Morey -- acquire an actual center like Marc Gasol or Enes Kanter !!

I surely hope you are right. I don't remember Capela ever dominate a fully healthy Cousins. Refresh me if I am wrong. Someone mentioned about KAT. But KAT is soft. He relies on skills rather than physical dominance. Capela is fast enough to deal with those players. Plus, the Warriors have shooters. So you can't sag off to help inside. Capela will have to defend one on one.

That said, I am hopeful for a couple of reasons.

1. There aren't many centers like Cousins who are both physical and skilled.
2. When Durant is back, he will likely render Cousins obsolete again.

BTW, on offense, it really doesn't matter who is guarding Capela. Clint's effectiveness depends on Harden. When Harden gets into the paint, the threat of Capela's oop will keep the lane clear or Clint will be feasting on open dunks. Draymond was frustrated in last year's playoffs.

 

4/5 blks are on cousins alone. and yeah your point of effectiveness is also illustrated in this vid. but it also depends on the type of defense the opposing team will be playing and what they're focused on limiting

 

Not sure what narrative the media has said about this but watching Capela play a healthy cousins was concerning. He was getting dominated in every way by cousins to the point that cousins was getting double teamed and still scoring, or creating shots for open shooters.

It’s cool that we want to pump up our guys with the narrative that Capela is better and cousins makes them worse but cousins is just flat out better, if not the best big when healthy.

Cousins got the size and skill to create his own shot and make plays for others and rebound as well. His defense ain’t great but I didn’t see our guys scoring at will on him like they did on faried.

He provides the warriors with 2 elite scorers on the floor at all times which will kill our second unit when we go with tiny subpar defenders like faried and Shumpert.

Once again our team looks outmatched and our supposed strengths in having depth is looking like a weakness vs these guys. (Looney looks much more useful in this series than faried). Hopefully we can play as well as we ever have, get lucky and shoot the lights out for 4 games in the playoffs, otherwise I see little chance of beating a team that is more talented in every facet.

 

The issue with this thread, initially, was that Kanter being cited as some useful piece that the Rockets should have acquired but didn't. Then it became an argument that Clint can't handle "bruising bigs" like Cousins so, therefore, we needed Kanter (again, laughable) or Gasol but Morey was not astute enough to make the necessary transaction (which, in and of itself, is a pretty bold take).

Outside of that I don't disagree with @Senator that it would benefit the Rockets if we had another "bruising big" but at what cost? Clint is the center you want on the floor as much as possible not only because he's a PnR threat but also because he's nimble enough to move around on defense. Bringing in a "bruiser" means you're going to sit Capela and now you're down one offensive threat which means more reliance on the rest of the guys to make 3s.

Every center has had some sort of weakness or kryptonite during their careers. Hakeem had some trouble against Eaton. Howard got dominated by Yao. Okur's 3pt shooting meant Yao had to try and close out outside of his comfort zone. Sure the assumption that most had (including myself) about Cousins going into this season was that he wouldn't be the same player he was prior to the injury. But when he showed a glimpse of his skills the other night, people for some reason were surprised? Like the guy had one of the worst injuries for an NBA player but he was STILL an All-NBA player and Capela, as much as I love the kid, is not.

Like I said in the game thread, I don't expect what we saw Wednesday night from the Warriors as something that's sustainable. If Durant had played and Cousins performed the same way he did then I would be heavily concerned. Could they deploy the same lineup/strategy during the playoffs? Absolutely because Kerr would be stupid not to. But if Durant's going to play 33-38 minutes a night, I don't expect to see this strategy (thereby Capela's "weakness" showing) to be proof that we need to go into panic mode and advocate for Enes Kanter.

 

I haven't watched KAT but I think he will get better and more physical.

I think the last 10 or 15 games he was averaging 35 or above 30 ppg. First time he did that.

KAT hasn't reached anything resembling a prime yet. Jury is still out if he stays soft or not.

 

Houston needs to be careful cousins in playoff. We need to start Faried to grab more rebounds to protect the rims

 

Thanks for the video. I noticed that most of the blocks on Cousins was fastbreaks or when Cousins drove in from the perimeter. That kind of things I am not worried about.

 

and back to your point, if the warriors are going to take away iso possessions over KD, ill gladly take those chances honestly

 

If this thread was just about Kanter, then there's really nothing worth discussing. But the issue presented was a valid concern. I agree that every player has weakness or kryptonite and we would have to play Capela major minutes whether we had a big defensive center or not. But that does not erase the problem of not having a real backup big other than Nene.

Capela is not going to play a lot of minutes. As good as he was in last year's playoffs, he only averaged slightly more than 30 mpg. Maybe he can handle a few more minutes per game this year. Assuming Nene is only able to give us spot minutes here and there, we are pretty much forced to play small ball (with Tucker or Faried at the 5) when Capela sits. I was hoping Hartenstein would grow up fast enough to help. But it doesn't look like it's happening.

 

So now finally you admit what i said on gameday....capela got owned by boogie on wednesday. He will have to have much more discipline against centers like boogie and jokic to be more effective defensively

 

Looking at their splits, yea Clint needs to do better defending Jokic but it's not as if Jokic is putting the Mutombo clamps on Clint either:

Last season:

Capela vs Denver
12.3 ppg/ 13.3rpg on 57.1% shooting

Regular season average
13.9 ppg/ 10.8 rpg on 65.2% shooting

Jokic vs Houston
17.3 ppg/ 9rpg/ 5.3apg on 50% shooting

Regular season average:
18.5 ppg/ 10.7 rpg/ 6.1apg on 49.9% shooting

This season:

Capela vs Denver
27.5 ppg/ 9.0 rpg on 72.7% shooting

Regular season average:
16.7 ppg/ 12.5 rpg on 63.5% shooting

Jokic vs Houston
23 ppg/ 12.7 rpg/ 6.7 apg on 59.2% shooting

Regular season average:
20.3 ppg/ 10.8 rpg / 7.6 apg on 50.7% shooting


I bet if you take out the 3rd game this year against Denver from Jokic's stats since Clint did play the numbers would look more favorable for Houston/Clint.

I'm not expecting Clint to drop 27-28 points consistently against Denver if we meet them in the playoffs because that's irrational but Clint has the ability to do pretty damn well against Denver/Jokic. There's a reason why our team has a 5-1 record against them over the past two seasons.

Updated:

Jokics vs Houston in the two games that Capela played:

Game 1: 14 points, 12 rebounds, 7 assists on 42.9% shooting (-14 +/-)
Game 2: 24 points, 13 rebounds, 4 assists on 55% shooting (-22 +/-) this is the same game where clint had 31 points, 9 rebounds, on 72% shooting (+26 +/-)

 

Absolutely there was. A 'W'. Did that not count? Do games not count when your team is facing issues? That's news to me. How do you get to 82 for each team, then?

 

Are u being ignorant on purpose? What was there to take away from beating GS that night? Please, tell me...

 

I'm not dreaming, you're just living in the past. Even pre-injury, Capela slowly crept up to Cousins' level until eventually they were playing shoulder to shoulder. Cousins won't be a problem. I hope they play through him, but they are not stupid.

 

I just did, quite clearly...making your 'ignorant' comment pretty ironic. Can you not read? Maybe brush up on that before calling others ignorant.

 

I didn't say Capela will dominate him though. I just it won't be a problem. Harden/Paul/Capela will take turns running that guy into the ground imo. This was just a good outing for Cousins and a necessary learning experience for the coaching staff. We have to goad them into feeding Cousins, it is far better than having Curry, Durant or Klay taking shots.

 

The narrative that the media has been pushing is that this is the only game in the regular season series which we can extract predictions from and that Cousins can have this good a game against Capela every night. This is silly. Cousins was barely outplaying a less developed Capela in his last pre-injury season, it won't change now.

It's just one good game. If the Warriors play through Cousins while Curry, Klay and Durant on the floor, our coaching staff will be very happy about it. Cousins' 5 games before that:

13 pts on 11 shots against 7'1, 250lb Ayton, a -2 on the floor in a loss
13 pts on 11 shots against Jokic/Denver, a +5 on the floor while all other starters were over +20
10 pts on 12 shots and -6 in a bad loss to Boston
25 pts on 15 shots against a Philly team whose entire C rotation was injured and still a -2 on the floor
21 pts on 16 shots against 7 ft, 260lb Nikola Vucevic and a team-worst -16 on the floor

The size of the C doesn't make a difference. He has been a defensive liability. Capela is getting back to form. Cousins is barely cutting it with 2-3 elite shooters and 2 elite playmakers on the floor with him. Your C has to be able to bother Cousins, outrun Cousins on the break and switch onto smaller guys fairly often. We're more than fine.

 

Look if Harden would have PUSHED the ball up, Capela would have run Cousins into the ground.

DD

 

you’re wasting my time with your ignorance

Rockets proved they could beat a GS team without Curry and Boogie that was going through drama...amazing

that game meant absolutely nothing

 

So Houston proved they can win without Harden what's your point?