Can you see it too?

What I have found really interesting over the last few games is
that you can actually SEE the guys trying to make changes in their
games, and it's obvious that it's because of what the coaches have
been demanding of them.

I say trying..

The next step will be actually making it truly work:

Lemme 'splain: If you watch, for example, KT, you will see him,
from time to time, make some kind of a move into the lane, say up
near the FT line on the right side.. get in there with his back to the
basket, and pass out to someone (Mooch, SF, whoever). In the
past, and with apologies to all the 'Kenny is a black hole' moaners
out there, he WOULD have done his usual whirling-dervish bit,
and tried to just get in there and put up a shot.

But now you can actually see the little hamster turn in the wheel
and see him actually make a conscious effort to pass - obviously
because that is what he has been told to do.

It almost reminds me of that scene in Hoosiers, where the coach
demanded a certain number of passes before anyone was allowed
to shoot.

And just like in the movie, the point was not to pass for the sake
of passing, but to force such an unnatural act to become natural,
through repitition.

This is the stage where the Rox are now.

Many of the passes we make now are still 'passes for passes sake',
just like in the movie. If you watch the results of many of our passes,
you can see that they are 'static', ie they do not actually do
anything to advance the offense or help get a score. As with the
example of KT's pass the other night, for example. All it really did
was run time off the clock, and leave a man standing outside, with
the ball, with time running out. It's almost as if we have substituted
the 'dribble-it-til-the-shot-clock-is-at-4-seconds-before-I-jack-a-shot'
offense for the 'make a couple of passes, but still end up with
the same result a lot of the time' offense.

Compare that to the way Sacramento played against us the other
night - they passed with *purpose*, and they handed our guys'
heads to them in a doggie bag. Our guys were making the effort
to pass, but it was often without purpose. At least we were making
the passes.

But anyway, this is actually a good thing.

Because it shows that 1) the guys are really trying to listen to
Rudy, and do what he wants, 2) that Rudy is actually cracking the
whip on these guys to go against their habits, and 3) they are
(slowly but surely) getting better at it. I mean, is it any wonder
that the one guy for whom this comes naturally, Yao, has almost
overnight become the most important member of the team? Of
course not. Encouragingly, it seems that many of his teammates
have, at least in their minds, begun to understand that the more
of them who embrace and nurture this skill, the better they ALL
will become.

Just like few people would have predicted the current state of the
team after only seeing their progress in the first 3 or 4 games, so
too is the current state of the team in no way a true indicator of
where this bunch will be at the halfway point, and beyond that the
end of the season.

As the unnatural becomes natural, as making the 'right pass' moves
from being the result of a deliberate conscious thought process to
the unthinking, automatic-reflex kind of action such as one sees
when a good shooter is simply stroking the ball into the hole (that's
why so often a player misses that wide open jumper, he suddeny
'thinks' about the shot, and bam! it wouldn't even go in with
vaseline), THEN you will see this team become a force to be feared
in the league.

Let's watch this issue and try to compare against the later stages
of the season, and see if these guys have continued to make the
progress they have shown so far.

Ciao