Looking like it'll be 5 years of playoffs in a row we struggle to solve Dame traps. Clippers then Warriors Warriors Pelicans Warriors Lakers It seems like it should be easy to solve a trap, pass to teammate and have them run 4 on 3. Why can't we solve the trap?
We were starting to before running the 2 big lineups. Dame/CJ/Melo/Trent/Nurk gets a wide open 3 on each trap.
We did, when Gary and Melo were on the wings with Jusuf as the outlet. But tonight they started bringing their bigs up even higher and more aggressively on the traps. Need to work some action to get Dame off the ball a bit. The Whiteside-Nurkic lineups have to go. That was obvious in the first quarter, but Terry doesn't make changes on the fly, ever.
Time for Gary Trent to break out. He starts hitting and they will have to make changes. id even throw a surprise at LA and start Nurkic Whiteside Treat CJ Melo pretend Dame is hurt a bit then bring in Dame for CJ and Gabriel for either Whiteside or CJ and run them hard This would mess them up and they’d have to react to us
The issue is Melo will not be able to keep javale/howard or AD off the glass on defense. And Bron is also a huge issue if he takes Trent in the post. We don’t have the horses we need to matchup without Ariza and Collins. We are also playing way too slow offensively because we have to take it out of bounds and they are picking up full court with token defense. By the time we get in our sets, if the initial action doesn’t work, we are being forced into hero ball. More possessions actually benefits us because we are the better shooting team but we need to pickup the tempo so we are not playing the entire game in the half court.
You need other players who are competent moving the basketball and being aggressive in a 4-on-3 situation. Truly, other than Nurk, if Dame is out of the equation, who moves the basketball on our team? You need to attack the rim for dunks or fouls or kick it out and make 3s. Who do we have that does that? Trent made 3s for the first five games in the bubble, but he's come back down to earth since. You have to have offensive threats that make the opponent pay for covering one guy with two guys 35 feet from the basket. Sadly, we don't have guys that can do that consistently. We have several more-than-adequate one-on-one offensive players, but this is a situation where you need to move the ball around quickly and decisively, not settle for low-percentage midrange shots and you hit open 3s, you dunk, or you get to the line.
You brought up a lot of good points. I like to add that teams has figured out that Trent basically stand in the corner, he doesn’t go running around bunch of Screens like Klay Thompson and Redick. So all they have to do is make sure their man doesn’t leave him. I feel strongly this is on Coach Stotts, he need to call plays that will allow Trent to move around in the offense. And secondly, this whole thing about needing a second playmaker is understandable but also nonsense at the same time. When dame passes out of the trap all his teammates need to do is keep passing to the open man, is it really that hard for someone who has played basketball so long to do that simple task? This is also on coach Stotts for not emphasizing that. Third, why are guys like melo and our guards trying to crowd the paint. With their lack of height or athleticism they won’t make a difference to a bunch of seven footers. They need to stick with their man on the 3 point line. Other teams get way too many open looks, we were really lucky that the Lakers had a really bad shooting night in game one cause otherwise it would’ve been a lost. This is also on coach Stotts And lastly, what is coach Stotts even doing anyway. His offense is “free flow” so he doesn’t really call plays anyway. His free flow offense should also be known as no discipline offense. Just go out there and see what you can do. And his defense has never been good either. He also seem like a guy who can’t fired up his team. We’ve never heard him doing that. It’s always been one of the players, mostly Dame and Nurkic. So if he can’t even motivate his team, especially coming out of halftime, what’s the hell is he even doing? And I’ve hated coach Stotts for a very long time
Some would say personnel. As if we don't have a completely different personnel now than we did in some of those other series... The one major constant? The coach.
That's so weird because we outscored them in the third and fourth quarter in game one... but you are right in a way, I guess. We haven't totally kicked there asses since that first quarter but we'll bring it to them again... I don't know how the series or season will end for our team (assuming you consider in your own negative way that the Blazers are your team) but I know we will show up again and will win at least another game if not this series. Like Dame said after the game, the Lakers don't get two wins for kicking our asses tonight, they just get one. You do understand that right now the series is tied at one game a piece right. Oh and I hope you remember that you said we wouldn't even win one game and we one the very first game. So how the fuck am I supposed to believe you when you say we won't win again?
