I always believe that a basketball franchise operates at its best when the GM does the GM's job and the coach does the coach's job. I hope that Morey understands that.
he may have matched up on Boozer when Yao was off the court, but sorry Dak, you are mistaken for the most part. When Yao and Chuck are on the floor, Yao is on Boozer, Chuck on Okur. Please dont make me pull out the video, Im too damn busy for that right now.
Pull it out, all last year Yao guarded Okur, it was only in the playoffs that the switch was made. DD
Firstly, what player doesn't have some difficulties in matchups against Boozer? The guy is a great offensive player. Chuck was our best defensive option against Boozer, and it was a shame he didn't match up more against him. It could only happen if Yao and/or Okur weren't in the game.
Oh god ... there's no way that was the case. Just think about that for one second. Why would Van Gundy have ever even considered guarding Okur with Yao? It didn't happen, unless there was an occasional mixup in transition due to cross matching.
Look Durvasa, Yao guarded Okur all last year in the regular season, during the playoffs they switched it. Please feel free to look it up if you don't believe me. DD
Regular season game highlights from 4/1 last season (thanks R2K): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_95NwewqMo Several defensive plays are shown. Yao is never matched up against Okur. I guarantee it didn't happen in the 11/1 game as well, unless by accident in transition. Those were the only 2 regular season games Yao played the Jazz. Edit .. Ok, here's an NBA.com link to the highlights for the 11/1 game last season. http://boss.streamos.com/wmedia/nba/nbacom/recaps/recap_12_houuta.asx Only 2 or 3 Rockets defensive possessions shown with Yao on the court in this package, but he wasn't guarding Okur in any of them. Satisfied?
On the one hand, I can't wait to hear how this is resolved with Morey second-guessing Adelman's rotation. I sure hope RA is OK with this. On the other hand, what IS a GM to do during the season outside of trade talk, especially if there are no trades in the works or it's after the deadline?
Durv, Hmmmm, you do have me thinking about it. I just remember Hayes being on Boozer, and Boozer doing fairly well against him........maybe Yao was guarding Colllins or someone other than Okur, but I thought I remembered that Yao didn't guard Boozer until the 4th quarter to keep him out of foul trouble. DD
You are right. I remember last season well. Even in the beginning of the season, I remember our first game against them, he had Yao on Boozer. I even remember posting after the game about how foolish it was to attempt to defend Boozer with anyone besides Hayes. Van Gundy was consistent. He had Yao on Boozer all the time. But, it also consistently never worked. And the games where Yao got into foul trouble and Hayes guarded Boozer, we drew down the score deficit and Boozer was significantly less efficient. But JVG would only put Hayes on him after Yao had gotten the obligatory 3 fouls in the 1st quarter. Very frustrating watching that over and over again.
Hmmm... http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/boxscore;_ylt=ArwrxIaX1CZG.hrPngvEgEakvLYF?gid=2007040110 http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/boxscore;_ylt=AuiJyTQ6zK7LyN17iA3nb12kvLYF?gid=2007010510 http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/players/3632/splits?year=2006&type=Fielding
Yep, and I remember posting in response that it would be even more foolish to guard Okur with Yao, completely reversing any defensive strengths Yao has. If I recall, you argued that Okur wasn't capable of getting a score off the dribble, so you could get away with Yao defending on the perimeter. Firstly, I don't agree with that statement -- I've seen Okur penetrate from the perimeter before and score. Secondly, perimeter defense isn't just man on man defense in a half court set. The further out your defensive responsibility is, the more ground you'd have to cover in a help rotation, for instance (simple geometry). And I guarantee that Yao would routinely lose him in transition as well. It's one of the few times I've strongly disagreed with you. Well .. there's the V-Span thing, but even I had a soft spot for him in the first half of the season.
I wonder if D-Wade would have got any playing time with JVG if he came in as a Rookie. D-Wade averages 4.59 TO's per game which any slashing cutting guard will do.
The problem with putting Yao on Okur at the perimeter wasn't necessarily the threat of Okur driving past him ... Okur has terrible footspeed anyways so if he ever did it, it's something we could live with. The problem was, as durvasa alluded to, it moved our shotblocking presence far away from the basket with too much ground to cover in help defense rotations. Even though we would have slowed Boozer down, the result would have been Jerry Sloan running and endless array of backdoor cuts and picks resulting in easy, nearly uncontested layups for Harpring and co. That said, I would have loved to see JVG mix things up a bit during that playoff series, if only to slow down Boozer a little. That dude just flat out killed us... Yao was virtually helpless against him.
We didn't have a big enough body with enough speed to put on Boozer. Maybe you could put Landry on him if he gets his defense down because in terms of speed and strength that would actually be a good matchup.
He would have if he had knocked down his open shots and made all those jaw dropping plays that turned him into a superstar. Also, Wade might be a high turnover guy, but I'm pretty sure he wasn't losing the ball nearly as frequently as Spanoulis was.
Again, this was not the problem. Chuck would have done a good enough job if he had the chance to defend boozer. The quandary the Rockets faced was that with Boozer and Okur on the floor together, the only way they could solve the Jazz was to take Yao off the floor. Juwan Howard and/or Shane Battier could have done a fine job on Okur -- the problem was that without Yao down there, there was no shotblocking. It wasn't merely Boozer, it was the weird Boozer-Okur combination with the 5 camping out on the perimeter that gave us trouble.
