Mr. Clutch, respectfully disgree with your point... Lin & Harden finally rolling, and Rockets winning should be in spite of the poor coaching, not because of it. It was almost a random luck of the SAS game, that desmentraded what JLin could do. And that was not even cemented, until the NYK game. It was only then that the coaching were simply forced to play the way we all recognized since day one, i.e. beautiful team game, tons of moving & passing with JLin playing the PG. The coaching didn't do anything to facilitate this melting process. It was absulately absurd to bench JLin for the 4th quarter, counting the so called whatever excuses. It still a problem now, benching him in 2nd quarteIr for maybe having the 2nd foul. These kind disrruptive subs do no good for any players. Jlin survived despite of these raw deals. The probabillity happening the other way tollaly burying JLin was just as high. Give credit to JLin, to Harden a true humble superstar team player ! It is interesting to watch, if next time when Jlin goes 0-5 in starts, what the coaching is going to do.... Hope they are completely bought into our team playing basketball concept, stick with our own determined sub patterns, not having to find any excuses again...
Actually, the thing is there is nothing to figure out. If you're always running on possessions on rebounds, misses AND makes, and always doing big outlet passes, there's only ONE way to combat it... run fast for the transition Defense. If you have the athleticism to do it, you can. If you don't, you're done. There are teams with the speed to do it... Miami, Denver, the Clippers and OKC are all young and fast enough, at least through their starters. However, if we're running on both units, you need a LOT of players with young legs to slow us down. So teams like Boston, the Knicks, Celtics, Memphis and the Bulls are all going to have problems with this type of offense. Low scoring teams will struggle against us. It's the young, athletic teams that can run AND score that will give us problems. However, we're only talking a handful of play off teams. Which is a pretty good place to be when your roster is this young and has lots of growing up to do. :grin:
Calvin Murphy & Clyde Frazier all said he hasn't been playing his natural position. Once again the truth is somewhere in the middle it isn't one extreme over another. Also I see that a lot of people are praising Lin for being aggressive which he is. But he is still doing some dumb stuff that he did when he wasn't being aggressive. For example passing up wide open jumpers. People are just not talking about it because we are winning & he is putting up numbers. Also Morris is out there so the floor is a lot more spread & Morris is being respected so Lin's woeful 3 point shooting is less highlighted. I think something that needs to be realized is that teams are going to start to aggressively scout our up tempo offense seeing as how lethal it is & the rockets will have to adjust once again. Just like they had to adjust when teams started scout harden after the first two games. It will be interesting if the Rockets adjust fast enough to not lose to many games. If we start losing I am sure this board will hit the fans. I found this kind of funny too.
Durvasa I appreciate the hard work you do with your number-crunching - and find your analysis usually interesting and objective. But isn't rule #1 of commentating/analysis to always read/watch the source material at the very least (in this case, watch the games?)...
That or minimize our ability to quickly inbound and get the ball back up the court ala Marc Gasol. But you run the risk of having a delay of game called.
Maybe it' because Lin stopped deferring so much that he started to look more like the pg ? Back then he would pass the ball to any open teammate as soon as he passed the half court line. Isn't that what Sampson and Mchale have been saying?
*face meets palm* Correction. *palm meets face* Okay you are entitled to believe who you want to believe (Sampson) & others are entitled to believe who they want to believe (Calvin & Clyde). That isn't what I am stressing because nobody will ever see eye to eye on that. What I am trying to stress & have been trying for quite some time is that the truth is somewhere in the middle, I like to think we can agree on that. Or maybe not. I really don't know.
While I don't think the coaches made enough effort to get Lin involved more, I think most of the issue was because of Lin himself. Something like 85% (random Greg Smith percent generator) 15% coaching. We going to have to agree to disagree if you see it differently
I really don't see how people think Lin has poor lateral quickness. At worse, he has avg NBA quickness. Otherwise he wouldn't be able to stay in front relatively well of guys like Brandon Jennings and Westbrook. He might have to back up a lil bit and give up some room, but he still stays up in front of them and doesn't allow too much blow bys. And plus people forget he is 6'3. You can't expect 6'3 guys to stay consistently in front of elite quick, smaller guys. Harden lets guys blow by him so often that its not even credible to say he's not just trying hard enough. Even Douglas , who is quicker footed than Lin (partly cuz he is 3'' shorter) , occasionally lets guys straight blow by him. The ISO stats this year by Lin shows he has improved a lot on D and is quicker laterally than people give him credit for. However, his speed should be unquestioned. He accelerates as well as anyone in his size and has extra gears to reach top speed, which was tested to be amongst the highest vs other elite PGs
What argument/commentary/analysis of mine are you referring to, and what position (that was informed by religiously watching and rewatching games) was I arguing against? If you can quote something I wrote which you object to, I can respond to your question. By the way, I've watched maybe around 10 complete games and watched portions of most of the rest. Beyond that, I followed what happened in the games based on commentary online (both here and from informed people I trust outside this board). I think that's enough to disagree with people who think the only reason Lin struggled was because of the coaches, unless they can provide some evidence to support their positions.
Come on man. I'm a well known YOF for a long time and I'm rooting for Lin now. But I've never seen Durvasa did anything like "tried applying a hacksaw to Yao's reputation" and I don't think he's that kind of person based on so many of his posts. Having different opinion on Sampson also doesn't mean "going after Lin". He's very objective compare to most fans here. For Lin's earlier struggle, I believe his knee was the biggest factor. Not being 100% healthy affects both Lin's play and coaches' decision(some of decisions turned out to be bad). You should be happy that Lin is healthy and coaches found the right way of how to use him now.
I don't think online commentary is a valid way of following games if you are planning to make deep analysis. There are all kinds of commentators out there (does Jon Barry do it?). I do respect your statistical approach to basketball though, even if I don't agree with your definition of "playmaking".
Durvasa has turned into the anti-Torocan. Torocan loved by the 2012ers, Durvasa -Hated by the 2012ers.
I believe the fault is distributed evenly between Lin and the coaching staff. If it wasn't for those few games in which Lin was taken out way too early even though he was performing well (with the exception of shooting), I would have thought that they were resting him and letting him recover from his surgery (meaning 100% on Lin and 0% on coaching). Oh well, as long as they are all on the same page... On another note, I don't mind resting Parsons for tonight if his knee and/or his shoulder needs it. I love both his attitude and his play, and would prefer long term gains to short term ones.
I said "informed people I trust". And I merely offered my opinion in this thread and asked a simple question regarding Lin's performance prior to Sampson's "benching", not a deep analysis.
That's funny, because I think torocan's posts are great and must-read. Even when I disagree (which isn't often), I feel a little smarter about our team when I read one of his posts.
Yeah there were some questionable moves by the coaches for sure but Lin still average over 30 minutes a game then which is hardly holding him back.
