Not even close. Couple years ago he was cut early after just a week training (both times) and last year he wasn't with team playing SL with Rockets. This is first time he played with most of the players of this year LTU NT. And it was a first competition as well. Out of all the guys in the team he was the "newest" (not sure if that's a term) one and barely knew other.
So you make judgements based on negative feedback from Clutchfans posters??... Geez badlee, I thought even you were better than that. You've been around here long enough to know that the nay-sayers outweigh the logical fans 15 to 1. I appreciate your honesty but this doesn't help your credibility at all looking at things that way... but I guess that's why you're labeled as "CBL Rookie". Does D-Mo look like the same player he was 3 months ago... well yes of course... Why wouldn't he??? What player changes that much in just a couple of weeks of offseason training before the tournament started....which is NOT designed for development at all. Its not the D-League where the sole purpose is to get young players minutes. The truth is D-Mo looked like D-Mo both with the good and the bad. However he did contribute to them getting a silver metal so I take that as a huge positive from where he was a year ago at this time. Whoever is going to have an opinion of him now is going to think that he's a young player with talent that can be fulfilled in the future, or they are incredibly short sited fans who are ready to throw away a high reward gamble young player because of one rookie season where they saw all they thought they needed to see to judge his career. Having an opinion of him or any other player is fine... but putting some realistic thought and analysis behind an opinion would be nice for a change.
Of course you missed this part: But i get it. You want to start a debate. It's cool. Let me ask you a question. Do you think the Rockets, as built, can beat the Lithuainian team? The same Lithuanian team that D-Mo isn't starting on? The same Lithuainian team that knows him better than the Rockets?
Actually I'm really not. That's the point. You can't really judge D-Mo based on this Summer's Eurobasket tournament. Who he is with the Lithuanian national team this Summer, and the Rockets this Winter/Spring are completely different. You can't formulate an opinion on a player's NBA career one way or another based on a 3 week long tournament like this. Actually, I would think that the Rockets know him better than the Lithuanian national team. This particular coach hasn't coached the national team in several years, and D-Mo has never made the team before a weeks ago. He's been scouted for years, and been with the Rockets for a year now almost every day of the week under their supervision. As for "who would win" -Of course its a completely different game over there, but I'd assume that after some time, the Rockets would be able to adjust their game to eventually be a top team in Europe. Much like this years French national team did(who were comprised of many NBA players), the Rockets might get off to a slow start, and eventually their talent level would bring them up to the top. On certain night, yes, I do think the Lithuanian national team could be the Rockets, but I would have to go with the Rockets to win a 7 game series given the talent they have to score against elite defenses vs. how difficult it is for the Lithuanian national team to score when the defense is really good. As for D-Mo starting with Houston vs. coming off the bench for Lithuania...Would one really call D-Mo a starter for the Rockets right now? Not in my opinion. He's going to have a shot at getting PT, but he's far from being penciled in for guaranteed minutes. The only reason why D-Mo would be considered as a possible starter on this team is because there is no clear cut proven veteran at the PF position that McHale has to go with instead of having to take a gamble on a young 2nd year player like D-Mo or Jones. Plus his skillset playing alongside a Dwight or Asik might lend him to be a better fit with Houston next year. Time will tell whether or not his weaknesses can be hidden and his strengths at this point can be productive in their current lineups. For Lithuania, he doesn't start typically, but there have been matchups that have dictated him getting minutes over Kleiza in certain situations, but the point is Kleiza has been playing in that system on that team for years now. Its no surprise that these old school Euroleague coaches would go with a player they know well and trust over someone so new to the team and with such little experience. You think McHale plays favorites..... yeah. Still, the fact that the Lithuanian coach would sometimes start D-Mo in the 3rd quarter or go with him in crunch time is telling that on a team like Lithuania, its a good sign that a Rockets rookie/sophomore would even earn PT at all in the tournament at this point in his career.
As usual you are spewing out garbage misinformed posts. Par for the course. You might as well label Jonas a bust too since he made as much of an impact in this tourney as Donatas. Guess what? Jonas is considered one of the best prospects in the NBA. D-Mo will have a chance to show his stuff this preseason and my guess is he will give Jones a run for his money
There's really no point in analyzing these games deeply for DMo(or any other Rocket). It's a different setting with different teammates and different rules. I wouldn't put much stock into it either way, although it would've been nice to see DMo play well. That said, I do think DMo playing with the national team as opposed to training with the Rockets may be a negative at this stage of his development. This is what I'm afraid of, because he has a lot of areas he needs to develop before he can be a solid rotation player.
Sigh. It just goes to show that D-Mo does not have enough minutes last season nor in Euroleague for a fan to judge where he is at. I have gathered the statistical data from the last NBA season and the EuroLeague and the margin of error is just to high due to the sample size. It is time to wait for next season. Wild speculation is counter productive.
All is moot with one good season. PF situation is up for grabs since Scola left. Dmo's size advantage and some of his hook shots are the only things that interest me in that player
I think most of what you said is accurate. For DMo, the biggest hurdles for him are just strength, defensive awareness, and the increasing trend to using guys like Lebron/Melo/Barnes as PFs. Strength appears fixable. Once he has that, he should be a dominant low post threat in the NBA if the defensive awareness and the Wing PFs don't do him in.
I agree that playing the style of basketball they play in Lithuania could end up being a net negative for DMo, the zone schemes that they use IMO is part of the reason he has the deficiencies as a player that he has. The zone defense has him bouncing around from player to player never sticking to just one man which in the NBA led to him being out of position all the time and the offensive scheme never plays to his strengths. Lithuania should be posting up with their big men almost every time down the court between Motiejunas and Valanciunas, yet they barely played in the last game against France (IMO part of the reason why they got destroyed). I think the Rockets' coaches will have their hands full trying to undo the damage cased by DMo playing in Lithuania in the preseason. Hopefully DMo bounces back and acclimates to the NBA game before this season is over.
Maybe we should then take it as a positive that D-Mo's defense was so bad in the Eurobasket tourney. Maybe its because the Rockets staff have engrained their defensive approach so much that going back to a zone just didn't fit right for D-Mo. That's probably an over-optimistic way of looking at it, but I saw some positives last season when he was with the Rockets that led me to believe that he won't be as bad as he is on defense his entire career. He did well in one-on-one scenarios like the game against Golden State where he held his own against one of the better low post scorers in the league in David Lee. You'd have to think that a big part of training camp will be the defensive end of the court. If they are keeping their same offense, it shouldn't take much to get that back up and running (literally). Having a full training camp will be huge for D-Mo and the other youngsters on the team. Playing the PF spot exclusively, he should know exactly where he's supposed to be and what he's supposed to do on the offensive end to get PT already. Pretty simple job on that end.... spread the floor, and hit open 3's. The coaches should really be putting a lot of time and energy into defense this year I'd assume.
Kleiza making the all-tournament team is yet another argument against position-restrictions with all-anything teams. Dude wasn't even Lithuania's best player. Him making the all-tournament team is beyond stupid. Statistically speaking there's probably not much to take away from this tournament, but since we do have some "advanced" data (courtesy Simon Jatsch [@sJacas]), here are some stats on LTU's bigs and for context, B-R comparisons between the 3 NBA players (I used '11-12 #'s for Kleiza, since he was injured last year and didn't play a whole lot). You'd have to go through all the NBA players and somehow adjust/filter for comparable role to get a somewhat representative picture of how those numbers correlate, though it would seem that the deviation isn't huge with any of these. Blk% generally doesn't necessarily give you an idea of how good somebody is at protecting the basket, however, since I've watched all of LTU's games, I can confirm that, as the numbers would indicate, D-Mo is still an absolute non-factor protecting the rim. His rebounding still is below average according to both the numbers and the (my) eye test as well. Offensively, D-Mo's role with the Rockets obviously will be slightly different, in that he'll play even more off the ball, so I wouldn't put too much into the PPP & eFG numbers, however the numbers would suggest that D-Mo is still below average as far as scoring-efficiency for a role-player goes, which also lines up with the eye test. Both his outside and free-throw shooting is inconsistent. He still goes away from contact in the post and has trouble establishing position against bigger guys. For the most part he still tries to out-finesse guys, rather than going up strong. This more or less may go back to what Morey was saying when he mentioned last year that one of the next steps for D-Mo will be simplifying his post game and settling on one or two go-to moves rather than going to all these different shots from all over. Now before jtr ( ) or someone else chimes in and tells me that the Rockets don't need D-Mo to be a rim-protector, nor a beast on the boards and that the Eurobasket stats sample size isn't big enough to look at shooting% and scoring-efficiency, that's fine, I get all of that, and D-Mo may be able to become (more) consistent with his shot as the season goes on. D-Mo's defense, however, is still rather bad and I don't see that changing anytime soon. I hope D-Mo proves me wrong and I've said before that D-Mo has the potential to be above average to good, even, in certain areas on D, however there simply are no signs of D-Mo making whole a lot of, if any, progress on D and, to me, he's still closer to awful (Mirza Teletovic) than "below average" (Carl Landry). LTU played man-to-man D for most of the tourney and the few times I did see D-Mo play zone, he, for once, actually didn't stick out negatively.
Bull**** in last Euroleague season - 30min / 12,5pt/ 7,9 rb/ (http://www.euroleague.net/competition/players/showplayer?pcode=LCZ&seasoncode=E2011) and Euroleage record 21 rebound. DeMo in interview said that he not had minutes in first half because- he rookie; in end- Rockets goes for PO position. That is just simple as that in other team he get more minutes just because, not all coach(McHale) hate young players.
I guess we just watched different games, the times I saw them play, they had DMo playing a zone where he was bouncing around guarding everyone from centers to point guards. When he's actually guarding a PF one on one he does alright, his main weakness on defense is that he bounces around too much trying to help or double when he shouldn't and "his" guy ends up open or he gets out of position. Hopefully the Rockets can calm him down and teach him proper defense because he's quick and long enough to be a good defender if he can learn proper technique.
Saw Casspi shooting around at the TC practice court this evening so I guess it was a quick turnaround from Euros back to Houston to get ready for camp.
Doubling on pick & rolls (before the bonus, to disrupt the flow of the opposing offense) and switching on pick & rolls (in the bonus, to annulate the effects of a pick and avoid a foul) are plausible tactics used by almost every European coach today. Lithuania very rarely played zone defense. Even when they were getting destroyed by France, they used it maybe for a couple minutes, all while Donatas was on the bench. The PF spot is the only one where there wasn't a clear cut best player. Lithuania had to have at least one guy in the all tournament team and Kleiza was their best player in the two most important games, against Croatia and France (also, don't forget that 20-10 game against BiH). It wasn't a great choice, but still fine by me. <iframe width="640" height="480" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/WsJ-Tfn6w1I" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
