Optimism Discussion: The Laker's Sky Is Not Falling

HA!! That’s great. I’m loving Russ’s progress in figuring it out how to be a point guard with this team, his still physical dominance in exploding to the basket and trickiness at getting there with either hand off whichever foot, the good passing in spite of the fails that happen now less frequently and his relentlessness.

 

Kind of sad a rookie needed to bail out the team in overtime against a scrub team missing its best player though. Small victory I suppose, but not that much to get excited about. Should've never had to go to overtime.

 

It's pretty crazy we win, or even contend, in some of these games.. teams are taking more shots (usually quite a bit more), securing more offensive rebounds, yet we seem to hang in there with efficiency.

 

Anyone else prefer Ireland’s style over Billy Mac’s?
I always thought after doing the radio call for so many years now that he would have already been in the seat next to Stu.

 

The lack of boxing out and over all “don’t give a crap about going after the ball” attitude that most of these guys have REALLY bothers me.

 

My bad.

 

I recently posted about this. Ireland is WAY better IMO. Im optimistic about him taking over. haha

 

Thanks for your answer. I completely agree.

 

as i said in the AD thread, this is illustrative, but not in the way that people will take it.

first, they seem to be using raw +/-, so the -52 looks worse than it is. second, it's worth noting that a lot of the "only davis" minutes were because lebron was hurt and thus weren't part of any plan the team had going into the season.

as i've noted many times, the team isn't built ideally for AD, so yes, when he's the only one out there, we're going to look bad.

so, i guess my optimism is that (again like i said in the AD thread), i don't expect his absence to do that much to our performance this year. we'll score better and give up more points. our decommitment from defense made AD less important, imo.

 

Tough loss but the effort was there from what I saw.

IT looks pretty good if I’m being honest.

Melo played well.

 

Thought we fought throughout the game in this one. Good team effort all the way down the depleted roster.

Had we taken better care of the ball early on or hit our FTs down the stretch, we walk away with a win. Even with those shortcomings, our two best shooters got good looks to send this thing to OT.

Proud of the effort, especially after that s*** show in Minny.

 

I thought outside of DJ the team played well.
You could see glimpses of what Ariza can bring: he looked good on defense and you just see he knows where to be on offense and defense.

Just so tough with all these injuries and Covid too get any sort of flow: I mean even with Lavine out, Chicago had a full roster and were going against a lineup with Lebron at C surrounded by westbrook/ellington/IT/Melo. That's a bad defensive lineup with only Lebron being a positive defender in that whole group

 

Sounds like every year LeBron has ever had.

 

Too much doom and gloom IMO.
Lebron looks great
Ariza looks good
I hate Westbrook but he is what he is (hopefully the team has courage to bench him in the 4th quarters of the game if he doesn't have it)
Melo got ejected

DAJ is not NBA player anymore
IT is not an NBA player anymore
Rondo is not an NBA player aymore
These guys are not going to see minutes once this Covid situation is over

Meanwhile
Monk playing some fine basketball (goes out with covid)
THT played two of his best defensive games (goes out with covid and sucks in his first game back playing with some err interesting lineups)
HBK hits a game winner and plays two great games (goes out with covid)
Dwight finally completely replaced DAJ in the rotations (goes with covid, DAJ gets minutes back)

Even with AD out we have not seen this team with the guys who were expected to the main rotation after the 1st months fo the season
Dwight/Melo/Ariza/Monk/Reaves/THT. Just a few games with this rotation with Lebron and then if they suck I'll be dismissive of this season. Could care less if Russ plays or not

 

Garbage floats most of the time @karacha