Lol what? I love Jalen Green. I hate Jalen Green's defense. He loses his man on backdoor cuts and dies on screens. If he could fix those two things and be a bit more efficient on offense (this I don't worry about) the Rockets will be a play-in team at the minimum.
You didn't need an editor, but I'm adding my emphasis, including quotes. Jalen Green plays some s*** defense, absolutely horrific. Some animals, you cut off the head, the body still moves; that's Jalen Green on defense. He acts like no one ever coached him on it before. And maybe no one did. Fingers crossed Udoka pimp-slaps him a bit on this.
He does, he was just too small. You can't just jump over everyone in the NBA, the difference between a miss or made layup is a VERY small bump. His body will eventually catch up to the NBA.
It's really bad. And judging by his scrimmages I'm Rec and Team USA it doesn't look much better. At this point I'd be laser focused on A/Bing him with Cam Whitmore. Because if he can't improve this part of his game to at least "Steph Curry" level then there's no point in extending him anything close to a max contract. Let another team do that. Tari and Bari have already shown they can play defense. FVV and Brooks I mean...that's why they're here. On a scale of 1-10 I'm at like an 8 right now on Jalen becoming an average defender.
"Lol what? I love Jalen Green. I hate Jalen Green's defense. He loses his man on backdoor cuts and dies on screens. If he could fix those two things and be a bit more efficient on offense (this I don't worry about) the Rockets will be a play-in team at the minimum" ... Dude someone who "loves" Jalen Green isn't going to say look at a dude who hasn't played a single NBA game as a replacement and base career trajectories on scrimmage highlights, I don't know what to tell you man. You can say you are a reasonable critic but man that's a really low take on Green.
I did a double take, is that Jabari sitting in the bleachers towards the end??? Man he's put in some gym work this offseason for real. Jalen too, he's never going to be thicc like Eric Gordon but that kid is ripped.
You're seeing the same workouts/training videos - just different sessions and days. He was guarding Durant in these runs for entire games (and getting cooked for most of the game). You can see him guarding Durant in this video, but the video was also originally posted at least 1-2 weeks ago. The BTS videos are put out there by Through The Lens. Go to their site and you can watch the entire game. People are acting like these dudes are in 5 different places at the same time but in most cases it's just different social media accounts posting videos from the same session(s).
That wasn't Silas' system. That was Stone's "secure the pick" system and it worked rather well to that end.
The point is whether you believe he's going to do it and you're cynical about it. Somehow, Udoka believes in him and you don't. Udoka is not an easy guy to impress based on that we know. Not to mention there's another path where he doesn't become a good defender but is still worth the max. No one learned to play defense on this team the past two years. It's easy to see everyone didn't improve or regressed defensively under Silas. Anyhow, I'm sure you'll hop on the bandwagon after the predictable happens. It's not debatable that he's worked hard on his conditioning, fitness and skills this summer under the watchful eyes of Udoka and Kerr. He deserves props for working hard during a period when most others don't. You can't learn defense or defensive habits in the summer, so you'll be waiting till halfway through the season while dismissing any other positive development in his game. We're all here predicting what's going to happen based on what we've seen. That's what basketball talk is about. If we were all here saying everyone sucks until they prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt, the posts would be rather pointless. We'd just be pointing out the obvious over and over again. Oh and let's be honest. Fighting through one screen is not going to cut it. That statement was cynical as heck.
Yeah but it's fair to say his defense was bad last season. What's surprising is how people associate it to his perpetual identity rather than the fact that he's never been coached on defense (i.e. high school level defense), never played with decent defenders, the organization wasn't rewarding good defense nor was it punishing bad defense. To conclude from that "Jalen better change his attitude" is disingenuous when we've only ever heard his core identity is hard working and coachable. We're late at teaching him defense and making it a team priority. Also weird to associate his entire future to it when he's clearly designed to be a star scorer. Everyone hides one or two bad defenders in their starting lineup and it's so natural for that player to be a high scoring SG. I've said it before, there's just a lot of arbitrary standards that are set on Jalen for whatever reason.
This. And it's really weird that folks are so hyper focused on his defense when Jalen is one of the few players that has shown the ability (when he wants to) to play some pretty good defense - I'm thinking of one of the Phoenix games where he locked up Booker in the closing minutes and one of the Atlanta games where he stopped Trae on multiple occasions after he and Dejounte were bumping their gums. Jalen has the ability, the only attributes that needed to be improved were strength, conditioning, and consistent effort. We seen\heard that he's improved the first two and I have confidence that Coach Udoka will demand the other from all of our Rockets next season. Lets agree that last season defense was not truly a focus and though some of Rockets tried to play consistent good D (it's just part of their b-ball DNA) thinking of Tari and Jabari here the Rockets still sucked. Does anyone believe that Jalen doesn't have the ability to stay in front of - Booker, Donovan Mitchell, Maxey, Beal, Dejounte Murray, CJ McCollum, Austin Reeves, Anfernee Simmons, Tyler Hero, Jordan (Clarkson or Poole) etc... and on nights when where he doesn't match up as well strength wise - Ant or Jaylen Brown - isn't that one of the reasons we signed Dillon Brooks. Jalen will matchup well physically against the majority of SG's in the league (can't say I believe the same for all of our young core). An improved system and being held accountable for his defense (another reason we got Brooks) are the missing components.
Thank you for saying this. I have been thinking this for 2 years reading some of these posts. People can be negative about players coaches and/or team as a whole. The Bobby when I see it BS is tiresome and mundane to the point where it has collapsed on itself. It really does get boring to read over and over about I need to see it to believe it posts.
Y’all too whiny about some of us being negative. Look, we went through the worst stretch in the history of the franchise, this kid here was supposed to be something, but he’s been mostly nothing. He can still become something, but looking back over the past couple of years I don’t get how a Rocket’s fan can be anything but negative. There’s something else going on here, some weird infatuation some of y’all have with this kid, making you super touchy-feely when anything is said about him.
Um... I just meant he's looking strong? What's he supposed to do hardcore guard Kevin Durant during an offseason pickup game?
KD will cook everyone on planet Earth. The issues with Green’s D are not when he’s iso-ed 1-on-1. It’s the "headless chicken" defensive positioning, the "mosquito-on-windshield" handling of screens, the leisurely jogs back after a miss, this type of things… Somebody posted something recently about the time when T-mac was throwing a fit about some drama and playing demonstrative bad D for awhile, and the outrage it generated. Well that’s what J.Green’s defense looked like for two whole years. Except we’ve fallen so bad to the bottom of the league that there is no outrage, everyone is just numb…
