Jason Quick chat " This excuse of being young has to be dicarded"

I mean, he seems like a decent enough dude, but some of the stuff coming out of his mouth is out-and-out wrong.

Talking about the comparisons of last year's team and this year's, and asking who is better:
"The record's the same, but the strength of schedule is much more difficult this year" Not really, JQ. Nice to throw out there, but it's an urban legend. On Jan 23 last year, we were 25-17, right where we are now. The average record of the teams we beat were .474, and the teams we lost to were .590. This year the record of the teams we've beaten were .480 and the teams we lost to were .594. So this year's schedule, based solely on SoS, has been no harder than last year. Then, when we hit the "easy" part of the schedule, we went 16-25 (11-10 home, 5-15 on the road). We had been 17-3 at home, then ended up 28-13. We went from 8-13 on the road during the "good" stretch, to 5-15 for the rest of the season.
"More road wins, more quality wins over teams we never beat" , followed by "They have a lot of quality wins over teams", but then he comes back with the refutation "The team has not won a single road game against the Western Conference playoff-caliber teams"
"They kind of have that maturity, I think. Brandon is better, LMA is better, so we're going to be better b/c of those areas" So wait, do we have a really young team or do we have maturity in our stars, which will make us better in the second half that we were in last year's second half? B/c Brandon and LMA in March 2008 were more mature than in Dec 2007, but it didn't help them a lot in the standings.
"I think if LMA has a goal in mind, he sets his mind and goes for it...they've envisioned a KG type where he can score, defend, distribute, do it all" I didn't hear him say "rebound", which KG has done at an 11.4 clip through his career.
"I don't think the Blazers have made a decision on Raef's contract" KP said it was the "probably the most valuable expiring contract ever" and that it was "more valuable than you probably realize, for the insurance reasons" at the M&G. Maybe Quick's right that they haven't made the decision. But KP said they HAD targeted a player, and whether we used RLEC to get him at the deadline, or got him during the FA season with cap space, they'd get their man.


Other random thoughts...
You know what a fun stat is? Wins over >.500 teams vs. losses to <.500 teams. We're 11-4. We're 14-4 against below-.500 teams, and 11-13 vs. above-.500 teams.
I read in a few articles and team blog posts that people think our offense lost the game last night, b/c we couldn't get the big bucket that normally would come from Blake. Well, J-Bay and Sergio combined for 17 pts, 5 assists and 1 t/o. Our Points per 100 possessions was the 3rd highest we've had in a loss this year (109.47 and just below our average of 110.6). We had 7 turnovers...well below our average of 12 per game.
On average, in our losses we shoot only 3 more FTs per game than 3pointers. In our wins? 6 more.