Inside Advantage: Blazers?

You have nothing to worry about. Oden "murdering" Mutombo happened in the second half of a blowout during game 1. Did you not notice how Mutombo dominated on the rebounds and kept your players for penetrating into the lane? I think his loss will give Portland a big advantage in this series.

 

To bad Coach Nate doesn’t have too much faith in Bayless (maybe I don't either). Other than Roy, I can't think of another player on our team who has the ability to make a move on the perimeter, drive into the paint, and draw contact. In a perfect world experiment, I see Coach starting Bayless, instructing him to drive directly at Yao on EVERY SINGLE PLAY, until Yao picks up two fouls in the first quarter. I feel that this would not be too difficult a plan to execute.

In reality, if the refs aren’t even calling fouls when Roy gets hammered in the paint. They’re sure as hell not going to call the foul when Bayless is drawing contact. Especially in Houston.

 

Smaller players do seem to give Oden the most trouble. Stripping the ball from him and getting by him causing him to foul them. But he's going to kill Yao!

 

Small players only give Oden trouble in that he worries about backing them down because he knows they're going to flop on him.

 

And, he wears himself out dunking on them.

The whole stripping the ball thing is mostly in the past. Sure, like anybody, he'll occasionally get stripped, but not nearly as much as he did early in the season. He does a much better job keeping his body between the ball and the defender until he's ready to shoot/dunk. Early in the season he was exposing the ball to the defense way too early, and that's why he was getting stripped so much.

BNM

 

The bigger advantage to Greg and our bigs will be offensive rebounding when Yao is out. Especially if we go with Greg/Joel in the lineup again, that just killed Houston on the boards in Game 2.

 

I agree. Deke had five boards in five minutes. Regardless of the fact he is as old as Oden looks, he was still an elite defender up to the second his quadriceps tendon blew. What a shitty way for such a great career to end.

 

The problem Houston faces is that if we go big in the front line, the Rockets will have trouble matching without Yao. Usually you can counter by going small, pulling the bigs out of the lane and running backdoors or have the smaller players knock down 15 footers. The problem is Chuck Hayes has the same shooting range as Joel Przybilla and Landry has yet to fully come back to his pre-injury form. It means we can go big and pack the middle without penalty.