I like Jones: he doesn't rebound but individual rebound numbers don't equate to team rebounding. As long as he can box out, he's can be an above average c that you can use against small ball units
I didn’t watch the game, how did we look offensively and defensively in the first half with our stars playing? Also Lebron 0-7?
ball and people moved more in the first half than they did last year, particularly with the starters in. we struggled to keep ballhandlers in front of us, which i fear will be season-long issue. when bevs and reaves were the back court, the offense got really stagnant, and you had bevs trying to create points, which was obviously less than ideal. i thought the defensive rebounding (led primarily by AD) was much better than last year. there were a couple fluke possessions where sac got like 4-5 chances because they bricked threes in unpredictable ways. there were more ballscreens than i was expecting, and to my eye, those were our less effective plays. we pushed off the rebounds with purpose, which helped. but like last year, we can't do that when we're taking the ball out of the hoop. lebron plays normally, and we're up 15 at the half. i went to bed after that, and apparently we lost by 40 in the next 24 minutes with our bench vs. theirs, which is...not super.
Thanks for that, appreciate your comments. About what I expected at this point, hoping those screens free up more space to get into the lanes for Lebron and Russ and mismatches where the defence has to give us an open shot.
Gabriel and Bryant played the 4. I think we will compensate our lack of size with going big there. Both are pretty useless on offense so we'll see if it pays off on D. It's hard to see them at the 4 with JTA at the 3 which narrows down our bench rotation options Pat Bev and JTA were the first to get in Then Reaves and Bryant Then Gabriel Nunn played also in Russ/AD lineup which I think is good to get some scoring when LeBron rests We were solid with our main rotations. Game went south when we played our deep bench. It's irrelevant what happened in the 2nd half. Just confirms we are a lottery team when our big 3 is out which is surprising to no one. Schroder and Lonnie can have a role for us, especially Dennis. We don't have much margin between success and failure as 100% of our success relies on Lebron and AD health. With them, I think we will be a solid team but nothing spectacular.
I know preseason results don't matter, but I think it would be great to get a win today with Phoenix. They are in a bad shape now and a win here would bring some positive aura to the team. There's a lot of doubts on this team so these results matter more than usual. Last year we went 0-6 and I think it reflected in the rest of the year. We are also probably starting with a 0-2 the season against Warriors and Clippers, so getting 2/3 wins in preseason would have more importance than usually. Of course for this to happen we can't play scrubs the entire 2nd half, so let's see how they approach this game
It will be interesting to see what we unveil tonight. I don't know if Walker is playing or not. I would like to see him in a couple of different lineups.
Walker is interesting. He likes to get downhill. If the goal is to get him to attack these "gaps" and play in space, I think that's the right way to do it. IMO.
I might be over optimistic, time will tell, but I think that Darvin got with Joey and Jesse, and identified some kids that he thinks will flourish in his system. Lonnie was a very quick grab, they saw something.
when people have been crapping on walker, i've been thinking he can definitely play in a 4-1 offense due to his explosiveness. regarding the above, having anyone who can shoot set a screen that leads to lebron or AD moving toward the basket is a welcome sight. we did, like, none of this the past two years.
