For the season, our starters are doing fine, they have the best +/- in the league I believe. That makes Rox a solid playoff team. Although Tmac and Rafer are in a shooting slump, they still do a lot good things on the court. But our bench is not even close to Mavs, Suns, Spurs and even Jazz. A comibned 9-32(28% shooting) for a total 22 points in last 3 games(7.3 points off the bench per game). No team can win consistently with this kind of bench production, Rox were lucky to win 2 out of 3. The bench's inability to score means starters have to play heavy minutes and that's a huge reason Yao is not as effective in 4th quarter as the previous 3 due to fatigue. It's also a huge reason that Rox as a whole can't play better than opponents in the end of 4th quarter all year long when they are tired. Although I think JVG is a very good coach, I blame JVG for his inability to play the bench players more in blow out situation. He's too afraid of bench players making mistakes, but he forget inexperienced players need to learn from their own mistakes in real game situation before they can eliminate them. Now he's in a situation to cross his finger hoping for no injuries to Rox starters in playoffs.
Everytime we play our bench our leads dwindle...this has been happening A LOT lately and will probably continue to happen during the playoffs. Deke, JHO, and Head all seem to have slipped a lot lately. Probably old age and Head is coming back down to Earth. Wells is the only player that has potential to be a big time contributor but he isn't going to play at this point. Snyder is stromile swift at the 2 guard. So yea our bench is a huge liability. Did I mention we have no backup PG for Rafer
It is now too late to talk about the bench, I think it is about 70 games late or I can also say, 6 months late. maybe my signature can explain more.
no it's tmac. he's a superstar. he is expected to do more than this. playmaking is his skill. so when he does it i'm not supposed to be wowed by it. sure he's defending and rebounding more aggressively now, but his scoring WITH yao has been where i want it to be. him and yao should be scoring 55+ pts NIGHTLY. tmac is not doing his part scoring wise. the other things tmac should dominate too and he is. but scoring, it's above average right now. not superstar-like
Every superstar has off nights. Kobe has off nights, Duncan has off nights, even Jordan had off nights. Someone else needs to step up in that situation.
I think Rafer not having any real backup is the problem, it forces him ito playing too many minutes, and alot of his mistakes can probably be attributed to him playing when he is far too tired to be out there. He leads our team in minutes played and per game. Luther Head is not a backup point guard, he has not shown that much, in 1 week i have seen more positives from Lucas than Head in the PG dept. That being said Head is too small to play SG for any real extended period of time, and he is our best offensive weapon off the bench. So really the problem is the bench. Since Yao ming has come back we have roared to 30 point first quarters in almost every game because our starting 5 is so effective. Once we start mixing in our bench players it gets dicey. I think that for the rest of this season until its mathmateically not possible to get home court, we have to play our starters around 40 mins a night. This summer we need to make moves on the bench. We still have Sura's contract, and i think Luther Head will have the highest trade value at this point while his contract is still around 1.1 million before it starts going up to nearly 3 million. I think Head is a good shooter who benefits from double teams and open looks, he is clutch, but i think he could net a player who might fit our needs and team better.
Our bench is not as good as the contenders, not because they haven't played and had a chance to get better, but because they are NOT as good.
off nights are fine if he tried. i accepted the lakers and clippers poor shooting game b/c he penetrated all night. i accepted the miss layups b/c he penetrated at least. i counted 3-4 penetrations last night. that's unacceptable. plus, he didn't demand the ball in the 4th when he saw the other guys struggling to score. tmac should have finished the game for us as yao set up the table for him. that's what is unacceptable to me. off shooting nights are fine. when that happens, do something else.
I think Rafer not having any real backup is the problem, it forces him ito playing too many minutes, and alot of his mistakes can probably be attributed to him playing when he is far too tired to be out there. He leads our team in minutes played and per game. Luther Head is not a backup point guard, he has not shown that much, in 1 week i have seen more positives from Lucas than Head in the PG dept. That being said Head is too small to play SG for any real extended period of time, and he is our best offensive weapon off the bench. So really the problem is the bench. Since Yao ming has come back we have roared to 30 point first quarters in almost every game because our starting 5 is so effective. Once we start mixing in our bench players it gets dicey. I think that for the rest of this season until its mathmateically not possible to get home court, we have to play our starters around 40 mins a night. This summer we need to make moves on the bench. We still have Sura's contract, and i think Luther Head will have the highest trade value at this point while his contract is still around 1.1 million before it starts going up to nearly 3 million. I think Head is a good shooter who benefits from double teams and open looks, he is clutch, but i think he could net a player who might fit our needs and team better. We then need to get a backup point guard, i think the backup forwards on our team are adequet if the other positions are upgraded.
choujie, You complain about bench play and then say that they should play more? Admit it, you are just digging for a way to blame Van Gundy, right?
Are you kidding? I was a JVG supporter when things went really ugly last season. I just feel our bench could have been better had JVG played them more in those blow out games. We had the most blow outs in the league, yet we don't see bench gets emptied quite often even when the lead is really comfortable.
I agree. I'm not trying to put the blame on them, but realistically you can't compare our bench to our Western counterparts. They seem to have 8 players who have the potential to go off and have a good offensive game. Meanwhile we've got JHo and Deke, who don't exactly scream 'energy' or 'instant offense'. Head has been a huge help at times, although it's all mostly spot up 3's. We are much more heavily reliant on our superstars scoring than any other contender. Basically if Yao or Tmac don't get their points, we're already in BIG trouble.
Those who keeps saying bench players will help us are being naive. Great team play is a mentality. It's NOT a skill; It's NOT great defense (solely); It's the team's thought process when it counts (i.e. T-mac's referring to execution). It comes down to who wants it and who has enough confidence to go out and get it. Who's not afraid of failure??? Yao Ming seems to be coming into this mold.. T-mac has deviated from it. So, in conclusion, great players are great, but without great MENTAL players, we will go nowhere. (i.e. the suns w/o nash; the mavs w/o jason terry or avery johnson). notice i didn't say dirk.. he's is very talented, but not very strong mentally. it may appear he is.. but come down to the moments where you can't hide your true courage, he'll choke ala last year's finals.
If he doesn't I will. You have put some of the blame on JVG. He should have developed his bench. No matter what he leads everyone to believe you can play at least 9(maybe on some nights 10) on consistent minutes.
If we lose, we usually lose by under 6-7 points. If T-Mac stops having those 7 for 30 games, we'd win all of them except the ones vs. Phoenix. Our system works. T-Mac just needs to score better.
