Eric Gordon is dominating Donovan Mitchell defensively in the first 3 games. In 99 possessions; Mitchell has 18 points, 3 assists and 5 turnovers on 5-21 shooting. Locking down their only great scorer equals "Game Set Match". BTW offensively Gordon's effective FG% is at .609. When will fans begin to appreciate Gordon's play?
Eric Gordon has always been a good 2-way player. He has been great here. If he can lock down Thompson in the next playoff series, I would feel real good about our chances at advancing. I will repeat this several times: Curry and Durant can have their 25 points, but Thompson must be absolutely locked the hell down.
I’ll fully appreciate Gordon and all the Rockets, except Tucker and Harden, once we beat the Warriors this year. Tucker and Harden have my full appreciation already due to their play from past 2 seasons. Paul and Capela are right up there with Harden and Tucker but not quite unless we beat Warriors. With the fall of Warriors, their dynasty will crumble as Durant and/or Klay will likely leave.
That's not what this thread was about. That's your connotation. The point of this thread was how we were going to matchup and play them defensively. I offered no prognosis than to speculate that their size if they went double big would give us trouble. Stop reading things into posts that aren't there.
Agreed, they don't have the shooters to match up with us. That's why I suggested before game 1 that they'd go double big for more minutes. It was their only hope. Of course it is/was worse defensively if they're going to spot Favors up at the 3-point line. He's not a 3-point shooter. So, why put him out there...just dumb. There is no way that you can play two non-3-point shooting bigs in today's NBA and expect to win unless you're going to double down on their size and use them to abuse smaller defenders. I would've thought that their coaches would have went to high/low action with Favors/Gobert and would have also made the PnR the staple of what they were doing against us, by repeating the PnR action through both bigs while they wile away the shot clock. Personally, I think their coaching has flat-out stunk this series. There's no way a coach can look at these two teams, especially with Korver dinged, and think they can spread us out and out shoot us from 3. It's just ... dumb. Could not disagree more. The only thing that kept the game remotely close was Harden laying an egg. If Harden has even an average game, then this game is over midway through the 3rd quarter. Gobert and Favors aren't average bigs. Gobert is exremely long. And Favors is extremely athletic. Their only chance to beat us is to pack everything in the paint OFFENSIVELY and then board. Our weaknesses are size, length, and subsequently rebounding. Like I said above, in my opinion, the Jazz have coached very poorly. Nobody that knows a thing about the game would think that they could match up with us by them going small. That's playing into our hands. Their only choice for any success was double bigs and mucking up the series with by winding the shot clock and going to the hole relentlessly with their bigs both going to the glass relentlessly. They'd been better off to do that and give up some transition dunks as to try to spread us out and shoot 3's with us.
I would say that their one-big lineup helped them on defense. They were finally able to successfully pull off the defensive strategy that had failed in the 2 games prior. Having more wings out there meant they could move around better on defense; they could rush to help on Harden, and still be able to get back and recover if Harden passed to their man (most of the time). With two bigs on the floor, it's harder to pull that off.
The Utah Jazz are getting more wide open (6+ feet from nearest defender) 3 point attempts than any other team in the playoffs. Their offense is generating 21.3 of these looks per game, and yet they are only hitting 18.8% of them. Is this something to be worried about? On paper, this makes it seem like the rockets are playing terrible defense. I thought about this, and thought maybe it's because we are easing up on our defensive effort because the games are blowouts. But I don't think that's the case, because we are actually giving up the most of these open looks in the first quarter (6.7), more than any other quarter. I'm not really sure what to make of this...letting the other team shoot a bunch of wide open 3s doesn't seem like good defense to me. It definitely does not bode well for the next round, unless there's something I'm missing and this is somehow an intentional Jazz-specific strategy. Would like to hear some thoughts from people who understand the defensive x's and o's better than I do.
I think that's intentional. Look up how many of Ingles, Mitchell, and Korver's attempts are more closely guarded. I think we're only concerned about those three guys. We don't care how many open 3-ball looks we give Crowder, etc. And we probably would prefer that they take more to entice them away from the basket.
Ingles actually has the most wide open 3s on their team, and is shooting 2/12 on those shots. Next is Royce O'Neal at 3/11, then Donovan Mitchell at 1/8. Korver is 1/3. So we are giving up a lot of attempts to their best shooters, they just aren't hitting. Crowder is 0/6 and Rubio is 2/7, for reference.
Houston understands that Utah's roster can't hit 3's apart from Jingles and Mitchell. They just walled off the paint and dared Utah's shitty shooters (e.g. Jae Crowder and Rubio) to hit wide open 3's. Good job by Bzdelik and the Houston analytics team.
Now they've adjusted to push ther ball to Gobert and Capela is ill. Then they matched up our small lineup and beat us with their big, including Gobert working over Harden. What do we do next? I dunno. But despite this game I'm still not worried about their shooters until and unless Korver and Ingles get it going. I'd be happy to let Crowder and Rubio to continue to shoot 3- balls. I'm concerned defensively about Gobert and by extension Favors.
