Exclusive I'm not sold on Dame/Ant

No. I never said they wouldn't win games. I said I'm not convinced it will be any better than Dame/CJ. We need to actually get to the playoffs and see how this lineup does against another playoff team over a 7 game series before I'm going to be convinced that Dame and Ant can be a winning combo. Winning regular season games is not the problem.

 

I'm pretty sold on them being more complementary on offense than Dame/CJ ever were and at least as good if not a little better than they were on defense. I'm just still not sold on the idea that them being just a little better on defense is good enough.

 

We never got to try Dame/CJ with quality two-way forwards like Grant, Hart and Winslow. (Evan Turner and was as close as we ever got to a real two-way wing.) Or had a bench as deep as ours seems to be.

Even if Dame/CJ --> Dam/Ant is a completely lateral move, it may be enough to produce a much more competitive squad than any of the Dame/CJ teams, just because all the complementary pieces fit together better.

Plus, I think the frenetic play style that Billups has instituted better fits a guard-dominant offense. Two years ago, we were last in the league in scoring in transition frequency--11.8%. This year we're 9th, at 17.6%. Transition scoring naturally favors faster players.

The funny thing is that it feels like Dame has kind of been dragged into this new pace by guys like Hart and Winslow.

I'd really love to see Dame do more pushing the pace himself. He's always been a pick-and-roll guard, but this isn't really a pick-and-roll team anymore. Aside from Nurk, we've swapped out big bulky big men like Kanter, Whiteside and Leonard who can set big screens on the pick. Gone are guys like Aminu and Harkless that you camp in corners, because they fuck up pretty much anything else. It's much more about passing, cutting, shooting and driving from all 5 positions.

The other thing, of course, is to get Dame in more off-ball action. Hurd did a great job of pointing out in the Miami game how distracting it is to have Dame running off screens and scrambling around. The defense has to always keep one eye on Dame even when he doesn't have the ball, which creates all kinds of opportunities for the guy with the ball.

People have been comparing Dame's pick-and-roll style to Curry's off-ball style for years, but this is the first season where it feels like the team is really built to emulate Golden State's offense. We finally have enough ball handlers and shooters and spacing that it makes sense to take the rock out of our best player's hands.

In the end, it may be a lot less about Dame/CJ vs Dame/Ant, and a lot more about Dame/Stotts/Olshey vs Dame/Billups/Cronin. Under Billups/Cronin, we may be quietly transitioning into more of a Warriors style of offense.

Jury is still out on how Ant coexists in the new regime, but early returns are definitely promising.

 

It's interesting to see that in Dame's 6 games he's had the highest usage of his career:


But you compare him to Curry, and it's surprising how close they are historically in usage:


Both guys really do dominate the ball a lot--it's just how it comes within the offense.

 

lmao, another comment in the offseason that aged well...being negative all the time must not be fun man..

 

I'm pretty happy with Simons and ShoeStar.

 

Down the stretch of last nights game, again and again the Heat worked high post picks to get Butler iso'd on Simons or Dame. Once achieved, they'd spread the court and Butler was able to muscle his way to a good look in the paint. Fortunately Portland was able to turn the ball over a couple times and hit every 3 pointer they put up to grab a dramatic victory right at the end, but things really broke right for them.

GPII will eventually give Chauncey a 2nd solid G/F defender (to Hart) to switch in on time outs as games wind down and take away some of this issue, but don't kid yourselves... the defensive end is the problem with playing Simons and Lillard together.

STOMP

 

What's not to like?

 

This is the problem with bumping extremely old threads. I wrote this back in February. We didn't have Grant at that point. We didn't have Sharpe. We had just acquired Hart and Winslow. With that said, the sample size is too small. I like what I'm seeing, but until we get to a 7 game series and beat another good team, it's hard to say if this backcourt will have any more success than the last one. We won plenty of games with Dame and CJ.

Also, I still think that Simons is a point guard, and he'll never reach his full potential while he's paired with Dame.

In the two games without Dame -
30.5 ppg
7.5 assists
4 boards
42% from three
48.7% from the field

In the games with Dame -
19.6 ppg
4 assists
2 rebounds
34% from three
42% from the field.

He's still a good player when he's with Dame, but without Dame he's an All-Star. The main difference is I think he's clearly playing out of position now.

 

I think Dame/Ant are going to be better than Dame/CJ....maybe by quite a bit. From my perspective, to this point at least, Ant does not have anywhere close to the strain of 'MeJ-dribble-the-shot-clock-away-hero-ball-hooplock' that CJ had, in spades. Just keeping that component out of the Dame/Ant combo would make it much better. Ant just seems to make quicker move and quicker decisions

that doesn't mean that the pairing won't have issues, especially relating to defense. So, it's premature to claim it doesn't have failure potential. But for chrissakes, the Dame/CJ combo got a 7 year run; I think the Dame/Ant combo deserves at least a year or two....unless some team offers an all-star forward for Simons

 

I feel like there's a lack of understanding about what this thread is about.

It seems like people are interpreting it to mean: Dame and Ant = bad.

In reality my thread was saying: Dame and Ant = probably the same success as Dame and CJ.

My issue has always been that I hate being on a treadmill. This team has been on a treadmill for at least 4-5 years. I'm encouraged by what I'm seeing so far, but having two worse-than-average defenders at guard is not usually a recipe for success. Everyone is looking at offensive production and that was never the problem.

I specifically called out 2016-2017 as a best case scenario for Dame/Ant


Here is Dame/Ant so far this season:


Offensive production isn't the problem. I'm worried about defense, but as I said we didn't have Grant when I made this thread. We didn't have GPII. We didn't have Sharpe. The team is longer and more versatile. I guess we will see.

 

Agree with you on almost everything. Wish I had some stats that show how often Simons and Lillard are involved in transition scoring. My impression is that it's not that much.

 

sorry for cutting your post way down but I just thought that last paragraph was what I want to respond to

and the main thrust of the 'it-won't-work' argument, has been, and remains, that Dame/Ant will be too much like Dame/CJ so it's likely to fail

well, yeah, it could fail....BUT....the biggest failure of the Dame/CJ combo wasn't really the combo, it was how Olshey viewed the value and talent of CJ. Olshey never tried to build a team around Dame; he tried to build teams around Dame AND CJ and I think it's really safe to say that if Olshey had to choose between Dame and CJ, he'd have taken CJ every single time. He was blind to CJ's limitations and he was blind to how hard it would be to get complementary talent around Dame when he was convinced CJ was an elite player. That ego-driven idiotic belief convinced him that complementary forwards like Aminu & Harkless & Henderson & Turner & Hezonja & Melo & RoCo & Nance would be the pieces that would turn Portland into a contender. Or, maybe he just didn't care if Portland was a contender as long as he could watch CJ play

in other words, the biggest differences between Dame/Cj and Dame/Ant are Cronin and Billups, and that might be enough

 

https://www.nba.com/stats/players/transition?dir=A&sort=TEAM_ABBREVIATION

Points per possession in transition:

Dame - 1.04
Sharpe - 1.04
Hart - 1
Grant - 0.92
Simons - 0.91
Little - 0.82
Keon - 0.7
Winslow - 0.36

As a comparison in 20-21 (last healthy year without tanking):

Melo - 1.32
DJJ - 1.23
Enes - 1.23
Cov - 1.19
Nurk - 1.19
Norm- 1.16
CJ - 1.13
Trent - 1.11
Dame - 0.97
Little - 0.94
Simons - 0.92
Hood - 0.72

Needless to say, while we seemingly get out in transition a lot more often, we aren't very efficient at scoring in these opportunities yet.

 

something else too with all the chatter about the defensive failures of Dame/CJ and projecting that to Dame/Ant:

in the the last 2 'healthy' seasons for Dame/CJ, Portland finished 28th and 29th in defense. This season, Portland is 10th. Now, I know both Dame and Ant have missed games. But even with that, it seems like there is growing evidence that the failure of the Dame/CJ combo on the defensive end wasn't as much a failure of the two players as it was a failure of roster construction and coaching imagination

 

obviously still early, but stats don't show this. According to RAPTOR, both Dame and Ant are actually slightly worse this year on defense than last year.

but what we have now are 3 very capable defenders in the starting lineup to compensate. And multiple guys off the bench who can also help make up for our guards' deficiencies. As you say, the roster construction definitely is better this time around.

 

And I hope that keeps up. The sample size is still very very small, and again, it has to hold up in the playoffs against a team in a 7 game series.

 

yeah

obviously all these numbers are way too small a sample size. But having better defensive talent and better defensive schemes sure appear to be a big difference. I also would imagine that Chauncey can have an impact thru rotation and minimizing the time Dame and Ant spend on the floor together. It kind of seems like he's already doing that. It's much easier to hide one poor defender and much harder to hide two

 

It was mostly roster construction. Stotts had good defenses when he had guys who were willing to play defense.

 

But what if we get into the playoffs and just sweep everyone ...?