Yeah, there is an interesting dynamic about not trusting someone on offense when you are a negative defender - especially when the person you don't trust on offense is a plus defender who doesn't trust you on defense. There is likely a reason Ariza shows his frustration when dealing with James even though he's seemingly reserved most of the other time...
You do realize it was harden that came back in and saved the day when we got down by 5 in the fourth right?
Doubt it is anything. Look, anyone that has played sports know you disagree sometimes with teammates in the middle of the argument. If they had lost then maybe. Since they did win though I doubt Ariza even remembers the play tomorrow. Look. Jordan used to fight teammates...
btw, the defense is the whole team's issue, not just harden's. even ariza and bev, who are supposed to be good defenders, are not remotely doing satisfactory job on D. and it seems like brewer is even a bigger problem than harden is when it comes to defense. seriously, I have no idea why he keep getting 20+ minutes of playing time on the court. he genuinely looks like one of the worst players in the NBA, and this is not an exaggeration by any means.
Yes. Defense is always a team issue. Always. Bad defenders can look good on a well coached defensive team. See those Ben Wallace Pistons team and Richard Hamilton. See Curry. I still think he's an average at best defender but it really doesn't matter when the team as a whole know hows to rotate and play on string together. I think the team defense suffers so much because we have way too many guys that just gamble. Brew gambles on nearly every play and when the gamble doesn't pay off it leaves everyone scrambling. Beverly has not been that bad recently with his gambling but he overdoes it too.
No it hasn't. We need to realize that we beat the 76ers by just two points. Something is extremely wrong with this. We aren't going to beat the better teams when we play like this and it is clear. Bickerstaff needs to either start adding some better plays and ball movement with slashing or it's time to bring in Thibs. Harden ISO's will only get us so far and it has been proven time after time. We were just really lucky it was the 76ers tonight.
yeah, definitely. curry is still sub-par 1-1 defender, but he looks average due to GS's stellar help defense.
Hakeem endured numerous average seasons until management finally surrounded him with the right pieces. He was always the go-to player during the games but his teammates were able to play off him by hitting open jumpers when he kickd the ball out. harden has no one at this point that can elevate the team. Howard is a shell of the guy he once was in Orlando. He's a piss poor FT shooter and he's never had a strong perimeter or post-up game. He once made of living off of dunks and defense but those days are gone... Long gone. None of the other guys surrounding Harden can shoot the damn ball with any consistency. If management one day realizes they need to surround Harden with high % shooters then maybe people will stop blaming him for selfishly scoring so many points to win a game.
Damn if he do and Damn if don't. That's how it works around here in the Garm. If we would have lost this game because Harden's Iso ball these same people that are saying he was right for going Iso, would be blasting him. In the 1st 3 quarters we seen some pretty good ball movement but in the 4th the ball movement was nonexistent . We have to do what got us the lead plain and simple. That way Harden doesn't have to go Iso crazy. Now if Harden doesn't go Iso crazy and we would have lost. Well these same people would have blasted him for not taking over the game. Make up your minds people. hahahaha
This...some people here only look at his 50 points, but they don't count in how many points we concede to opponents because of Harden's defense and turnovers. There's a reason why we we're this dysfunctional as a team and nearly lost to the worst team of all time, and it surely involves Harden.
Harden's plus-minus in this game : + 13 I'm pretty sure scoring 50 points with 50% shooting coupled with 8 assists is more than enough to cover up for 9 turnovers, buddy. On the other hand, Westbrook today committed 11 turnovers with only 14 points, but his team still handily blew away the Pistons. sometimes it doesn't matter how good or bad a superstar plays, basketball is a team sport and thus the game result does not necessarily correlate with a superstar's performance.
+/- is the most worthless stat of all. And don't reduce it to turnovers, read my post again. He's killing the chemistry, doesn't tust his team and freezes guys out, his defense is abysmal, he's making many bad decisions, completely changes our defense and offense and team chemistry.
it's more useful than your delusional subjective opinion. and yeah, he should totally trust his teammates, esp when they are all shooting career low percentages from the field. totally makes sense, lol
The team probably practiced ball movement for the endgame. Harden chose to go away from it, his call. However Ariza didn't sulk and still played defense and got the ball on that all-important jumpball.
I would like to see a video of this, but anyway things like that happen very often in many teams in the league. Now everything is put under the microscope because of our issues but most of the times it doesn't mean anything much.
Our halfcourt defence so far has been average. (that's good). It's the TRANSITION that sucks. It sucks so much that it leads to losses pretty much. And guess who has the responsibillity for transition defence? It's not the center and it's not the bigs. It's the wings.
No, it's completely worthless. And that "delusional" opinion is mirrored by nearly every NBA expert this season, and his own teammates. And maybe look at the games in-depth and you'll absolutely see that he alone costs us a ton of points by completely murdering our defensive rotations and letting his assignments drive past him when the defense hasn't settled yet and can't help, therefore blaming the rest of the team in those situations is completely delusional.
