You know who wore googles in his playing days?.......Shawn Marion. Who else? A’Mare. They had to put so much of their body into it that it put their faces at armpit level. They swung elbows a lot back then. Got poked in the eyes and popped in the face often. Hakeem found that out. But Hakeem was tough. He could endure the beatings. Keep his face out of it for the most part. I’m just saying D’Antoni has been disappointing to me. People here have heard me say it for two years now. Champion of the regular season; but fizzle out bust of the post season. Suns are the example to me. 1st in everything in the regular season and 5hen puff. Out with a whimper. Denver took advantage of the mile high altitude. Ran teams off the floor with Fat Lever, Alex English, Calvin Nat in the regular season......in the playoffs teams dropped back more defenders after a shot and took away all those fast break points. Games in the playoffs became half court sets. Back then they could mug you. Take a lead pipe on to the court. Just kidding. But true that the Small-Ball of Mike D’Antoni and Run DMC and Nuggets run had to face bruiser punish them in the half court. So yes it was a gimmick back then. I have seen Barkley and Shaq tell me that “No jump shot shooting team can win a championship.” That was their take while watching the Warriors win in 14-15. I would argue that the Heat was the first team I witnessed the was small-ball that had to hit jump shots to win. The zone defense was enacted I believe around 2002. Something like that. Well in 2010 the Mavs played a zone bs the “big 3” of Bosh/LeBron/Wade and won. Guys like Shawn Marion, Jason Kidd, JET, Barea could play a zone to pack the paint and all they had to worry about was Mike Miller. Well the Heat learned from that......brought in guys like Norris Cole, Chalmers, Ray Allen, Battier to open up lanes for Wade and LeBron. The rest is history. I considered it Small-Ball was having Haslem as your center followed with Bosh. Bosh is not small height wise, but weight-wise.......a tooth pick. Rule changes such as zone defense and no hand checks have opened things up in my opinion. Now they combine the D’Antoni Suns with the Miami Heat “Big 3”. Warriors built a juggernaut that won using these concepts. Before someone says it.......yes I know the Rockets do a lot of iso and PnR’s. Warriors run a lot of Triangle slash Princeton Offense. Just as a basis in which we have branched off of, please. Still the D’Antoni 7 seconds or less. What I have fault with D’Antoni is: uses too many smallish guards while running his version of Small-Ball. I’m fine if you have a combo PG/SG Harden with two point guards. Say Rivers and Westbrook. That means Eric Gordon is over-kill. Again Harden combo guards means about one more SG. Means Eric Gordon again is over-kill. So 2 PG’s and 2 SG’s the rest SF’s and combo PF/C’s. D’Antoni shows to much love for the Guards. Like last year opting for Shumpert over House. 6’5” guards playing SF are not going to cut it against 6’8” LeBron and his 268 pounds. You need true SF’s. 6’6” to 6’9”. Like Snell is skinny; but he is like 6’9”. 40% 3-pt shooter with length. You can have a 6’1” Westbrook; but his defense is spotty. You can’t have an Eric Gordon with a notorious high DEFRtg with a Harden. Know for mainly interior defense. With Rivers included. The 4 are too light in the pants or just not that good at defense. D’Antoni always just says play harder. More hustle. You can’t ask 6’4 guys to guard 6’8” guys all over the place. It’s unrealistic. Especially when your center is 6’5” Tucker. I believe D’Antoni fell in love with that OKC team. All those guards. If Westbrook had been healthy we would have knocked them out in 5 games. Please. That guard centric team would have been out earlier. Same with us vs the Lakers. We became guard centric. Kuzma, LeBron, Markieff had a field day. AD controlled the boards because Tucker needed the help of SF’s. And Rondo snuck in and did his stuff (focus was on the others). The other main fault is his short player rotations. He won’t change. No confidence no playing time. I am not one of these, coaches need to be cheerleaders. Cheerleaders need to be cheerleaders. No Knute Rockne speeches every 5 minutes needed. Players are pros......they need to get motivated themselves. If millions of dollars and pride in your work doesn’t do it.....then you need to find another line of work. But, I do expect coaches to coach, instruct, educate players on how to get better. Like bartenders, you have to be part psychologist too. John Lucius can’t be expected to be the only player developer. Rumor is John Lucas is being considered for head coaching jobs as well. Teach the Faried or DeMarre Carroll what’s needed to succeed with this team. I’m not sold that they were at fault. Because House was kicked to the curb too easily and a pattern seems to have developed. So in retrospect, D’Antoni doesn’t expand his roster during the season or playoffs. Runs the players who are working overtime because they are fighting guys bigger than themselves. Most of them need their minutes cut from 40 to 32 minutes. Play more Clemons vs bad teams. Or Hartenstein. C’mon man. And get SF’s predominantly......less point guards and shooting guards. Roll Eric Gordon into a couple of SF’s......combo 3-4 positions. Guards didn’t create much for us anyway when a Harden passed out of double teams at half court. Why have them then? They were afraid of going to the hoop and getting rejected? SF’s are shooting just as well as SG’s and PG’s nowadays. Play position-less defense. Give me more SF’s. That’s what all these teams are winning with. Except maybe Jokic/Denver.....but let’s see who advances Sorry, I said I would give you the last word. Then came “War and Peace” Take it away, it’s all yours.
please explain how he was out coached..... all vogel did was go small, after lebron complained there was no spacing. with the advantage lebron and AD already had our only chance was if their role players did not make their open shots.... well, they did. we could not guard them. I am not sure what adjustment you think could have been made on a team that was simply better than us. Also remember without house we lost a key rotation piece who played 30 mins a game. that limits what he can do with lineups even more. its ok to admit the lakers are just a better team. they were #1 for a reason.
Man if you can figure out Harden being double teamed than something is wrong. And it happend for 3 straight games. But I feel bad because Mike was stuck with Russ which made those doubles possible.
its not about running out of gas. the spurs were a bad matchup for them and its as simple as that. the spurs used to play a slow half court game but were more than capable of playing uptempo with parker and manu and because of tims presence defensively they could simply beat them at their own game when necessary. nash and amare were not good defense and the spurs were a team that can could exploit their weakness more than most other teams. i dont believe the rockets run out of gas either, I think we are not as talented as other contenders when it comes down to it. as long as the owner is not willing to go deep into the tax to get the necessary talent we will not get a title.
what do you mean figure it out ? you keep referring to the offense. WE COULD NOT GUARD THEM. our offense would have been fine if we had a full roster and could get stops. we hardly got any fastbreak points because we could not get any stops once they went small.
Their defense was fueled by their transition game of off our misses and turnovers. Our spacing was killed because Westbrook sucks. Our half court defense was perfectly adequate. It was the transition defense and offense that was bad. Russ was complete garbage all playoffs and the numbers bare that out. I wish we could trade him. If you are an NBA team than you should be able to beat the double off of Harden, an easy fix to that would be actually getting 4 shooters on the court but we coulndt do that because we had to play Russ.
The bartender analogy really helps put my thoughts on House into a framework that makes sense. Both in terms of why it should not have happened, and moving forward. He is a rare ray of light moving forward in terms of a young guy that could potentially improve. But I know if my coworker ****ed over the team like that, I’d see red. Hopefully our next coach can be a miracle worker and rebuild the relationship. I assume he’ll get traded though.
you are hell bent on blaming westbrook for everything. you still fail to grasp the fact they are more talented. they were going to beat us with or without westbrook BECAUSE WE CANNOT GUARD THEM. when they did miss they got offensive rebounds. all year the metrics said the lakers were a much better team, a completely different team when AD played the 5, they just didnt use more often because he doesnt like to. they played faster, rotated quicker, had more spacing, made more shots. but hey if blaming WB makes you feel better then by all means hold onto that anger. i hope it works out for you. we could have had klay thompson instead of WB and still lost if all we could surrond them with are PJ, roco, ego and austin rivers.
We guarded them with who we had on the Roster, Gordon is our 3rd best player we had to start him. Then once House got removed from the playoffs the rotation went to hell completely. Maclemore should have played more and that's it. We had what we had. Mike doesnt construct the roster Morey did. And we had to go small because Westbrook is trash with a center.....but he's also just bad in general. Those rotations got ruined by House being an idiot. Faired is playing in China and Demarre wasnt very good to be fair. We had no one left to play on our roster. Like Mike should have opened up the rotation no doubt. But we really had nothing left by the end of it. And if you look other playoff series you are seeing a lot of coaches ride their starters. Though Mike has poor minutes management during the season. Like I get you are mad at him, and he definitely he has his faults be had very VERY little to work with this year. Westbrook is straight up awful and i cannot stress that enough.
Lakers half court offense wasnt that good, you are not getting that they werent that good there and they were getting fueled by their defense which caused them to get into transition. All of the Harden only lineups were positives, Harden and Westbrook lineups were bad(you can guess why) and the Westbrook only lineups were absolutely garbage. He cant shoot, pass or play defense. The Lakers were able to double James because Westbrook was on the floor. That's what allowed stuff like that to happen. If we had Klay Thompson we would probably beat them. If we had Lillard or Chris Paul we would have won, yea I believe that. Also...guy's were gassed from playing small ball so much, that is for sure. You can keep apologizing for him but the fact is, he isnt the second best player on a championship team. He had like a 47% TS for the playoffs and he was laughably the second worst in net rating on our team. Keep believing that he wasn't a problem the Lakers keyed in on.
again with the non-sense. why do you keep saying he is double because of westbrook ? he is doubled because of his ability not just score but facilitate. he is one of best players in history. he is doubled because whoever he passes the ball to cannot do what he does so they want the ball out of his hands. was he not still doubled with westbrook on the bench ? he sure was. dame lillard had more shooting around him than we did and the lakers still doubled his ass at half court and made him give up the ball. he could barely even get any shot attempts and they destroyed the blazers even though they had the top offense in the bubble. there is literally nothing we could have done with this roster to beat them once they went small. why do you keep ignoring the lack of talent throughout the roster instead just key in on westbrook and dantoni ? you cant see the forest for the trees.
Yea, but those lineups with Westbrook on the Bench were actually good lineups. Our best lineups. That's the difference. We need an actual super star player who isnt a total liability on the court. Lol also did you see who the Blazers were kicking it out too...Melo. They were even playing two bigs and looked how well that worked out for them.. And the Blazers had one of the worst defenses all year. Of course that was easy for the Lakers. And despite being doubled Harden still put up an amazing, efficient stat line. He was hampered by doubles all series and received no help from his second super star who is supposedly an MVP. Yet I gave you the numbers about how bad he was. Dude coulndt even get to below average, thats how bad he was.That's the difference between him and Lillard, Harden can still make it work. Because statistically a guy who is supposed to be our second best player was actually our second worst player. He gave Harden no help whatsoever. He was terrible offensively and terrible defensively. The Lakers double strategy worked because of Westbrook.
man you seriously dont get it. in your mind harden and some role players than can shoot are going to beat a top two player of all time on a number 1 seed. do you realize how you sound ? this ROSTER is not good enough. if you dont get that i dont know what to tell you. youre going to be miserable for a long time.
No, I think Harden, Chris Paul and some role players would have had a shot at beating that team. If we didnt trade for Westbrook we could have actually used assets to get small ball big and Covington.
Not sure. Supposedly not an isolated incident. And my initial thoughts were other players. Not just Rockets. When House was sent home.....a person close to House claimed, because House is not a star he gets put down. Now that could mean some stars in the bubble we’re doing the same and getting away with it. I think LeBron is too angel like.....supposedly. Kawhi too quite. But Jimmy Butler has some bad boy in him.....maybe Paul George.....maybe Giannis?.........We all know Harden strip club visits. Guess all are clean just appear to be mischievous. Who knows? I just ask why send him home so soon after? Fear that he may talk to reporters? Implicate others? Teammates or non teammates? The NBA didn’t want to deal with that scandal....not yet. May come out later? I feel he was set up. Maybe by the NBA because LeBron has to get in as his window is closing. I think he needs two more rings to catch Jordan. Lakers probably snitched on the snitch-line. They needed to make things easier. Removing House was important because he helps guard LeBron/Markieff/Kuzma, we needed his body frame and energy level. But im just venting. That House situation just seems fishy to me. Unless he had Covid-19, why send him home? Lou Williams was at the strip club for Pete’s sake.
youre just a pure homer. get off cp3 nuts. hes old and wouldnt be able to do anything against that defense. • Lakers shot 76.8% in the paint against the Rockets. Highest ever % according to NBA.com since it was tracked starting 2014 in conf semi finals like i said we couldnt guard them. burned us inside and outside.
Yea he would. He would sure as hell do a hell of a lot better than Westbrook who's straight garbage. Keep apologzing for a dude who single handely killed our playoff hopes. And there is no need to get disrespectful. You like Westbrook, I get it. but you need to accept that he's not better than Chris Paul in any capacity whatsoever. And those picks we wasted for him arent coming back. You can't quote a paint percentage and then that tells me all I need to know about a series. Never mind taking into account transition and half court offense. And btw you offset that by taking ALOT of threes. They were able to slow the pace down and make us play their game. Those doubles completely took us out of our game. Their transition offense is what got them so many good looks in the pace, its like you never even watched the damn series. Burned us inside in transition, they got hot for one game from 3. We coulndt guard them because they got so many transition points from our offense being neutralized. There are both sides of the ball you need to take into account. Westbrook killed us on both ends, missing rotations and being garbage on offense. Take a look at Westbrook's net rating for the series. He was bad on both ends. https://stats.nba.com/team/16106127...ason=2019-20&SeasonType=Playoffs&LastNGames=5 Freaking terrible. I cant believe he got an MVP. We were also gassed because of Mike's short rotations unfortunately. House definitely screwed us over there. Edit: Also the only reason we even went small was BECAUSE of Westbrook haha.
