Pacers and OKC are using 10-11 man rotation in playoffs

I think the primary issue is
what I consider the AAU fallacy

Coaches want WINS . .. .not developing players

Thibs and Ime prioritize EVERY GAME
when they should be developing some players during the season
so that in the playoffs they could get some run

instead they don't develope them and when they are not good say "See I told you he wasnt good"

Rocket River

 

This doesn’t make sense to be honest. If Amen is the best two way or overall player, what does that have to do with how you treat your offense? Are you saying that Amen showed himself to be the best offensive player? Our coach and 29 other coaches don’t agree with that. You’re talking about a guy guarded by less than 1 mediocre defender putting up 15.7 points on 12 shots. Be honest, what happens when you slap a great defender and a double team on him? Just be honest. Don’t think about debating. What’s the likely fair outcome?

You have to start Amen ok let’s start there. But then you have to fix the lineup to suit your best player like every coach in the world does. You can’t now ignore that Amen can’t shoot and is highly passive if the paint is packed. You can’t ignore that Brooks and Amen overlap defensively and that Jabari is better at rebounding than Brooks and is 6-11 with a 7 foot wingspan and is respected at the 3PT line every bit as much as Brooks.

A players impact is determined by on and off ball defense and on and off ball offense. Amen is good at 3 of those 4 things (on ball defense, off ball defense, on ball offense). What on earth are we doing turning him into a guy who has to get his points off ball? We literally maximized the worst part of his game. That’s why when we replaced Jabari with Amen in the starting lineup, the starting lineup got way way way worse. It achieved nothing for us and we were left having to climb out of holes all the time.

Not a single action Udoka took indicated that he sees Amen as the lead guy on offense. Even if he did, in that case he screwed up starting him with Sengun. Those two don’t fit. They can’t PnR. They can’t make jumpers when the other is doubled. If we’re all in on Amen, then Sengun should go to the bench.

Let’s be honest, no one believed we should do that including Udoka. The team was built around Sengun and Amen got treated like a Kirilenko-type role player for Sengun’s offense. Sengun’s PnR partner got 40+ minutes per game. The pace only suited Sengun - hiding him defensively and letting him do slow PnR/Postup in the half court. Amen Thompson was turned into a wing defender who scores off dirty work and cuts to the basket. Transition was non-existent if Amen couldn’t beat all 5 opponents by himself. You can’t tell me that Udoka treated him like the franchise player.

No matter how you look at it, Udoka screwed up a good thing. At least off the bench he could have been allowed to play his game, attacking defenders on their heels, getting into the heart of the defense.

If we come back with 2 non-shooters who are not elite scorers and 3 above average shooters, we’ll struggle to be top 5 in the West and Ime’s ass will be in the hot seat. And he’ll deserve it too. This is childish basketball we’re wasting time with. The world has moved on and Ime has to grow up from these things.

 

I saw a lot of people talking about the Pacers depth but it's pretty perfunctory

Thomas Bryant played 4 min, 0-0-0 with 2 PFs for example

Matthurin played 12 min and was 0 points , 1 tos -12

Bradley played 8 min, scored 1 point.

Basically the Pacers went back down to 8 in the second half which I guess is more than Knicks who only play 7.5 players

 

Indiana is deeper and in general has players with more experience. It should be obvious that our stay-ready group is poor. If you played a round robin tournament with the back-end benches around the league, I'm not sure we win a game.

They aren't good for three reasons: limited skill, limited experience, and limited conditioning. Holiday, McVeigh, Roddy, and Jeenathan may have a lot of desire, but they're big negatives on D.

I don't understand why Cam and Reed were chained to the bench. Ime has his trusted favorites, but there's more going on here behind the scenes.

Cam has shown these incredible flashes of promise, but he did not come ready to play last season. From the opening tip of the summer league, his shot was off. He was moody, uncommitted on D, and if we talked with insiders, we'd see that he wasn't pulling his end of the rope. He'll turn twenty-one in July. Maybe this offseason will be different.

As for Sheppard's redshirt year, I don't understand it at all. Since T.J. McConnell (6'1 190) logs consistent minutes for Indiana, that has to prove players of Reed's size can find their way into a winning rotation. I understand that Reed needs to be stronger with the ball and less turnover-prone, but I'm unsure how he can improve in these areas without playing 30 games for RGV.

Sitting on the bench, traveling with the team, and watching games is no way to improve. It's almost like they were protecting his trade value, fearing that if he got on the court, even the RGV court, he'd lose value.

 

It's important that you start your best players. This allows you to give them more minutes overall. Amen and Sengun are clearly our top 2 players which is why they had to start.

Amen is obviously not our best offensive player but he's a better overall player than Jabari. It's not really close. That's why it's advantageous for us to start him. I don't think Amen would have done well as the primary ball handler against double teams. I'm not sure what that has to do with anything. I do think Amen will someday be able to manage more of the offensive load in the future. I think he's smarter than Jalen and maps the game out better overall. The same intelligence that helps make him so great defensively will eventually show up on offense. Regardless, I'd like to upgrade the Jalen spot and utilize Alpi and Amen as secondary creators. Amen doesn't have to be our best offensive player to be our best overall player.

The fit with Amen and Sengun in the halfcourt offense may not be great. They're going to have to make it work eventually though because those are our two franchise players.

Ime's mistake wasn't playing them together. It would be idiotic to only play each of them 24 minutes so that they never have to play together.

Ime's playoff mistakes were in playing Adams over Jabari and in not giving Cam a few minutes when Jalen was struggling.

You speak about Ime as if our playoff failures were mostly his fault. I think he did a pretty good job in leading a very young, very inexperienced team against a veteran team with a lot of championship experience. We would have won the series had the officiating been a little more balanced or if Jalen had been a little more competent.

Amen and Alpi are definitely the future of this franchise. All moves need to keep this in mind. We literally finished 2nd in the West this season with those two as our two best players. Improving the rest of the roster is the right choice.

 

Yeah but those few minutes were enough to give the players who are heavy in the rotation some much needed rest, which pays off at the end of the game

 

a lot of teams shorten their rotation in the playoffs because they have fake depth or regular season depth…essentially they have guys u don’t want on the floor or can’t afford to have on the court during a playoff series

I keep seeing criticism of Ime being stuff like “Ime's playoff mistakes were in playing Adams over Jabari”

Y’all do know Steven Adams had a +14.1 net rating in that series right? He was 1 of our most impactful players. Jabari should’ve gotten more minutes based off how well he was shooting, but we absolutely needed Adams out there.

FVV isn’t that good, but the drop-off between him and anyone else running point is so massive that Ime feels compelled to trot him out there all game. We had a -17.1 net rating in the 56 minutes Fred was off the court. Our other options were Aaron Holiday who 99% of posters on here hated the entire regular season and a rookie Reed Sheppard.

perhaps Ime should’ve given Cam a look since Jalen was so trash…Ime doesn’t trust his lack of BBIQ or like his mindless gunning, but perhaps he could’ve gotten hot and helped the team

OKC is 1 of the deepest teams in the league

love what Indiana is doing, but their path has been the injured Bucks, injured Cavs, and a good but not great Knicks…GS is better than all those teams and would be playing game 3 against OKC right now if Steph didn’t get injured

 

No it’s not important to start who you think might be your best players. You know what’s the most important thing? That you score more points than the other team. You know how you do that? You play your best 5-man unit. If your alleged two best players are losing a lot when they start together, then it’s imperative you don’t start those two guys together unless you’re prioritizing development over winning - in which case stop complaining about results.

Can I be honest? I think you’re sugarcoating things. Having 2 non-shooters on the floor dominating the ball is a disaster. None of them being a big scorer is a bigger disaster. The lineup with our two best players sucked - by score, not my opinion. Mathematically. The lineup where we separated them was better.

You didn’t start watching basketball yesterday. You saw us pair Westbrook with Harden and he was useless to Harden. When Dwight Howard wanted to post up more than being a vertical threat, he was useless for us. When we paired a declining two way jump shooter with harden, we took Durant’s warriors to 7 games.

If we rebuilt for 4-5 years so that we end up with 2 poor shooters on the floor dominating the ball in the year 2025, we f*cked up real bad. If you’re saying they need 2 years and they can learn to shoot, fine but then you are just admitting this is currently not functional.

This is why I hope we get Giannis this summer. We need a voice on the roster who can tell the coach straight to his face that he needs shooters. If we have a non-shooter on the floor better be someone who can put up 30 points and 5+ assists.

I really can’t believe you think two guys who can score in the lower 20’s and have no 3PT shot is what we should build around. I’m sorry to tell you but Ime has not stopped trying to acquire C’s since the day he got here. If Amen is his guy - and I believe he is - trust me Sengun is neither the PF nor the C that suits Amen until one of them learns to shoot. The offense was built for Sengun and he ended up 21 points on 19 shots with single coverage - something Julius Randle dramatically eclipsed one round later guarded by the same guy.

If this team is going to be built around Amen, then he’ll have the ball and he will run with 4 players who can drain 3’s. The team is now acutely aware the Sengun and Amen don’t perform well together as starters.

What I hope is that they actually just take Sengun out of the paint which the obvious answer if Udoka can get over his obsession with players that remind him of the 90’s.

 

Teams with short rotations don't win championships. You have to be able to develop players in your culture.

 

If your two best players are starting with Jalen Green and those were not winning minutes, is it possible that Jalen Green might have something to do with those failures?

As you said, the point is to score more points than your opponent. Amen is really good at stopping the opponent from scoring which is why he should start.

Of course we want to develop our two best players. They signaled that winning in this year's playoffs wasn't the number one priority when they didn't make a significant trade at the deadline to improve shot creation and shot-making.

That said, we would have won the series had Jalen been only a little better.

I understand that Ime is not a good offensive coach and that Amen and Alpi are not an ideal pairing currently in the half-court offense.

My position is I believe they are so good at the other facets of the game that it is still worth starting them together.

I think we can win a championship with those two starting together with some upgrades around them. I am also counting on Alpi improving his offensive efficiency with time and Amen improving his shooting. I think these are reasonable expectations for two 22-year old players who have improved significantly during their time as Rockets.

I hate the idea of trading for Giannis as he is definitively not a shooter and has almost no chance of ever becoming a competent shooter. I also don't want to give up all that we would have to give up to get him.

Ultimately, the problem is not Amen, Alpi or Ime. Our greatest problems are inexperience and Jalen Green.

 

It seems most people are on the same page here: Alpi and Amen will only work if at least one of them develops a better shot. As far as what we should have done in the playoffs, i think there was no way this roster was going to win the championship, regardless of coaching decisions. Yeah I would have loved more shooting, but I don't think Cam or Reed were ready. I would have loved more Jabari, but I have to admit Curry was cooking him (understandable) but also every time he tried to dribble it was frankly embarrassing. Yeah I would have loved to bench Green, but he was drawing a lot of defensive attention that would have gone to our other players without him. The roster just wasn't ready.

 

Ime is just another iteration of JVG and Thibedeau. No coach that concentrates on one side of the ball will win a championship in this era of the NBA. If Ime does not improve his ability as an offensive coach this should be his last year.

 

The problem is not that Amen started. It is that he started over Jabari instead of FVV.

 

Then you'd have no one to handle the ball. Amen should have been starting over Brooks. Would it harm spacing? A bit, but adding Jabari would balance that out.

 

This tells me next season if we dont make a trade we better see alot of cam Whitmore and Reed Shephard and the new drafted rookie.

 

What? It's allowed to play more than 8 players?
Thibbs and Ime faint

 

There’s literally nothing you back that up because Amen and Sengun underperformed even when Jalen was hitting his shots. On the other hand, we were 2nd seed without Amen starting even. You can have whatever opinion you want, but right now all the data says the starting lineup with Amen and Sengun was a disaster and your opinion is it’s because Jalen shot 0.5% below league average from 3. It’s an emotional and absurd statement.

Not an ideal pairing is a massive understatement. 2 non-shooters on the floor is a horrific pairing that brings each other down. That’s why no one does it.

 

The Rockets won every game they played a 9th player before garbage time and lost every game they only played 8 before garbage time.

 

It’s not all about the contributions from those players though, it’s more about the rest for your main guys. Think about running for 20 minutes straight compared to running for 9 minutes, taking a 2 minute rest, then running for another 9 minutes. Really short breaks make a huge difference. Even if you throw these bench guys out for 4 minutes and they have 0 points on 0 shots it still helps with fatigue for your starters, and impacts the way they play to close out the game.

 

Nope..... You are just being unreasonable plain and simple.

Both Pacers and OKC have been competing for more seasons and just have better rosters. They are not in the same place as the Rockets no matter how much you try and elevate our roster to make your point.