A Message From Dame...

Touché

 

I still maintain that the players are trying their best. They just had the misfortune to play over their heads for half a season, early in a rebuild, so they'll always be judged by that baseline rather than a baseline more appropriate to their (collective) talent level. Which is low.

 

Playing over their heads, or really good team basketball?

Given the large sample size, 1/2 season, I say they were playing really good team basketball. Especially good team defense, something we have only seen this season on very rare occasions.

 

Good team defense is above their heads, in my opinion. They don't have the personnel to play good team defense--they have three solid/decent defenders on the entire roster (Turner, Harkless, Aminu), likely the worst backcourt pairing of defenders in the NBA and no rim defense at all.

Their offensive numbers aren't much different from last year. Top-ten last year and this year. All of last year's second-half surge was fueled by defense unlike what they had played before or after that. I really doubt that they didn't bother to put in effort in the first half last year, put in huge effort in the second half and then went back to not putting in effort. To me, the more plausible narrative is that they had a flukish half-season, especially since that fits better with the actual personnel on the team.

 

@Minstrel ....I agree that they don't have many good individual defenders but some of the things they do from a scheme/help/positioning aspect would make a high school coach cringe. If someone gets beat because they are smaller or just not as athletic, that is one thing.

But I see heads turned, bodies turned, poor rotations, bad hedges......that make even also-rans loook like all-stars at times.

Last night, Hibbert, Belinelli and Kaminsky combined for 40 points. WTH! The game before, Kelly Oubre, who went into that game averaging 5.8 ppg, had 18. Tomas Satoransky was averaging 3.2 ppg....he had 10. Kevin Love had 34 points in a quarter against this group. Those are not uber athletic physical specimens. Most of them are scrubs and in the case of Love, he hasn't scored 34 points IN A GAME at any time the entire rest of the season.

Whether it is just a lack of effort, poor defensive philosophy, or the players just aren't doing what Stotts instructs......either way, all of those are very bad.

 

nice little speech but IMO I do NOT see "heart and soul" being laid out on the floor in any consistent way, these guys often seem flat as a pancake. Don't hatem just awful Bball to watch so I have lost a lot of interest. I love to watch effort on both sides of the ball, the losing teams of a few years ago were so much more fun to watch, these guys pretty much stink it up. PA's has got to be bummed as he seem so emotionally into the team with his playoff speech last year, then he shelled out big bucks and now this team seems dead. Can't believe he will take much more

 

But I think the idea that things like proper rotations, hedges, etc, are all the same at every level (high school, college, NBA) and if a high schooler can do it, an NBA player should be able to do it easily, is incorrect. The NBA moves at far greater speed. A high schooler has far more time to size up what's happening and make the right decision just based on being taught. In the NBA, you have a split-second to make the right decision based on how 10 people (including yourself) are moving in complicated patterns. And it's not just a matter of snuffing the activity taking place in front of you--most NBA offenses these days run actions just to move a defense in order to set up another action (which may, itself, be just to set up a third action which is the intended money action).

Defense, both individual and team, at the NBA level requires a hefty helping of talent, not just want-to or education. I have little doubt that every man jack on that team knows and understands basic and high-level defensive principles. It's just that they don't have the requisite pattern-matching capability that allows them to flawlessly make decisions split-second by split-second, thinking potentially two moves ahead.

It's just like chess in this sense--you can spend decades learning about the game and playing the game, but if you don't have the same pattern-recognition circuits for chess that grand masters do, you will never approach their level--because they aren't simply applying learning the way a normal person does, they also "see" game states and how to improve them instinctively.

Brilliant defenders like Scottie Pippen or Kawhi Leonard are like that, but talent runs along a scale. The Blazers players are poor defenders because when they try to make those split-second decisions, they make mistakes often enough to lead to defensive breakdowns. A good defensive possession means five players making dozens of correct decisions. That's "playing on a string"--every player seamlessly making correct designs to flow from rotation to rotation. Even one or two poor decisions along the way can compromise the entire thing. I have little doubt that the Blazers players know the proper defensive techniques and are trying--they just aren't talented enough to keep on making the right decisions, over and over.

 

I think you are saying they don't recognize patterns quickly enough. And it seems that enough practice at this and emphasis on this, would improve their pattern-recognition skills. If I was the coach of this team; I would practice only defense for the next month.

 

You can improve pattern-recognition skills, but only up to a point. Some of it simply hardwired capacity, which is why we have things like artistic talent, chess talent or, as Rasta once mentioned, talent for something as seemingly basic as face-recognition. You can improve your art skill with practice, but you won't catch someone with the innate talent for knowing where to put colors to create the proper effect--especially if he or she also practices. Everyone in the NBA has been practicing this stuff for a decade or more and continues to do so.

 

Exactly. There's ZERO reason this roster can't be average on the defensive end. Just playing fundamental, position defense would do that. Neither Dame nor CJ are such poor defenders that they can't play fundamental defense. They are too good, too smart, and too competitive. Our defensive woes start with Stotts. Our roster certainly doesn't help, but maybe that's a good thing? If we had players who were good enough to cover up for Terry's deficiencies we might not know just how bad he is.

 

Also exactly! Defense is pattern recognition. That's something that can be improved upon.

Also, I think Minstrel is overselling the speed of the NBA. All too often - especially with our team - players walk the ball up the floor while other players stand stationary on the perimeter watching the ball-handler and a single screener work a two-man game. Maybe a few cuts/backscreens occur, but often go unused. These guys are all professional athletes - the speed of the game isn't too much for them to handle (except for Meyers).

 

So right. 'Average' defense to go along with an upper 1/3 offense would get much better results. That this team is dead last in many defensive categories torpedoes any good offense they get. We as fans are not asking to be top-5 but somewhere in the #13-19 range doesn't seem like an unreasonable request.

 

So every team should be at least average on the defensive end, because all it takes is effort. Which obviously moves what "average" means up (because there's no logical sense to everyone being average or above). If you think half the teams in the NBA are just lazy, your viewpoint is coherent (but silly, IMO). If you don't think that, your viewpoint simply doesn't make sense. "Average" is an NBA baseline based on what the median defensive team can do--by definition, about half the teams MUST fall below average. So there's every reason why the Blazers shouldn't be average--because their defensive personnel is well below average in ability. You can't "work" your way to average because every team is working, so talent determines it.