1) Trap.
2) TRAP!!!
3)
you fools!
4) for all the basketball hipsters who like to claim Scotty Brooks can't coach, rewatch this game on replay, if you can stomach it They had the gameplan, they brought the effort from the opening tip.
5) we did not. Immaturity as a team to let anything like this sneak up on you. And we a) really need some work on how to break a zone; and b) better hope other team's weren't watching this one because our lack of shooting just got exposed in a big way and you better hope that's not picked up around the league or it can make Cuz's life miserable. We aren't a three point shooting team, and they made us into one. Unfortuately a 3 for us is practically a turnover.
6) speaking of Cuz btw. Obviously a poor game, and he, like everybody else, did not come out to play. We deserved to lose this really. BUT, if somebody wants to take the time to put together a tape of every defensive possession in the third quarter with Cuz on the floor (except maybe the first two) he was absolutely brilliant back there as we cut a 17point lead to 1. I mean, he stopped everything and guarded everybody. It was straight out of the Noah handbook.
7) you know what will really pee you off? Your team letting Ish Smith, Nik Collison and Kendrick Perkins go a combined 10-12 from the field for 26pts. American Indians used to cut the noses off of women who cheated on their husbands. A tad extreme of course, but I am thinking maybe making each offending King get a "I let myself get lit up by that bleeping scrub xxx xxxxx" tattoo across his forehead would be about proportional.
8) each win or loss so early in a turnaround season matters. With a brutal 4 game stretch of @MEM, @DAL, SAS, NOP coming up, how we deal with this loss will be critical. You can't let it break your momentum or you can be right back sub .500 quicker than you can say "we took crap for granted, and deservedly got our asses handed to us by a pack of scrubs".
NOTE: the Grading Consortiuum is actively recruiting a new squad of graders for this season. And grading wins is more fun than grading losses. Give us a nudge If interested.
Boxscore
Stats: 39min 23pts (9-19, 1-6, 4-4) 10reb 6ast 2stl 0blk 1TO
Gay ( A- ) -- you know it wasn't a good game for you when your sick guy was your best performer. In fact if he hadn't have joined the sudden teamwide fascination with that newfangled funny line they drew in a semi circle out on there on the court he would have had a very nice game indeed. Looked smooth offensively...most of the time, and was the only guy consistently beating the OKC zone (which apparently none of our other players have seen before). His smooth little post moves and pullups were well designed to slip right into the holes on the 2-3's. He was on the glass again in a big way, which was a big help because Cuz really did not dominate the hordes of scrubby scrappers banging and hanging on him, and our PF rebounding was pathetic (JT and Landry combined for 5). He even hit a feet set three, and had a big gunk in the mid third as we woke up. But the problem was that there was all kinds of bad things hanging off a really good game. he wouldn't leave that one 3pt hit alone, kept on chucking them up apparently buying into his season percentages even though he's never been that guy. And our team was sputtering with patches of 1 on 1 play and selfishness, and it happened several tiems with Rudy, iunclduing crtically at the moment I think we lost the game, we had stormed back to get it to 1, OKC was reeling, and then on three straight possessions first Cuz got doubled, somehow did not find anybody, and turned it over, then Rudy tried to heroball it and goes 1 on the OKC team, bricks it, and then Collison tries the same thing. Idiot, idiot, idiot. well, Cuz at least tries to pass, just no idea hoe he ddin;t find somebody. But Gay and Collison = wannabe heroes/ instead by the time they were done the lead was back to 5 and that big emotional release if we'd taken the lead was lost forever. Anyway, throw in a taunting tech he got on that big dunk for staring down Lamb (NBA, you are a bunch of pencil necked er...cats calling that stuff) and then a big combined coach/Rudy brian fart at the 2:00 mark fo the game, when Malone decided to resort to his cheap little hack a opponent intentional strategy, and it blew up in his face when Rudy didn't foul until the 1:58 mark, and under 2min that cheapness means OKC gets 1 foul shot AND the ball. Anyway, just lots of mistakes and wrong headed stuff. Did make one more really good play though at the 1:30, again being the one person understanding the zone, driving baseline and finding Ben for an open corner three to keep us alive. But it wasn't enough. 23-10-6 while sick is such a great statline that I felt like I had to tip into into the low A's, but the selfish mistakes, 3pt chucking, and several boneheaded things costing us FTs and the like had me eyeing a B+ as well. Still, along with Ben the best we had.
Stats: 28min 2pts (1-2, 0-0, 0-0) 4reb 0ast 1stl 0blk 0TO
Thompson ( D ) -- this was a flat bad effort from JT who got his butt handed to him by Ibaka in the early going on both sides of the ball, watching him drain jumpers one way, and going inside and getting his stuff packed by him the other. Per usual with the new JT, he wasn't on the glass, which was a bigger problem when nobody else was either. Late in the half he got his only points of the game when he randomly pulled up and hit a little facing jumper. Still given the way everybody else was shooting it felt like a relief. You were hoping for a steadier 2nd half, but not encouraged when he went to sleep in the early third and let Ibaka get backdoor on him for a finish. Still, while it was hard to attach to anything JT was doing in particular, Ibaka evenutally quieted down and disappeared offensively. And while JT didn't contribute anything statistically but fouls after the middle 3r4d (and almost had as many fouls as pts and rebs combined) he'll get a little credit, just a little, for helping Cuz get control of the defensive lane. But its only a little -- Cuz played a very strong defensive 2nd half. Jason...just quit getting his butt kicked.
Stats: 34min 16pts (7-15, 0-0, 2-5) 7reb 1ast 4stl 2blk 2TO
Cousins ( B- ) -- tough night to judge. It was obviously maybe his lowest statistical output of the season, and in the early going a good chunk of that was Cuz himself who unfortunately did not show himself immune to the don't-gotta-bring-your-A-effort-its-only-the... blues. But while the Thunder have been using that 2-3 zone with everybody to try to slow the scoring and survive until they get their stars back, rarely do I think its bedeviled a team so much as it did ours, and the biggest problem for Cuz on offense was he couldn't even get the ball to do anything with it. When he did, he was several times victimized by the OKC frontcourt strategy, which has always been loading up on stacks of untalented dirt workers to thug opposing bigs, stand them up, and wait for Ibaka to swoop over to finish off the defense plays. In the early going Cuz experimented with going to the jumper to escape that thug/Ibaka/zone mess, but it was off. And one of the reasons this grade is hard to get right is that Cousins was actually one of the few players to use his head and respond appropriately to the situation. The jumper was off, so he went inside for a couple of nifty post moves through Adams. On defense he picked off two long OKC passes but just did not look like he was physically into the banging war early and both Adams and Perkins got one over him, which is kind of embarrassing.. When he returned in the second Cuz looked more focused in all aspects, but Collison suddenly looked shaky, and while Ben came alive as a desperately needed shooter, he still couldn't handle or set Cuz up against this great and never before heard of thing called a "2-3 zone". And so Cousins looked more solid, but was simply not involved in enough plays to make much of an impact. One point that had little to do with anyone but Cuz himself is that he looked sluggish on the boards. Not sure what was up there, but there were lots of OKC bigs swarming around in there, and they flat outworked us while Cuz did not clear his area and dominate the glass. Adding to the grading difficulty was that Cuz came out in the third and played a tremendous quarter quite obviously trying to make it happen on defense, and I think he did as we came storming back into the game. At one point on consecutive plays he guarded Reggie Jackson and then Jeremy Lamb on the perimeter, just deciding to stop the guards himself. Then he threw Adams out of the way inside to rotate to cut off penetration. Then charged out to force Ibaka to alter the trajectory of his defense, aggressively cut off penetration gain, blocked a shot, and probably knitted a throw rug while he was it. He just challenged seemingly every single OKC shot. And he was making some great plays on the other end too including a great catch on a drawn up lock and lob play out of the timeout . But he simply did not have any lengthy dominant stretches on the offensive side of the ball and we struggled to get the ball to him consistently enough for their to be any rhythm to it. Anyway, I'm going to settle for an inbetween grade here. This was a more saavy effort than the raw numbers show, in particular on defense. In fact really statistically and stylewise this was more like a Marc Gasol game. But the problem is, we are not a terribly talented team and we need Cuz to be the monster, and he simply wasn't. Boardwork was particularly disappointing. He grabs 11 or 12 here and I might have had to rethink this grade.
Stats: 28min 16pts (6-9, 4-6, 0-0) 2reb 2ast 0stl 0blk 1TO
McLemore ( B+ ) -- the shootist has finally arrived...or at least for 1 game. But this is three straight games of something from Ben, and probably even more important than the oncourt something is the sudden burst of confidence. And for that I think you have to look prominently over on the sidelines a this coach who may have saved his career, or at least his starting spot, by making a very conscious effort to push him forward 3 games ago. There was a bit of luck involved in Phoenix, where the momentum almost died until the game went to OT and Ben could contribute again. And now this -- a third straight game of Ben not looking scared and in this one, of him critically doing something not one other person the team showed themselves capable of doing: hitting a three point shot. Ben was 4-6 from three. Everybody else was 2-18. Ugh. Now the thing here was...the rest of the game wasn't necessarily very good. Sometimes when you grade you play a little game and say, how would this grade have gone if this guy had just made a couple more shots, or just missed them? Well...maybe not so hot actually. He did not have the same defneive impact he has been having, Lamb probably outplayed him on the whole, and he struggled along with the rest of our guards to contain Telfair and the little quick OKC PG brigade. He wasn't on the glass this time. And there were a number of little ballhandling and clock management mistakes as eh was of little help in breaking the zone except with that shooting. On one early play he wasn't aware of the shotlcock, then lost his dribble leading to a 24sec violation. He threw a terrible backcourt pass turnover at a critical point with us down 3 late in the 3rd. In the mid-4th with us again threatening he made a good decision to drive the ball and then somehow threw up a wild clank of the backboard on the wide open short runner. And yet...the game felt good. We got a push from Ben on offense. And while most of the practical push was just the fact he hit those threes, the stylistic takeaway is that he was aggressive and confident. His threes were mostly of the good variety...and by that I mean he ran to a spot and guys found him and he drained them (including a big one from Gay at the 1:30 mark as hung on), as opposed to him trying to create them himself and making a mess. But several times in this game he again showed an aggressive little push and suddenly created very professional looking pullups and turnarounds. Obviously only a couple went down, but the mere fact that he was able to conceive of them and execute them is something new that has him looking more like an NBA SG than anything he has done thus far in his career. I held back on this grade because of this realization though: the push tonight was almost entirely that he was hitting his threes and nobody else could. If he goes 2-6 rather than 4-6, all of a sudden, this isn't a great overall game. Might even be in the Cs. Its 10pts 2reb 2ast and indifferent defense. He did hit those threes, and that was big for a team crying out for some shooting. But alone that's not quite an A.
Stats: 35min 12pts (5-15, 1-6, 1-1) 5reb 7ast 2stl 0blk 2TO
Collison ( C- ) -- about the shakiest we've seen him. Teamed with Cuz to play good defense on the first Jackson possesion, but on the night really was not able to consistently stop him, especially late in the game when we needed it most. He started the game was his shot flat off, but some of that was his own fault, as he also started it unsettled as a floor general and taking shots he normally does not take. Like most of the team seemed confused by the zone, and despite not being a good 3pt shooter from up top resorted to trying to bomb away from out there anyway. Of course even when we finally did rotate him down into his preferred corner threes, he missed those too. Eventually he would settle a little, but I think his statline looks better than the game felt. Late in the third with us making a big comeback, he started killing us with turnovers that were just dumb and selfish, and a really poorly timed hero drive back to back with one from Gay that wiped away our best chance to take the lead in the game. He would hit his only three at the end of the quarter to keep us close, was definitely the only guard who could be trusted to get ANYTHING going for others against the zone, but this wasn't the same effective saavy floor leader we have seen thus far and that would be as big a concern as anything given the lack of options behind him. Anyway, just one game, but he guy you need to be your smartest guy really wasn't tonight, and his unsettled response to the zone bled over to the rest of the team.
2) TRAP!!!
3)
4) for all the basketball hipsters who like to claim Scotty Brooks can't coach, rewatch this game on replay, if you can stomach it They had the gameplan, they brought the effort from the opening tip.
5) we did not. Immaturity as a team to let anything like this sneak up on you. And we a) really need some work on how to break a zone; and b) better hope other team's weren't watching this one because our lack of shooting just got exposed in a big way and you better hope that's not picked up around the league or it can make Cuz's life miserable. We aren't a three point shooting team, and they made us into one. Unfortuately a 3 for us is practically a turnover.
6) speaking of Cuz btw. Obviously a poor game, and he, like everybody else, did not come out to play. We deserved to lose this really. BUT, if somebody wants to take the time to put together a tape of every defensive possession in the third quarter with Cuz on the floor (except maybe the first two) he was absolutely brilliant back there as we cut a 17point lead to 1. I mean, he stopped everything and guarded everybody. It was straight out of the Noah handbook.
7) you know what will really pee you off? Your team letting Ish Smith, Nik Collison and Kendrick Perkins go a combined 10-12 from the field for 26pts. American Indians used to cut the noses off of women who cheated on their husbands. A tad extreme of course, but I am thinking maybe making each offending King get a "I let myself get lit up by that bleeping scrub xxx xxxxx" tattoo across his forehead would be about proportional.
8) each win or loss so early in a turnaround season matters. With a brutal 4 game stretch of @MEM, @DAL, SAS, NOP coming up, how we deal with this loss will be critical. You can't let it break your momentum or you can be right back sub .500 quicker than you can say "we took crap for granted, and deservedly got our asses handed to us by a pack of scrubs".
NOTE: the Grading Consortiuum is actively recruiting a new squad of graders for this season. And grading wins is more fun than grading losses. Give us a nudge If interested.
Boxscore
Stats: 39min 23pts (9-19, 1-6, 4-4) 10reb 6ast 2stl 0blk 1TO
Gay ( A- ) -- you know it wasn't a good game for you when your sick guy was your best performer. In fact if he hadn't have joined the sudden teamwide fascination with that newfangled funny line they drew in a semi circle out on there on the court he would have had a very nice game indeed. Looked smooth offensively...most of the time, and was the only guy consistently beating the OKC zone (which apparently none of our other players have seen before). His smooth little post moves and pullups were well designed to slip right into the holes on the 2-3's. He was on the glass again in a big way, which was a big help because Cuz really did not dominate the hordes of scrubby scrappers banging and hanging on him, and our PF rebounding was pathetic (JT and Landry combined for 5). He even hit a feet set three, and had a big gunk in the mid third as we woke up. But the problem was that there was all kinds of bad things hanging off a really good game. he wouldn't leave that one 3pt hit alone, kept on chucking them up apparently buying into his season percentages even though he's never been that guy. And our team was sputtering with patches of 1 on 1 play and selfishness, and it happened several tiems with Rudy, iunclduing crtically at the moment I think we lost the game, we had stormed back to get it to 1, OKC was reeling, and then on three straight possessions first Cuz got doubled, somehow did not find anybody, and turned it over, then Rudy tried to heroball it and goes 1 on the OKC team, bricks it, and then Collison tries the same thing. Idiot, idiot, idiot. well, Cuz at least tries to pass, just no idea hoe he ddin;t find somebody. But Gay and Collison = wannabe heroes/ instead by the time they were done the lead was back to 5 and that big emotional release if we'd taken the lead was lost forever. Anyway, throw in a taunting tech he got on that big dunk for staring down Lamb (NBA, you are a bunch of pencil necked er...cats calling that stuff) and then a big combined coach/Rudy brian fart at the 2:00 mark fo the game, when Malone decided to resort to his cheap little hack a opponent intentional strategy, and it blew up in his face when Rudy didn't foul until the 1:58 mark, and under 2min that cheapness means OKC gets 1 foul shot AND the ball. Anyway, just lots of mistakes and wrong headed stuff. Did make one more really good play though at the 1:30, again being the one person understanding the zone, driving baseline and finding Ben for an open corner three to keep us alive. But it wasn't enough. 23-10-6 while sick is such a great statline that I felt like I had to tip into into the low A's, but the selfish mistakes, 3pt chucking, and several boneheaded things costing us FTs and the like had me eyeing a B+ as well. Still, along with Ben the best we had.
Stats: 28min 2pts (1-2, 0-0, 0-0) 4reb 0ast 1stl 0blk 0TO
Thompson ( D ) -- this was a flat bad effort from JT who got his butt handed to him by Ibaka in the early going on both sides of the ball, watching him drain jumpers one way, and going inside and getting his stuff packed by him the other. Per usual with the new JT, he wasn't on the glass, which was a bigger problem when nobody else was either. Late in the half he got his only points of the game when he randomly pulled up and hit a little facing jumper. Still given the way everybody else was shooting it felt like a relief. You were hoping for a steadier 2nd half, but not encouraged when he went to sleep in the early third and let Ibaka get backdoor on him for a finish. Still, while it was hard to attach to anything JT was doing in particular, Ibaka evenutally quieted down and disappeared offensively. And while JT didn't contribute anything statistically but fouls after the middle 3r4d (and almost had as many fouls as pts and rebs combined) he'll get a little credit, just a little, for helping Cuz get control of the defensive lane. But its only a little -- Cuz played a very strong defensive 2nd half. Jason...just quit getting his butt kicked.
Stats: 34min 16pts (7-15, 0-0, 2-5) 7reb 1ast 4stl 2blk 2TO
Cousins ( B- ) -- tough night to judge. It was obviously maybe his lowest statistical output of the season, and in the early going a good chunk of that was Cuz himself who unfortunately did not show himself immune to the don't-gotta-bring-your-A-effort-its-only-the... blues. But while the Thunder have been using that 2-3 zone with everybody to try to slow the scoring and survive until they get their stars back, rarely do I think its bedeviled a team so much as it did ours, and the biggest problem for Cuz on offense was he couldn't even get the ball to do anything with it. When he did, he was several times victimized by the OKC frontcourt strategy, which has always been loading up on stacks of untalented dirt workers to thug opposing bigs, stand them up, and wait for Ibaka to swoop over to finish off the defense plays. In the early going Cuz experimented with going to the jumper to escape that thug/Ibaka/zone mess, but it was off. And one of the reasons this grade is hard to get right is that Cousins was actually one of the few players to use his head and respond appropriately to the situation. The jumper was off, so he went inside for a couple of nifty post moves through Adams. On defense he picked off two long OKC passes but just did not look like he was physically into the banging war early and both Adams and Perkins got one over him, which is kind of embarrassing.. When he returned in the second Cuz looked more focused in all aspects, but Collison suddenly looked shaky, and while Ben came alive as a desperately needed shooter, he still couldn't handle or set Cuz up against this great and never before heard of thing called a "2-3 zone". And so Cousins looked more solid, but was simply not involved in enough plays to make much of an impact. One point that had little to do with anyone but Cuz himself is that he looked sluggish on the boards. Not sure what was up there, but there were lots of OKC bigs swarming around in there, and they flat outworked us while Cuz did not clear his area and dominate the glass. Adding to the grading difficulty was that Cuz came out in the third and played a tremendous quarter quite obviously trying to make it happen on defense, and I think he did as we came storming back into the game. At one point on consecutive plays he guarded Reggie Jackson and then Jeremy Lamb on the perimeter, just deciding to stop the guards himself. Then he threw Adams out of the way inside to rotate to cut off penetration. Then charged out to force Ibaka to alter the trajectory of his defense, aggressively cut off penetration gain, blocked a shot, and probably knitted a throw rug while he was it. He just challenged seemingly every single OKC shot. And he was making some great plays on the other end too including a great catch on a drawn up lock and lob play out of the timeout . But he simply did not have any lengthy dominant stretches on the offensive side of the ball and we struggled to get the ball to him consistently enough for their to be any rhythm to it. Anyway, I'm going to settle for an inbetween grade here. This was a more saavy effort than the raw numbers show, in particular on defense. In fact really statistically and stylewise this was more like a Marc Gasol game. But the problem is, we are not a terribly talented team and we need Cuz to be the monster, and he simply wasn't. Boardwork was particularly disappointing. He grabs 11 or 12 here and I might have had to rethink this grade.
Stats: 28min 16pts (6-9, 4-6, 0-0) 2reb 2ast 0stl 0blk 1TO
McLemore ( B+ ) -- the shootist has finally arrived...or at least for 1 game. But this is three straight games of something from Ben, and probably even more important than the oncourt something is the sudden burst of confidence. And for that I think you have to look prominently over on the sidelines a this coach who may have saved his career, or at least his starting spot, by making a very conscious effort to push him forward 3 games ago. There was a bit of luck involved in Phoenix, where the momentum almost died until the game went to OT and Ben could contribute again. And now this -- a third straight game of Ben not looking scared and in this one, of him critically doing something not one other person the team showed themselves capable of doing: hitting a three point shot. Ben was 4-6 from three. Everybody else was 2-18. Ugh. Now the thing here was...the rest of the game wasn't necessarily very good. Sometimes when you grade you play a little game and say, how would this grade have gone if this guy had just made a couple more shots, or just missed them? Well...maybe not so hot actually. He did not have the same defneive impact he has been having, Lamb probably outplayed him on the whole, and he struggled along with the rest of our guards to contain Telfair and the little quick OKC PG brigade. He wasn't on the glass this time. And there were a number of little ballhandling and clock management mistakes as eh was of little help in breaking the zone except with that shooting. On one early play he wasn't aware of the shotlcock, then lost his dribble leading to a 24sec violation. He threw a terrible backcourt pass turnover at a critical point with us down 3 late in the 3rd. In the mid-4th with us again threatening he made a good decision to drive the ball and then somehow threw up a wild clank of the backboard on the wide open short runner. And yet...the game felt good. We got a push from Ben on offense. And while most of the practical push was just the fact he hit those threes, the stylistic takeaway is that he was aggressive and confident. His threes were mostly of the good variety...and by that I mean he ran to a spot and guys found him and he drained them (including a big one from Gay at the 1:30 mark as hung on), as opposed to him trying to create them himself and making a mess. But several times in this game he again showed an aggressive little push and suddenly created very professional looking pullups and turnarounds. Obviously only a couple went down, but the mere fact that he was able to conceive of them and execute them is something new that has him looking more like an NBA SG than anything he has done thus far in his career. I held back on this grade because of this realization though: the push tonight was almost entirely that he was hitting his threes and nobody else could. If he goes 2-6 rather than 4-6, all of a sudden, this isn't a great overall game. Might even be in the Cs. Its 10pts 2reb 2ast and indifferent defense. He did hit those threes, and that was big for a team crying out for some shooting. But alone that's not quite an A.
Stats: 35min 12pts (5-15, 1-6, 1-1) 5reb 7ast 2stl 0blk 2TO
Collison ( C- ) -- about the shakiest we've seen him. Teamed with Cuz to play good defense on the first Jackson possesion, but on the night really was not able to consistently stop him, especially late in the game when we needed it most. He started the game was his shot flat off, but some of that was his own fault, as he also started it unsettled as a floor general and taking shots he normally does not take. Like most of the team seemed confused by the zone, and despite not being a good 3pt shooter from up top resorted to trying to bomb away from out there anyway. Of course even when we finally did rotate him down into his preferred corner threes, he missed those too. Eventually he would settle a little, but I think his statline looks better than the game felt. Late in the third with us making a big comeback, he started killing us with turnovers that were just dumb and selfish, and a really poorly timed hero drive back to back with one from Gay that wiped away our best chance to take the lead in the game. He would hit his only three at the end of the quarter to keep us close, was definitely the only guard who could be trusted to get ANYTHING going for others against the zone, but this wasn't the same effective saavy floor leader we have seen thus far and that would be as big a concern as anything given the lack of options behind him. Anyway, just one game, but he guy you need to be your smartest guy really wasn't tonight, and his unsettled response to the zone bled over to the rest of the team.
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