Russell Westbrick Discussion: Clipper Gonna Clip

…let us have this. Lol

 

I actually thought he played okay today.

 

I was told Russ didn’t have an attitude problem

 

I don’t think I can handle another full season of this dude’s quotes.

 

I thought he played well, not even just because some of his shots went down and he was able to put up 19 points, but more importantly I didn’t notice any glaring lapses in defense/effort…

But jeez that quote is just so aggravating, I don’t know how much longer we can afford to give this a chance.

I also want him gone so we can stop the “woe is me” press tour that always comes out on his behalf when we have nationally televised games. Chuck being all melodramatic at halftime and saying the Lakers are taking away his joy of life.

Reggie acting like the fans over scrutinize him and then after he airballs a wide open three “See you know Twitter is going to go wild on that one!”

Well maybe instead of blaming Twitter and the fans, maybe the takeaway that it IS justified to criticize a $50 million player who airballs wide open shots on such a consistent basis that it’s become a meme?

 

I also thought he played okay last night.

 

it's sad that we're excited by "not noticeably bad" play by a guy making 47 million this year.

but yeah, that said, he wasn't the problem.

i'll try not to spam threads, but the real problem is the huge gap in the quality of support players on our team vs. our competitors. lebron and AD were better than whatever you'd call gs's top two last night. 3-10 got decimated by their counterparts.

gs also really isn't a fair comparison. they basically returned their entire team from last year's title, and just about everyone has played in the same system for years. we've got the same thing coming up in several games, too. i don't see a path to winning against teams that are so much deeper and more talented and have the benefit of literally years of playing together.

 

Completely agree. I fell asleep on it somewhere in the third but am honestly not that upset or surprised we lost.

There's just only so much that can be done when the other team is deeper than you are and has better chemistry.

 

Westbrook played a pretty good game yesterday if we are being honest about it. He was far from the biggest problem.

 

right. and you can't build chemistry when you turn the roster over completely, get a new coach, and half your team misses half the preseason games.

i'm not promising things will ever look good, but there was no way they should have last night.

re: russ: his declining athleticism is making his trips to the buckets less fruitful, but i liked that he kept trying to get there instead of just hunting for his terrifying bank shot. he took one three i didn't like and passed up a three i liked, but i didn't notice him getting roasted on d or being directly responsible for offensive rebounds, so that was nice.

re: the bench. he's probably right that coming off the bench contributed to his hamstring issue. so maybe we can get him a bike.

 

100%. We played the defending champs at their house. We were supposed to get thrashed. I was happy to see Westbrook play less reckless and AD come out aggressive. The shooting and spacing is a huge concern for me.

 

Yeah. We've got to stop completely turning over the roster every year. It just won't work no matter what stars are the leading the way.

 

i hate the roster churn for many reasons. it just shows a complete lack of regard for how the game is played and won. and from fan's perspective, all players are mercenaries.


you realize how much of gs's roster was drafted and developed there? like 75% of the rotation. most of them there at least 3 consecutive if not many more years. they use the small money to tinker on the margins. we use to try to shore up the starting lineup!

 

Right. Meanwhile we're watching guys like Caruso, Kuz, etc who would really be helping us right now play on other teams.

Unfortunately, we're going to end up doing this again next season but hopefully the pieces will fit together better than now.

 

probably. but it doesn't have to be that way. if nunn plays well, maybe we can use the klutch connection to retain him. reaves should still be here unless we screw up, caruso-style. maybe gabriel, too. that sounds bad, but that's more retention than we've had! also, this is why i favor trading russ for longer-term salary sometime during this season. we can then start next year with several guys who have actually played together in the same system.

i really hope that the cap space we accumulated is purely for the sake of leverage in trade talks.

 

And all of that is because we gutted our depth for him. If 3 of your players eat up all of your cap, and he's the highest paid one then he needs to be great. Especially if his okay still causes defenders to load up on our best players in the half-court. In 22 games I don't think they've ever played a great game collectively. 22 games and our big 3 making $130 mil combined of our cap can't even put a positive net rating together. I guess our vet minimums are suppose to make up for that.

The Russ situation is a killer because his contract covers 3-4 good players who fit our two stars. Can't win with him being "okay" cause than our vet minimums gotta make up the slack which isn't happening.