If you trade Tuck, you may as well be starting a matador at PF. This team is already defensively compromised, you can't get rid of the one guy who can hold his own against bigger guys if don't get something similar in return.
The team has quit. I said it in my postmortem post about the season last year; that kind of magic is impossible to repeat. People bashed the hell out of Cowherd for pointing out that plenty of WCF teams don't go back, but he was right.
Honestly u can't blame Tucker. He's the only guy playing defense. All his energy has been used in defense and none left.
Harden is not playing hard. The team is not passing the ball at all. We are just not playing team ball.
It definitely lookssubjective, but it seems to be stamping out any remnants of the gritty defense that mostly vanished with the hand check rule. I think refs will definitely look at a guy like Tucker and focus on where his hands and arms are while paying less attention to faster, nimbler guys.
Ya I'm going to get a lot of hate for this post but our offensive deficiencies have plenty to do with Harden's vary narrow play style where he is essentially a warm sack of meat if he isn't dribbling the air out of the ball. The league has figured out how to defend a Harden centric offense. Harden's numbers will be great but the offense will be stagnant and prone to 5 minute scorless droughts.
My take so far into this regular season is that the "freedom of movement" rule *emphasis* encourages more defense like what we saw from Utah - the show-your-hands type. This sticks out because this is what the Spurs did to directly counter Harden in 2017 R2. Conspiracy theories abound. My other take is that it intends to deter players like PJ Tucker and Eric Gordon who rely more on body contact to essentially direct or restrict the other player's path e.g. denying a player from the lane. I feel like they are arguably the two most impacted by this rule on our team. Though, I see most of the whistles being blown explicitly on a PNR play, specifically on our guy switching onto the roller. The foul occurs trying to prevent the roller from going to the rim or popping out. We get a "freedom of movement" call for restricting the roll and the floodgates start opening up with the opposing team getting easy baskets at the rim. Our success last year was when we switched everything from Q1-3 and played more man2man defense going into the 4th. While it doesn't have to be in the 4th, I don't see man2man defense at all being played.
Harden has been the biggest problem even if he has carry us. It’s just like he doesn’t care. It has always been all about Harden. He is our main guy and the team goes as far as he take us. That’s why we haven’t been able to get over the edge from the western conference. He has the one getting lost when we need him the most. Or at least to not mess things up with his lack of effor on defense and his turn overs. This season he has looked uninterested and like there’s no chemistry on the team. Idk if he didn’t really want to get Melo and it has cause more drama internally than we were let known but to me the team has no chemistry and that’s has been the main issue. Even the worse team can give a better effort than this even an amateur team can. And it has all started with Harden, if he looks active on defense and is involve in our offense 90% of the time we win. When he is playing like this we lose. Yesterday at half time I knew we were gonna get blown even though we got down by 8. You could tell it was gonna be a big lose just by the way Harden was playing. And I know everyone else is playing like **** but Harden is the only one that could dictate how we play and if we win. Cp3 of course he has a lot of the fault in here. He was the one that wanted to get Melo since last year. We get it they are buddies. But I’m sure this has been the main factor why Harden and CP3 look to be on different pages. Like they barely communicate or Cp3 tries but Harden just ignores him. Also he has lost a lot of mobility and his jump. He can’t seem to score those easy 2 he used to score so easily and frequent. Capela well he has kept his usual bad habits but he isn’t the biggest problem. Just wish he had work on all those bad habits. Eric he has been probably the worst of them all. Especially coz we need him to bring a spark and scoring on our thin bench. He has been in a terrible slump all season and I don’t know why we didn’t trade him for butler. He hasn’t been the same since the rumors starter spreading. This slump won’t go anywhere since it’s already in his head just like when Ryan was in those trade rumors it affected him mentally. Now Eric is the same way he can’t score and our bench can’t either. Tillman is mostly to blame here if we had try to kept Trevor just for keeping all parties happy or keep them accountable. I hope we can get him back soon but not in a trade only if he is bought out. Tillman kept moreys hand kinda tight by probably telling him to keep the luxury tax to the minimum. So we got a bunch of scrubs like MCW or players that aren’t ready for the NBA
