Comments on: GAME DAY DALLAS

By: brian

brian — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 02:21:15 +0000

butler is playing all-star ball, last year they say he was lucky to be voted in, this year his is a shoe in. now u people kill me when u say why deshawn? without deshawn caron could score, nor gil, nor jamison, he makes up for their lack of d, they make up for his lack of O. his is the heart and hustle. the backbone. caron is the punch!

By: BruceO

BruceO — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 02:02:20 +0000

anyway forget all this I don’t want to make this long and argumentative. I agree with you that caron played great and other people played their usual game offensively. Where I disagree with you is I feel the team played well defensively, they had a good plan and they executed it. I also feel the team is improving offensively. We are scoring over 100 pts without gilbert. Its a combination of work players have done and work the coaches have put in with the players

By: BruceO

BruceO — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 01:59:41 +0000

deshawn didnt contribute offensively. He contributed by defending devin harris and totally styming their offense by doing so since he’s their point gaurd. As far as offense goes I wasnt even thinking about offense. I was looking at the players and how hard they were working defensively and how they were getting results. Also the idea they had as far as playing solid defensively and moving into a really quick fast break is coming into fruition. I just see big differences between this season and last season defensively. I also see us holding opponents to less. I’m not sure what Haywoods shooting percentage is this year compared to last. I just know I expect him to miss less. Maybe he doesn’t. But I wasnt looking solely at this shooting. I was looking at carons shooting, Blatches shooting as well. Those are the ones showing alot of improvement. At this point I’d think you are more right than I am. But I feel we are moving in the right direction and have done alot with the little we have. My question to you is this. Are we setting the right foundation to improve aspects of our team game? has the team shown a willingness to commit to this and are they learning from our coaching staff and trying to execute. Do you see improvements in certain players?

By: ricklevinenyc

ricklevinenyc — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 23:41:13 +0000

oh, and by the way, Haywood is shooting 63% from the line so far this year. A modest improvement from the 60% he shot last season, but not exactly something to brag about.

By: ricklevinenyc

ricklevinenyc — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 23:39:11 +0000

I didn’t say there weren’t other contributors BruceO, I just said that no one else played great. I agree there were good contributions from DeShawn and Nick Young, and Jamison and Daniels. But pretty much to a man, those contributions were on the offensive end of the court. And then only in the scoring column. As a team we only had 13 assists! That has got to be considered pretty selfish basketball.

My main point is that without stronger, tougher defense, we will rarely win unless the other team misses their open shots.

By: BruceO

BruceO — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 20:12:33 +0000

By the way guys give the team credit. They’ve played good D. Since the 5 loss streak we are 7 and 2. We;ve had 20 plus points in leads. Without Pech, Gil or Etan. They’re rotating well. Caron carried the offense but Jamison contributed too. So it wasnt just caron. Deshawn did a good job on Devin harris who’s their playmaker and everyone else got defensive assignments they could handle. Dallas made alot of freethrows but so did we. I feel good about ayers knowledge. He improved the magics overall defense and look where they are now. We’ve been holding teams to less than 90 pts and the ones who passed it was a last minute surge to try and beat us that didnt work. I feel good about our shooting. Our shooting coach changed Torontos shooting for the better. They’re number one in free throw shooting and alot of the players field goal percentage improved. I see our players improving. They’ve had high percentage games, carons range has improved, Blatche is finally making shots on offense, haywoods freethrows are up (remember the 9/9 game?) I just want to see what he does with Pech. I want to give the players credit. They’ve worked hard. The recent loses have come when the squad is weary.

By: BruceO

BruceO — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 19:58:17 +0000

the sean taylor thing sucks people. The washington familys going to miss him

By: neal

neal — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 19:24:19 +0000

I agree, ricklevinenyc. It’s the way we’ve won a lot of games since the Jordan/Princeton offense got here, but things have to change for us to move up. I get the impression Ayers has taught them better rotation. They just have to do it FASTER. Which means not to hold anything back on the defensive end.

By: ricklevinenyc

ricklevinenyc — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 15:54:58 +0000

It was a great win to beat Dallas. However, other than Caron I don’t think we played great. Dallas had more rebounds, assists, and blocks than we did. They also took 10 more shots than we did and were a perfect 29/29 from the line.

Our saving grace… Dallas shot 39% from the floor, and we hit a lot of tough shots to go 51% from the floor. And watching the game, you didn’t get the feeling that Dallas was missing highly contested shots. Other than Nowitski, they were just missing.

We cannot count on other teams to shoot that poorly (Memphis and Golden State certainly didn’t). While we can beat a good team that shoots poorly, we can also lose to bad teams that shoot well. We also cannot count on Caron to get 35 points on only 17 shots (that was amazing by the way!)

OUR DEFENSE MUST IMPROVE!

By: Brickjp

Brickjp — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 14:38:53 +0000

I thought Darius was effective on Dirk for a little while. Got him out of his comfort zone. He’ll be fine, I’m not worried about him in the long run offensively.

Barea was extremely speedy. Almost led his team back at the end.

Man, Butler was just out of his mind last night, just like Phil said. Out of his mind!