Don't Despair Guys, the Mediocrity is Contagious...

After our ugly (yet beautiful) win tonight, I realized I was quite happy. Why you might ask?

1. 4th place in the West is 2 games away...

I didn't really realize it, but everyone else in the west besides the Spurs, Suns, and Hornets (the Warriors did turn it around after an 0-6 start and just beat the Spurs so maybe you can throw them in there) also seem to be suffering from the disease that is mediocrity. The Jazz are in the middle of a four game losing streak (without any injuries to their star players) and with a loss tonight to the Suns, would be within 1 game reach. The Mavs are getting blown out left and right (by the same toronto team that beat us) and by some other rather crappy teams, while already nearing their previous season's loss count... The Lakers have basically nothing outside Kobe and will continue in their expected mediocrity. The Nuggets have no idea how to play defense and have no good reason to end with a better record than us (besides being in a much easier division).

The purpose of pointing this out is to show that even with the most difficult schedule to date (including the most road games in the league) we are within a couple games' grasp of 4th place which isn't too shabby. While we should worry about the game by game effort, a decent playoff seed is not completely unreasonable.

2. Bonzi is starting to find himself again, but he desperately needs to work on his FT's.

3. We have seen that Rafer actually serves a purpose and he is playing MUCH better recently. The thing I noticed especially this game was how fast he gets the ball up the court and sets up the offense. This reduces the time taken off the shot clock and prevents a few of the randomly jacked up shots with the clock winding down that we often took with James/Francis manning the point.

4. While we are losing some TERRIBLE games, we are doing surprisingly well against the elite teams. So far this year, we have beat the No. 1 and No. 2 teams in the west (Spurs and Suns), the Jazz, Lakers, blew out the Nuggets, just eeked out a win against the Pistons. Additionally, the other losses against the Suns/Spurs were without tmac and the Spurs game was exceedingly close. The two losses against the Mavs were equally close and painful. What it seems like is we are playing down to our lesser opponents and stepping up to the challenge of playing the big time games, and winning a solid percentage of them. All of this, is with a completely lost offense and a team with no identity.

While we are a bit over 1/4th of the way through the season, A LOT can happen the span of 10 games, we could find ourselves in a much better position than we had expected.

Granted, you might say that this thread is a knee-jerk reaction to a win over a solid team, but I think we need a few more positive knee-jerks around this place...

 

Lethe, if you take a look at my thread history, 90% of them are "step back, lets get happy for reason X threads." I lurk here constantly but get fed up with all of the negativity so I sporadically do some research and try to liven things up.


Btw, our schedule looks pretty gross now I realize, but why don't you look at January/Feb. Should make you smile, we have some beautiful stretches in there.

 

There is very little "luck" to winning a game. Yes, down the stretch if Sheed or Billups hit those threes, we would have lost. But you could go back and pick any instance in a game to change it like that (the ref calling the out of bounds against us at the end for example =) ). It was "unlucky" that we shot nearly record breakingly low on FT's this game, it goes both ways. We should just realize that we played a GREAT game defensively and give credit where credit is due. Our guys played with heart tonight and hustled for loose balls and got some stops when we needed to and beat a great team!