I’ll stand at the front of the line of glad Neil is gone, he’s a douche. Everyone rails on the 2016 free agency as what put us in a hole and it did, but in my eyes the NBA fucked us. Maybe I’m wrong but weren’t we like one of 5 teams with cap room that offseason? The blazers played their cards right and we were set to make a move. Then the league opened up the salary cap and every team had money to spend. The big FA’s went to the elite teams and we were left with scraps. This was a huge turning point but I place the blame on the league and not Olshey.
The league didn't fuck us, that's some persecution complex you've got going on there. The big TV money hit and the cap went up... it didn't go up because the Blazers were one of three teams that could have landed big name free agents that year and the league hates the Blazers, it went up because the league has to make the cap work with the revenue sharing agreement. If Olshey was stupid enough to not see the cap increase coming, it's Olshey's fault and if he was too shitty to get actually good players with all of the money we had it was also his fault. Letting LaMarcus walk without getting any sort of compensation before all of this shit went down was his fault. Failing at the draft or being scared of it after he'd been here for just over one year was his fault. Not putting pieces together that make sense was his fault. Being risk averse to the point of paralysis was his fault. None of that even got him fired... purportedly treating lower level employees like shit did. I wish they would have fired him for the failure he was as an NBA executive though and I wish they would have done it a while ago.
I think conflating "defensive mistakes" with "lack of effort" and/or "not buying in" is a mistake. The idea that "defense is nothing but effort" only holds true for kids and low level basketball--when it comes to the pros, defense is about much more than just effort. Obviously you need effort, but you also need talent, awareness, instincts, athleticism, etc. Just like offense. The idea that any group of NBA players could be good defensively if they just want it enough is prevalent among fans but I think off-base. It's easy to look at replays and say "This guy didn't rotate, which is just laziness" but there's myriad reasons why the player might not have rotated correctly--confused by the offense's motion, looking at the wrong thing, uncertainty about the defensive scheme they're running, unable to process what they're seeing quickly enough, etc. That's where defensive ability factors in--you can't apply effort without knowing instantly what you should be doing and not every player is equipped to do that well at the NBA level, where things happen extremely quickly.
“He shoulda seen it coming”. Saw that from a mile away. Teams set up their cap strategy several years in advance. We were primed and rug got pulled.
I never said "defense is nothing but effort". You're misinterpreting. And the laziness thing is based on situations where, (at this point in the season), there's absolutely no excuse for even the worst defenders not know instantly (example: RoCo guarding the guy in the corner, the Blazers trap the pick n roll on the same sideline and RoCo is 15 feet off his guy and then doesn't hustle to get out and contest). There are more complicated rotations that are more excusable, but when it's a situation where the offense is running a pick n roll on one side of the court and skip the ball and the Blazers have to X out (something they've had to do hundreds of times this season and likely thousands of times in practice), and you're not able to grasp such a basic basketball concept, then my opinion is that you're not dedicating yourself enough on that end and you're not focused enough. But here's the main reason why: This team has showed they can defend when locked in! How many times do we fall behind then stage a comeback when we start ramping up the urgency defensively? Over our first 10 or 11 home games we were ranked 8th defensively, and had some great defensive outings against good teams. This team showed they know had to execute basic defensive concepts during that stretch, I saw it with my own eyes.
1 - I'm more focused on the Blazers and don't have enough of a reference point for other teams to call out their effort. 2 - A lack of effort includes a lack of focus, but there's a slight difference. But in general, poor effort is easily seen when players don't fight through screens, don't box out, don't try hard enough to close out on shooters, lazily run past shooters instead of getting low and digging into the floor on their closeouts, calling for a teammate to crossmatch in transition instead of running back to their assignment when they still have the proper time to, not changing their positioning enough in accordance to the ball (think shell drill, which I'm sure you've done before), getting out of position in basic situations (i.e. being 15 feet off their guy one pass away), and not making most basic of rotations in a timely matter (this is more-so focus). There's other, harder to explain things that'd tip me off but these are the main things. 3 - It's hard to compare last season to this season effort wise because last season we ran a scheme that required far less effort. 4 - This question is ironic. I just focus what's happening on the floor with as clear of a mind as I possibly can then I talk about it. It's easy because I'm not focused on an agenda when I watch games. I'm just watching basketball.
That doesn't mean laziness. Consistency is a big part of talent. Analogizing back to offense, we've often seen players who can look like Kobe Bryant for a night, once every so often. We don't (usually) say, "See? He can be as good as Bryant when locked in, he's just lazy." We understand that a big part of what makes Kobe better is that he can play at that level consistently, while lesser players can only reach that level occasionally. I mean, sometimes people make the same mistake (IMO) on offense--Rasheed Wallace looking incredible at times made some people say that he was as talented as Garnett or Duncan, he was just lazy. I think most rational observers understood that Wallace, while a fine player, was not as talented as those two guys. He was generally very good, occasionally great. If he were more talented, he could have been great as often as Garnett or Duncan. Even not-so-great, not-so-aware defenders can have nights where everything's clicking. Bad team offenses have nights where everything's clicking and they look great. That doesn't mean that that's their true level if they just tried harder. It means that at their very best, when everything is going right, they can look good. But their true level is a lot lower, it's where their averages end up. Is it possible that this is a great defensive roster that simply doesn't care enough? Anything's possible--I just think that's much, much less likely than that they have two strongly defensively deficient guards, a (small) shooting guard playing out of position and I don't know what's happened to Covington. He's always cared about defense in his career, so I don't think not caring is his problem.
You do a good job explaining why you have the opinion you do and I understand why you think that way. I respectfully agree to disagree.
