If they put Murray on harmless again we need moe to be more active on the offensive boards Edit: harkless* ironic autocorrect
How exactly does resting a guy who had 26 points on 11 for 14 lead to 8 more points? Oh yeah, youre swish3, nevermind.
They played like a 2 seed home team should play. We had 18 turnovers they had 12 we shot a piss poor 74% from the charity and they shot 87% this is where we lost the game. We out rebounded them got more steals and 5 blocks we cant really ask too much more for a good showing. They went to the line 4 more times then we did. If we lost the ball 3 less times and made 4 more charity shots or any combination thereof we win. This loss has nothing to do with Stotts this loss is all on who was on the court. Blazers were a 80% + charity shot through the regular season. We should take game 2
We would have let Meyers shoot eight swish3s s and he's guaranteed to score half of them meaning 12 extra points and a win.
On this one in this series against the Nuggets with Kanter hurt. I agree with you on this. Meyers needs to be playing and he needs to take those shots we all know he can make. Then when they start guarding him he needs to make good timely passes to open shooters or guys cutting to the basket. Meyers and Turner play well with Jake also. He might just be a small adjustment that can make a difference here and there? Just not sure i would take any more minutes from Kanter unless he can't go.
What needs to be changed is your attitude. One away loss to a higher ranked team and we suddenly suck, Stotts does not know anything, Kanter is a liability etc. etc. Stotts is Stotts and Nurkic is not coming back this year, so deal with it. The team sure does. CJ and Aminu had a horrible game that should auto correct itself. (Kanter and Hood had great performances and that will auto regress too ) I also would like to think the refereeing can't get any worse and Dame can shoot better at 3. Overall, we have more room to improve and we will. Portland has a knack for keeping things close and stressful. I expect all games from now on to be close, win or lose. Not that it will happen, but don't be surprised if we become the first team coming from a 3-0 hole. We can't close games but we don't give up either.
I almost forgot why I hardly post here anymore, try answering the points I make instead of trying to insult me, because you don't. Bottom line, we couldn't get any stops, we surrendered 120 in a playoff game, our two starting forwards had the worst plus minus on the team, Milsap scored on them at will and they gave us nothing offensively. Kanter didn't give us even one stop against Jokic, not even one. We can try to outscore them but they don't say defense wins championships for no reason. We need to make major adjustments before the next game or all the geniuses here would prove me wrong until we're swept out of the playoffs
Adjustment I would make is play Hood with the 1st unit more to take advantage his height on Murray. If Harkless is in there attempt to get him the ball on Murray too. No I don't blame Stotts on this lost but I question his decision making sometimes in games. Last night you take hot Hood out replace him with Harkless that didn't do much all night long. Then you put Harkless on Jokic with 4 fouls on him and eventually foul out. Aminu or Harkless not big to guard someone like Jokic. Then he puts Curry another player that hasn't done nothing all night long and leave the hot man Hood on the bench. This was totally was team lost from coach on down.
I know it's not popular on here but in some ways, I agree with you. Though I think Kanter has consistently been good at least on offense and rebounding and the Blazers need him out there. Adjustments need to be made defensively, whether it's lineup changes or just scheme. I thought going into this series that we would really Miss Nurkic, but even with Nurkic stopping Denver is a hard task. It is one game though, it might be too early to make radical changes. The one thing the Blazers can't do vs Denver is beat themselves, so many self-imposed wounds between turnovers, missing ft's, not boxing out, not taking open shots when they had them there is a lot of "fixable" things in there that can tip a series. I'm sure Denver feels like they could've played better too. The objective for the road team in the playoffs is getting one of the 1st two, let's see what they do in Game 2.
Honestly you are not wrong on a few changes. But "MAJOR ADJUSTMENTS" comes off as reactionary instead of responsive. It's a road game against a team they should not beat in Denver. Getting a win in this series will be tough. Getting one on the road will be very tough. Gonna take a lights out shooting night and solid defense all around.
I dont get why people are saying that or pushing the meltdown thread, people are saying the gameplan for game 1 didnt seem to work, and offering ideas for changing it... I havent seen any posts that make me think anyone is losing it, could just be my perspective though.
Adjustments are needed in every playoff series. Usually adjustments don't involve blaming our 2nd best player when that guy was one of only 3 players that actually showed up last night. The fact is that the Blazers are 22-8 since we signed Kanter, which is over a 70% win percentage and many of those games have been without Nurk and/or CJ. Jokic shot 61% from the field (51% during the regular season), 60% from 3 (30% during the regular season), and 100% on 12 free throws (82% during the regular season). He had a great game. We lost a road game to a really good team. Now is not the time to panic. We need to tighten up our defense quite a bit but what I saw was correctable. The bottom line is we had 18 turnovers that led to 23 points for Denver. Several of which were bad passes that gave Denver fast breaks, open shots, and mismatches because our defense wasn't set. The Nuggets had 12 turnovers and we only scored 6 points off those 12 turnovers. The Blazers will be hard pressed to win many games with that big of a deficit in points off turnovers. They're hard to match up with to begin with, we can't let our sloppy offense contribute to our average defense.
There isn't much we need to do different offensively. Aminue/Harkless/CJ all had subpar games but we saw that the role players can get open 3's relatively easy, the amount of open 3's Aminu passed up was astounding, and attacking the paint on a quick slash or rolling/cutting to the paint all resulted in good looks. If we are deep in the paint they collapse and leave open shooters on the wings, if we get an O rebound the bigs might want to look to pass it out in game two. The big problems with our D came from O rebounds where we had trouble resetting our D afterwords as well as transition D. Jokic needs to be bodied and forced to exert effort on every shot, to many open looks from 2, don't care if he wants to shoot the 3 he is bad at it and if he hits them well you gotta live with that. A big problem was Murray was able to get open on the PnR just about everytime becasue we were more worried about Jokic then him and i'm not so sure we should be.
