrow, all by himself, but he doesn't actually use others to magnify his talents, nor vice versa. all that said, i did think ingram showed some flashes in the preseason playing off lebron, but you can see how much more naturally it's coming to kuz. to me, this is because the core of extraversion is approach motivation. it's defined by its obvious social manifestations (e.g., that guy talks and jokes a lot and people think he's cool), but really, there's something more basic that drives that: kuz wants rewards hard. ingram thinks rewards are cool and all, but he just doesn't get all hyped up about it. this can have positive behavioral manifestations, too--you won't ignore potential pitfalls in pursuit of the next momentary high--but sports tend to magnify the rewards of unfettered goal pursuit more than regular life situations do. ignore all that. nice reverse dunk.
He’s the safer bet long term if you could pick only one, but I like both of them. But if Magic goes after another max player, sadly one of them is likely gone.
Kuz has been scoring well playing with LeBron, but I think he has forgotten how to rebound the ball. 4 in 31 minutes is not going to cut it.
Kyle has looked like Lebron's right hand man with Ingram out. Lebron is constantly looking for Kuz and he has been scoring easily off those opportunities. Now it's up to Luke to find a balance between Kuz and Ingram, and how the both of them work with Lebron. Kuz probably goes back to the bench but man I'd rather start the game with Kuz's offensive punch and have Ingram (with Rondo/Lance) leading the bench.
I'm not sure Ingram can't play the sg spot. He was playing pg last season and actually guarding other team's pgs, so why not try him at sg? At some point we will need to figure out a way to play Kuz and Ingram together that doesn't include putting Kuz at center.
he's a sf who can play spot minutes at pf, not a pf who can play spot minutes at center. it seems like the staff is slowly coming to this realization. to be fair, didn't they ask him to work on his guard skills/perimeter game all summer?
He is a natural SF that can play PF in some stretches. Other than that, I reserve all of my observations. I'll wait til were done with November. Some things just doesn't fill right in our game. Rotation? Chemistry? I dunno. Like I said, November. Sent from my E6533 using Tapatalk
