2023-24 Team Developments: Trades / Free Agents / News / Rumors / Ideas

C'mon. Have to agree with Slick on this one. If DLO hadn't completely crapped the bed we probably win that series EVEN with the out of their gourds shooting. That was NOT your typical sweep.

 

Team was gassed. They were playing top basketball. We were probably the team who made them sweat the most.
But the main thing for me was the fatigue. They played playoffs games since mid Feb, that's insane. We were 13th and finished 7. And went to the WCF. How many times that happened in history? Denver was resting players and preparing the PO since March

It's totally normal that energy started to play a factor and we still put a fight. You couple that with barely any practice at all and it's even more incredible we had such closed games defined in details.

This same team with a training camp and a full season rolling will be very hard to beat come playoffs. If we don't have any freaky injury from LeBron/AD and both are healthy in postseason, I doubt we aren't top contenders who can win against anyone

 

this current team is better, the wcf team lost no excuses needed

 

and you think Dlo played like w/o Den having to do something with that?

 

Missing all the shots waay below his usual averages total and from deep, yes. DLO not being able to defend anyone on Denver, the way Denver was shooting and with their size/strength advantage over him …. no.

 

4-0 Den did their job correctly

 

Also think the team just not having a lot of time together while Denver had much better continuity was helpful here. Both from player chemistry and coaching familiarity. Should never have gone with small with Denver to start with and TT should have gotten a shot earlier as well. Needed some more ways to get Dlo going and better rotation on defense. They're definitely some personnel issues (max and prince would have seen big minutes if they were ready/on the team last year) but also they didn't seem comfortable going with some atypical lineups early in the series - i.e. Lebron on either Murray/Jokic which worked.

 

den made right play in crunch time, this team did not.....bron chucking 3s late gm when he hadnt shot well then ad stop functioning at a high lvl after gm 3 didn't help either

 

And Ham in game one with three guards crap against all that size.

 

We were a guy or two short. DLo was deep in his own head and Dennis just wasn't a good matchup for Murray. Prince and the version of Christie I think we'll get this year would have been a big help in that series.

 

I wonder if the Lakers inquired about Jock Landale: he did better job on defense against Jokic then DeAndre Ayton.
I have no clue if Jackson Hayes matches up against Jokic other Jokic is going to be a lot stronger on the block than Hayes

 

I think we did. But the contract he got is unmatchable, we did good not doing something crazy

I don't think Hayes matches well with Jokic. That's why I want TT

 

The one thing that did work well for the Lakers was putting Rui and particularly Lebron on Jokic (jokic still got his) but it really helped on the Denver PnR. Nuggets credit to them hit a ton of difficult shots that of course started not to fall against Miami.

That is the one thing a guy like Hayes could be helpful with is he's got a better wingspan than the Laker 4's and is quick so could lose the post-op battle against Jokic but still be overall good defensive player as it takes away some of that PnR effectiveness. I would like to see some film on him against Denver.

 

Nope, not me. He’s not a winner. I wish we could just stop bringing his name up here.

 

Nikola Tkitishvilli was also a Summer League MVP winner. We all know that he went on to have an exceptional NBA career.

 

yeah, being good in summer league hasn't been a great predictor of nba success. being bad, however, has been a bit better predictor, i think. still not great, but better.

 

Bulls and MIA are in the mix for him, as well

This quote was rich

DAMN!

 

Was just coming to paste that same summary by Woike. Seems a very good one.

 

bulls could have vucevic, derozan, and wood. 60% of the way to the all-stats non-stars.

edit: oh wait...they've also got lavine and drummond!

so weird, too, because caruso and jevon carter are like, the opposite of those guys.