They beat Portland bcuz the Spurs made Lillard play D every play instead allowing him to sit in the corner doing nothing guarding Lin or PBev. They constantly ran Lillard into big men screens and made him run to keep up with Parker. By the end of the series he was trying to check Matthews. You must make the best players on the other team play D. We didn't make Aldridge or Lillard play any D whatsoever. We are very strategy poor, ask James Harden how did that work out for him.
You put Parsons at the 4 and insert Lin in the start ing lineup,this line up with force lillard and aldridge to play defense, and would give space for Harden to drive. This is pretty much an indefensible lineup for Portland and we would have ran Lma and sideshow bob into the ground with our pace.
Dookiester is right. This wouldn't work. LMA would score at will against Parsons, and our fast pace would be neutralized since there wouldn't be many defensive rebounds.
I don't think the Blazers defense is what stopped us most of the time. Sure, they had some effectiveness inside whenever Harden tried to drive for layups by collapsing on him. But, you had to have noticed how many point blank shots at the rim the Rockets missed the entire series. Whether it's dumb decisions to try and lay up the ball off the backboard instead of dunking it because you are at the rim, the Rockets just blew a lot of point blank shots. Those cost us dearly. I would say that and our inability to just make mid-range 2 pointers with consistency killed us the entire series. But, I do admit that the Blazers have some well-sized players that made life difficult inside. Dwight was effective but they played bigger inside than the rest of our team did.
Can we scoop up Rudy T from whatever dive bar he's boozing at? Maybe he could teach these chumps how to play some D.
**** Mchale. I've seen this slow motion trainwreck before. It's called the Yao Ming experiment the 2nd time he broke his foot/leg.
Spurs offense evolved once their team,like the league has turned game oriented. When duncan was a mvp type, there were very,very few angle screens,pin downs,etc. A testimony to Pop coaching,he adjusted to his best player, parker. He's been the spurs best player since the last title.
I have no doubt that SA would have won more games against us than in regular season, and would have slaughtered our ISO and simple offensive system without perimeter D arse
Portland still would not have to work as hard since we rarely run screens for our guards. If there was a stat for energy level consumed by Lillard and Matthews vs Rockets guards as against vs Spurs guards on the defensive end, am sure the difference would be staggering. Every single game against majority of the teams we see our guards getting picked and screened endlessly, then we whine about how other guards always set career highs against the Rockets. Granted, many of our perimeter players are either lazy or not as aggressive defensively, but if we have our own constant screens to free up our guards, the opposing guards will eventually wear down and lose efficiency offensively. As it is, Lillard had a field day watching either Lin or Beverley bring the ball down, with no pick to contend with. Then they just wait for the hand off to Harden or Parsons. Matthews was mostly the same, resting on the defensive end because Harden very rarely ever moves without the ball.
Please. The bottom line is LaMarcus Aldridge (whom I do have do have more respect for now) has 8 years experience than Terrence. LA is different than any 4 in the league to begin with, and is better than 95% being the traditional post up 4. TJ was essentially a rookie. Then we can talk about the injury to Bev, but injury strikes a hard spot to any true Rocket fan going with Yao for so long :-( In a perfect world where injuries don't have an impact, we sweep.
