Optimist says it was first game, rust, capela will play better, anthony davis is damn good, mistrerotic is good and same for randle. I agree with clyde that lakers shouldnt have gotten rid of randle. Switching defense isnt going to work all the time with your guard guarding anthony davis. In a 7 game series we beat new orleans but its true they would not be an ideal opponent and will be there in playoffs. Congratulations on my knee jerk reaction that new orleans will be near top 3 in west this year. This just in..Anthony davis is good folks.. Pessimist says sky is falling and we cant beat teams that have any kind of inside. That we lost something but I fail to see us winning with ariza and mbah moute out there. We laid some eggs last year and this one feels like that where we dont try. Back to the old dont try rockets already?
The Rockets added worse players and lost their defensive mastermind. This shouldn’t surprise anybody.
You can’t take a bunch of new guys who have played together for like a month and expect to play the kind of team defense we will need to offset Ariza’s impact last year. It will probably take two or three months at least before we can get back to a decent defense. I wouldn’t overrate tonight’s game especially because New Orleans happens to be one team who is built to give a team like us troubles(two physical bigs). Ennis looked a little lost on defense but had some decent hustle and offensively he looked tentative. Think he will be okay with a lot more reps with the team. Melo looked like they dropped 70 on him alone - it was terrible to see NO hunting him out and abusing him any chance they got...but remember he is replacing Rhyno and people did the same to him...although it seemed like Melo played a lot more minutes than Anderson used to which worries me. It was bad all around for sure tonight but New Orleans was hitting a lot of shots I don’t normally expect them to make combined with some soft defense from Melo, some confusion about when and who to switch to, and a little less fluid Houston offense while guys were trying to figure out where to be(in particular Melo seemed to clog the lane a few times when he should have been spacing out the defense with his shooting). Add all that up and a 20 pt loss sounds about right. Hopefully Houston can simplify for the next game, catch a team that isn’t having a hot shooting night and actually start to create a rhythm offensively.
Good post. I want to add that Melo's bad defense not only sets the tone for our bad team defense but also sets the tone for the other team's offense. It really is a double whammy for us. His minutes need to be severely reduced and at no time should he be on at the same time as Harden is on the court. Any offense that knows what its doing will exploit us when both are on the floor at the same time.
But look at all the threes ariza missed game 7 Lol Yeah I said his loss was big but everyone acted like it was overblown Anyway only one game and I don't think we're that awful but it's gonna take a lot of effort from everyone in the organization to even sniff last season's defensive success
Man it was the stupidest thing seeing people say "we dont need him, look at all those threes he missed in game 7s" I was like what are you even talking about.
I’ll say this - Randle looks like a beast - I thought that before and after seeing him change his body type I especially see it now. Him and AD will give teams who like to play small real troubles. I still worry that they don’t have enough shooting on the roster to be a legit contender but they can scare some teams and maybe even pull off an upset in the playoffs - I just hope it’s not against us. Also - nice to see the media has given AD the MVP trophy already. We always knew it was a popularity contest but this is getting ridiculous.
He was really valuable to this team - just not $12 million+luxury tax valuable. Running back the same squad who wasn’t good enough to win a title but paying 30+mil extra for it seems like it would have been a bad idea - especially because we still gotta stock this team to be good for many years to come while we have Harden in his late prime.
What frustrates me was not the loss or how much pts we gave. It's the fact that we tried very hard in 3rd qtr, everybody showed up, shots fallin, forced coupld of TOs but still didn't win that qtr. That's a sign of a team with bad defense. And that's not gonna be easily/quickly fixed. Maybe our offense and Harden will start to look decent in next few games. But I'm hving serious concern abt the defense.
It's a loooong season folks. New players need time to gel. Don't get it twisted...major props to the Pelicans. They impressed me last year and made us sweat a couple of times...
That was two years ago. Last year we beat the Warriors in Oakland. As for that Lakers game coming up Saturday...you can bet the league will do everything to make sure Lebron gets that first home win in LA.
No, that was our 3 seed season. Ryno and EG's first season. 15-16 started with the 3 straight 20 point losses. Honestly...tonight looked exactly like that.
