it doesn't matter when cp3 got his pts. cp3 can score any time he wants with help from so many picks from his teammates. their p&r plays look very good. their bigs picked lin and harden very well. well, look at our p&r. our bigs like to start rolling too earlier for ball handlers to get rid of their man.
Pairing Parsons with Harden does not sound too smart either. 2 below average wing defenders on the court together is not a good combo. Either Howard or Asik have to be in the game whenver Harden is to compensate for his piss poor D. That said, Harden had an off night offensively. He is in another stratosphere normally.
Remember the David Wesley trade? The Rockets were an awful mess and Yao couldn't stop fouling until they traded for a guy who could stop dribble penetration. That's no.1 in the NBA. He was far from being a defensive stopper at that stage of his career. When Paul was allowed to park himself without any pressure it was letting them run unopposed sets like in training. Just going through the motions. Good defense isn't stopping the bucket or shutting down a player.
Plus if Lin can't stay on the floor (already has a 5th foul in the 4th) that means he was having trouble corralling CP3 in the first place. You can't blame Harden for that. Like I said it was a team effort, Howard was also in foul trouble throughout the game which limited his effectiveness. Everyone pouring in on Harden's defense should take a look at the other guys around him, that weren't able to stay on the court. Again losing effort on behalf of the ENTIRE team, not one seldom player.
Someone have the "Plus Defender"/"Minus Defender" stats on our team? I actually thought Lin, though a slight minus defender, was better in that category according to the 2012-13 RAPM: http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=242826 But I don't know the stats for like Synergy or 82games, etc. Where is the best source to find out who is and is not a "Plus Defender?" I saw Lowe say something about the Houston perimeter defense the other day on Twitter. He was watching the Utah game. Not sure how often he watches the Rockets and how well he knows the team.
You're right CP3 is going to get his. Lin probably played the best game of the starters and people are still getting on him. A lot of CP3's points came after Lin got into foul trouble, and as for the assist, Lin isn't guarding the people the ball is getting passed to. If Harden, Parsons or whoever isn't guarding their man that isn't Lin's fault.
It wasn't that Lin was having trouble corralling CP3, it was the superstar phantom fouls that CP3 is notorious to get.
Lin did well against CP3 last night. He offset him. Lin's efficiency was 19, Chris Paul's was like 37. So, 2:1 ratio. The ratio between Redick and Harden in efficiency was about 3.5:1. That's not a formula for Houston success, I don't think. As I said in another thread, CP3 came into the game last night with a PER of 37.6. After the game, he had a PER of about 37.8. Meaning, he played about the same against Lin as he did the other 3 teams he faced. The good thing was that Lin didn't have 11 TO's like Steph Curry did against Paul the other night. Several of Paul's stats came after Lin picked up his 5th foul, I believe, and therefore Lin had to back off of Paul. A bit of stats padding for CP3, perhaps. Lin had an 8-to-1 assist-to-turnover ratio against the reigning 1st Team All Defense point guard and one of the best steals men in the business. That's pretty good. After watching how Patrick Beverley struggled against Reggie Jackson and Kemba Walker, for example, I can't see any way in which he slows down MVP Mode Chris Paul. If the season ended today, as I said elsewhere, Chris Paul is the MVP. He's #3 in PPG, #1 in APG, and #1 in PER by a wide margin. He's dominating. This is what he can do. What you got with Lin last night that you might not get with Beverley is some offsetting of what Paul did when Houston was on offense. I think if Beverley plays last night, he may have fouled out of the game, and possibly pretty early. Chris Paul will attack you and draw fouls. I like Lowe, but not sure I'm on board with him here. Would need to know more and look at more statistics. I know Lin had an 88.6 Defensive Rating or so coming into last night's game and the last two starting point guards he faced before Paul had a grand total of zero points against him. I'm not sure how much Rockets basketball Lowe watches. Maybe he watches a lot, I don't know.
AggNRox needs Lin himself to come out and say that Bev is a better defender before he will believe it. Whole basketball community be damned.
I think Lowe and Simmons may be overreacting a bit after an likely outlier game after 3 pretty solid defensive games (aside from the first half in Utah). Utah and Charlotte may be bad teams but Dallas certainly has good offensive talent and is otherwise well-coached and playing pretty well. I'd give the team a little time, and a healthy Pat Beverley, before concluding what they are. To me it just seems that the team was just flat defensively all game, particularly Harden. In the NBA, when your team is flat and the opponent is hitting open Js, even if you have talent talented, you can get run off the court for a night.
do I need to care about who said? I watched almost all games last season and all games this season. I say what I saw.
To be fair to AggNRox, I'm not sure that the numbers exist yet to make this a definitive argument for Beverley. Recall, Beverley spent much of last year guarding backups. A couple of other pieces of data on this matter. Best career DRTG for a season -- Lin -- 96.7 (2011-12) Bev -- 98.8 Career Steals Per 36 Minutes -- Lin -- 2.0 Bev -- 1.8 The "Beverley Destroys Holdiday" game took place in the preseason. Bev got about 4 steals in 21 minutes of playing. In Lin's second career game, in the regular season, he had 4 steals in 16 minutes. He's also had at least two career games of 6 steals. And when he was signed by Golden State, the owner said he thought Lin could have a defensive impact for his team (meaning the owner seemed more focused on Lin's defense than Lin's offense). In other words, no one is likely to buy something sold just because it is being sold. It has to be proven. That includes from Zach Lowe, or anyone else. That's my position, anyways. As I mentioned earlier, the xRAPM figures from last year seem to show Lin as a slightly better defender than Beverley, or basically equivalent. I thought Synergy showed something similar for like points per player against, or something. That Lin may be slightly better on defense than Beverley. So, no one should expect any flat statement such as "Beverley is a better defender than Lin" to just be blindly accepted. If the stats don't show it clearly, then probably a number of people will push back against any kind of "eye test" reasoning or one set of stats that seem to "prove" the argument while another set of stats may show something different. And again, this does not take into account the argument of facing starters vs facing backups. Do I think Beverley is a better defender than Lin? Probably so, yes. But perhaps not. I'm not sure that the statistics definitively "prove" this to be the case at this time. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. I honestly don't know. But when the starters/backup issue is also added in, and you put into perspective that Beverley's entire NBA career at this point is a relatively small sample size, we'll have to see how things play out, I would think, before a definitive claim is made on this matter.
I think Lowe and Simmons are being premature. But still clearly this is an area that needs improvement. In case anyone's wondering, this is the Kelvin Sampson interview (from before training camp) that Zach Lowe keeps referencing: "JCF: You know what you have in Dwight and Omer – two of the best defensive bigs on the planet. With that in mind, do you envision that much of your teaching, at least in the early going, will be focused on helping your perimeter players take a step forward or two on the defensive end? KS: Yeah, I think because of our pace on offense, a lot of times last year our guys used how hard we ran as an excuse to rest sometimes on defense. Then other times it just came down to diligence: getting beat on back doors when you’re watching the ball – we’ve got to eliminate those mistakes. Most guys are geared toward offense. If you look at our roster, other than Omer last year, almost everybody else on our roster was in the league because of their offense. Pat Beverley and Omer were the only two guys on our team who hung their hat at the defensive end. ‘O’ is a great position defender, one of the best, and god knows he saved us so many times last year. Now we add Dwight and he’ll obviously give us a huge lift. But James [Harden] has to be more conscientious. Chandler [Parsons], defense has to be more important to him. Those are the guys that we’re going to challenge this year. Our perimeter defense has to be better. There will be nights where we play Dwight and ‘O’ together. There will be games when our 4-man will be Terrence [Jones] or D-Mo – even though they’re still young, they have some notches on their belt now. Other guys will be in the mix as well, but I’m not sure yet who will make our final roster since we have so many moving parts. We think we’re going to be pretty good defensively up front. Where we’ve got to make our biggest improvement though, Jason, is at the one, two and three, especially the two and the three -- those were our biggest holes defensively. . . . . Last year we had a lot of guys who were one-way players – they were all offensive guys. We ran and ran and ran and ran, and with our pace we found that a lot of times our guys would rest up on defense. Championship teams don’t rest on defense. It has to be more important to Chandler Parsons this year to play both ends. James has got to be a two-way player. Jeremy Lin has got to be a better two-way player. Dwight will help some of that, but he was on the Lakers last year and they weren’t a great defensive team – just because you have Dwight doesn’t mean you’re going to be a good defensive team. For us, we’ll make that huge step up when our guys start taking defense more seriously and that’s our responsibility to help get them there."
