No love for Kuzma’s hustle on the offensive board after LeBron’s missed free throws? If it wasn’t for him fighting for the ball (and Chandler locking up Lyn underneath the basket) we would have lost this game.
Eh, he missed the putback tho. +14 for the night, so yeah, dude was awesome sauce...but goddamit, why keep ringing up the #3 when it was clearly 86'd for him tonight.
He gets a lot of easy layups because he is great at getting behind the defense and getting himself open. Every game he has at least 3-4 wide open layups or dunks. His 3 ball is troubling though. Just can't hit and takes too many of them. His stroke looks great though but they have to go in, otherwise who cares about a nice stroke.
i'll chime in here, as it's relevant to my point in the lonzo thread: kuz's relatively lower shooting percentage from three doesn't indicate to me that he's a worse shooter than say, lonzo. why? because teams would clearly rather not give him that shot. he gets to the rim off of cuts and runouts, but he also gets there attacking closeouts. if teams start leaving him open and he continues to shoot a low percentage, i'll say he's a bad shooter, too.
Here's the thing though. Most of Kuz's threes have been open shots. He's not shooting those with guys draped all over him. I know that the Lonzo comparison is sticking in your craw, but the reality is that SO FAR Lonzo is shooting much better than Kuz from 3.
Big time offensive rebound by Kuz...saved us IMO. Still would like to see better D from him but I don't think we're going to get that consistently... And I really would like to see Kuz start hitting those 3s...I suspect that 28% will slowly start to trend up as the season goes on...
No basketball take here .... just came in to give props for "sticking in abeer's craw" smack. No offense to abeer.
can't find the stats on this (nba.com doesn't seem to have them up yet?), but i'm betting that's not the reality. nobody even runs at lonzo. it's really obvious when you're watching the game. his defender basically plays passing lanes.
https://stats.nba.com/player/1628398/shots-dash/ Kuz https://stats.nba.com/player/1628366/shots-dash/ Lonzo Second to last chart from the bottom shows shooting % and frequency of shots within a certain distance to defender. I'm not sure which of you is correct. I just found the numbers for you.
Sorry abeer, but it's definitely TIME! Kuz is tied for 5th in the entire league with 47 total attempted 3s (3.6 attempts per game) that are classified as wide open (closest defender is 6+ feet away).
I stand corrected. Though I stick by my assertion that lonzo's man ignores him all over the court, and kuz's doesn't. There's a difference between getting open and being left open. You have to adjust # of shots for minutes and games played, too.
