OK, here's a positive. Last year's starting guards shot 1-12 tonight. This year's starting guards shot 5-14. Here's a negative (aside from the loss): Our elite defender went 1-7. The guy he guarded went 4-12. 4-12 is not very good. but it's WAY better than 1-7.
If we're looking for negatives . . . Aaron Brooks looks awful. What's his story? I know at one time he was considered and up and comer. If I were GarPax I'd be looking into finding another point guard. You can't count on either Rose or Kirk playing an entire season and Brooks doesn't look up to the challenge of being a rotation player.
Seriously Denny. I don't think you can view this game as anything other than an unmitigated positive. I thought Mirotic might have some troubles in Thib's defensive schemes due to his lack of size, and he looked really good on that end for virtually the entire game. I thought he might have trouble on the boards and that doesn't look like it's the case. Mirotic's offense isn't going to consistently be as good as it was tonight but he's going to be way better in the NBA than he was in Europe. He actually use his handles here with the better spacing and he's going to get the ball here when he's hot. Coming into this season I thought we had one player in Rose who could manufacture points in iso situations. We might have two. How is that not an unmitigated win?
I don't think we can take much away from this game at all. Our starters were +5 or +6 and they didn't play barely more than half the game. The rest were basically auditioning for a spot on the roster. Solomon Jones? What I really saw was that the Wizards look like they improved quite a bit. Pierce for Ariza, added Humphries, and their D-leaguer Glenn Rice Jr. outperformed Mirotic. Our starters were 12-34. Slightly better than 33%. The team shot 33.8%. I thought we added a bunch of offense or something. We had two guys at +/- of -9: Mirotic and McBuckets. Only Brooks was worse at -11, but not much worse. Nah. I don't take much from the game.
Who else has seen enough of Hinrich? Complain all we want about Brooks, I want to see more of him and set Hinrich.
Obviously you don't want to take too much from one game, but I was pleased with the team. Rose looked good, Niko looked great. I was also surprised that Rose only played 14 or so minutes, which I take as a good sign.
