The good news: tonght marks a return for the Grading Consortium. I am calling it Grading Consortium 2.0.
Thus far Grading Consortium 2.0 is:
Bricklayer
Capt. Factorial
Bajaden
MassacheusettsKingsFan
Kingston Jamaica
Cruzdude
Hadlowe
and eventually Uncia03
The bad news: virtually everything else.
P.S. I am careful never to call for direct violence against somebody online, so I will content myself with saying I hope, sincerely hope, that ruination falls upon the houses of that ref crew. They completely dictated the flow and perhaps even to a significant degree the outcome of this game with a ridiculous touch foul whistle parade before half that quite literally saw 4 of our 6 frontcourt players with 3 fouls, and the other 2 with 2 fouls. That's 16 fouls called on our bigs in their 48min of combined action in the first half. Think about that. May their pets run away from home, their gardens wither up and blow away in the wind, and their cable service be crappy.
P.P.S. If you would like to see the effect of 1) building a team with only 1 PG, and 3 players who can create for others; and 2) having that PG missing and 1 of the remaining 2 players who can create for others not allowed to play by the refs who I hope spill coffee on their best Sunday suits, here it is:
Our two starting guards combined for 0 assists in 75min.
Ben McLemore 39min 0ast
Ramon Sessions 36min 0ast
Our entire guardline combined for 2 assists in 96min.
Ben McLemore 39min 0ast
Ramon Sessions 36min 0ast
Ray McCallum 12min 1ast
Nik Stauskas 9min 1ast
Our entire lineup outside of Cuz (a C) and Rudy (a SF) combined for 4 assists in 172min.
Ben McLemore 39min 0ast
Ramon Sessions 36min 0ast
Ray McCallum 12min 1ast
Nik Stauskas 9min 1ast
Jason Thompson 13min 1ast
Carl Landry 28min 0ast
Reggie Evans 14min 0ast
Omri Casspi 14min 1ast
Derrick Williams 1min 0ast
Ryan Hollins 6min 0ast
Oh, and Cuz and Gay having to try to do too much, then notched 13ast...and 12TO.
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 26pts (7-14, 1-3, 11-13) 8reb 8ast 2stl 0blk 7TO
Gay ( B ) -- Like most of the Kings tonight, Rudy Gay was really good in the first quarter. He had a big hand in getting the Mavericks into foul trouble (and would continue getting to the line all night), and poured in a few tough mid range jumpers as he’s known to do. He also set up two of McLemore’s first half 3’s, fed Cousins for a nice layup, and was generally doing a good job moving the ball around. As momentum was going back to the Mavericks in the 2nd quarter, Gay did a solid job of holding the offense together while Cousins was in foul trouble. It wasn’t pretty, and there were forced shots, but he answered a few big Mavs buckets. This included a deep three right after Dirk hit a three to bring the Kings lead back to 9 right before halftime. After the half, it was mostly downhill. Cousins couldn’t stay on the floor, and the Kings offense turned into the Rudy Gay show. That’s where most of his 7 turnovers took place. Do we blame Rudy for his ballhoggery, or the Kings offense for a lack of creativity? I don’t know. It felt like a pretty respectable performance from Gay overall, but serves as evidence that he cannot do it himself, and he never could. This team runs on DeMarcus Cousins, and if he’s not on the court, the Kings are going to struggle. I wouldn’t say Gay was a problem on defense tonight, either. Chandler Parsons hit fair share of threes, but a lot of those came off of total team defensive breakdowns, and Parsons was basically chucking threes every time he touched the ball. Games like tonight are always tough to grade because the team goes from playing their A game to F game in a matter of minutes. This felt like a solid B to me, as Rudy was the one of the few Kings who managed to stay out of foul trouble, and did a decent job holding the offense together for as long as he possibly could.--Mass
Stats: 13min 0pts (0-3, 0-1, 0-2) 4reb 1ast 0stl 0blk 1TO
Thompson ( F ) -- I almost gave JT a D- because he only played 12 minutes, which borders on an INC. However, had he played better, he would have played more, so the onus is on him. He wasn't one minute into the game and he fouled Nowitzki. He liked it so much that he did it again a minute and a half later, and happily headed to the bench, not to be seen again until the 4:55 mark of the 2nd quarter. He topped of the half by getting fouled and missing both free throws. JT got the second half off to a good start by missing an 18 footer. The cherry on top the cake for me was when he just stood and watched Nelson stroll past him to the basket. Nelson missed, but Chandler tipped it in. Shortly thereafter, he was on the bench and his night was over. I suspect that he and Williams must have eaten the same thing. All in all, a dreadful night for Thompson.
--Baja
Stats: 30min 16pts (7-13, 0-0, 2-2) 11reb 5ast 0stl 0blk 5TO
Cousins ( C ) -- what to do with this? This was a game defined not by Cousins' game oncourt, but by how much enforced time he spent off of it. Cuz is leading the league in fouls again at an astounding 4.9 per game in only 30min per, a pace for 7.7 per 48. He's not the only top center with a beef with the refs, Howard and Drummond have been screwed too, but nobody else is as absolutely critical to his team's fortunes (more on that on a thread I will start once these grades are done). And so you had Cuz playing a very good smooth first quarter in which he quickly chased Chandler from the game took several excellent charges (and risky ones given that he had already been given one of JT's fouls to start the game), was strong on the glass, and was battling around Mavs reserves Greg Smith like a chew toy. he added a brilliant pass to a cutting Sessions as we were blowing them out, and then, just when I was thinking "coach, might want to get him out of there before that second foul", boom, there it came when he went up to block a shot at the 3min mark. That was a pretty close call too -- I would say bad but I didn't get a replay of whether he hit his wrist or not. Anyway, its the game within the game for these Kings. By far the most critical play in any Kings game now is a Cousins foul. You would rather the other team hit back to back threes and Stauskas dribble the ball off his foot in between than to see the big guy pick up another foul. Well Cuz did, and it set up our collapse. He got back in in the 2nd, and too quickly got whistled for his 3rd, and the team which was already beginning to sputter then quickly kicked into a full fledged death spiral as Boogie only got 11min of first half action. The huge lead evaporated, the offense stalled, and the wonderful zebras went on a ridiculous whistle spree, which included the revelation that Dirk Nowitzki is made of glass and cannot be touched on his old age, especially not when I am reffing a game where Dirk might get to establish a historical record. The third quarter was the tipper here, and why despite playing a pretty good game while he was out there I had to knock this grade way down. The third quarter was more about him, and the team, than it was the refs. The lead was largely gone, the rest of the team was struggling, Ben's hot streak was over, and in a repeating pattern nobody was able to get Cuz the ball, and he started getting frustrated, started forcing and getting agitated. And if his first three fouls had been weak little things that may or may not have been right, he got his money's worth on his 4th, giving Chandler a Shaq bump so hard that even Chandler's flop looked natural. And so he was gone, and Rudy was left out there alone with...well pretty much nothing. Sessions looking for himself. Ben long gone. PFs who were mentally out to lunch. By the time Cuz got back to start the 4th we were well behind, and he was still not happy. But the thing was, despite a scruffy beginning, it was Cuz scruffy, not aieee! aieee! we're all gonna die scruffy. He comes back, and suddenly the bleeding stops. The entire team was too mentally out of it to make a real run, but the big guy was making enough plays that we hung in and matched them throughout the quarter while he had 8-10pts, 5-6reb and several assists, including one to Ben to get him his first points since the first quarter I think on a backdoor cut. He played well, when he was out there. And one more note on the refs: they faked this. Cuz played 17min, and THEN with the game ruined they let him play the 4th despite several things they would have called fouls in the first half. So he gets to play down the stretch, gets to have his 29-30min in the box score. But he's not able to be on the floor through the heart of the game when it matters. --Brick
Stats: 39min 17pts (6-12, 4-8, 1-1) 4reb 0ast 1stl 1blk 1TO
McLemore ( A- ) -- Ben came into this game in an upward trend and kept it going. He started the first quarter with a real smooth flow in shooting and being very active in defense. In fact Ellis got nothing going in the first half and Devin Harris was not having it easy either thanks to Bens efforts and good backup defense from Cousins. Monta Ellis and Devin Harris are two of the fastest SGs in the league and usually score heavily. Ben Mac was playing an A game in the first half, and his draining four three pointers in our early rush was a big part of why everything looked good early, but somehow disappeared in the third quarter almost reducing his score to B+. However, considering that he had his seasons best performance in scoring and with a good clip (50% FG and 3pt) in addition to the fact that he kept Ellis below his average in scoring and shooting % as well as Harris below his PPM (points per minute), he was contributing his part in a very convincing way. He played a very mature game with rebounds, steal and a block to go with his good stats line.--Kingston
Stats: 36min 18pts (6-9, 2-3, 4-5) 3reb 0ast 0stl 0blk 1TO
Sessions ( D+ ) -- Ramon Sessions is what he is - a score-first point guard. Things started out with a bit of creation for his teammates, but after drive-and-kicks on the first two possessions, Sessions settled in to swinging the ball around the perimeter and basically stuck with that for the rest of the evening. I did count seven entries to Cousins in the post (five in the first quarter), but he only set up four shots in the entire game and he had ZERO ASSISTS because not a single one of those went in - including a very nice pass to Landry who was unable to finish in traffic despite deep post position. Starting in the second quarter, the Mavericks decided to apply pressure on Sessions instead of giving up the game, and consistently were able to stifle Ramon into having to give up the ball before he even got across the timeline. From a scoring standpoint, Ramon did a very good job tonight. Late in the first quarter he came screaming down an open lane and caught a nice pass from Cousins for a two-handed flush that I'm not sure any of us thought he had in him. And while the third quarter was a massive debacle, Sessions was perhaps the only thing keeping it from being...what's worse than a massive debacle?...by being the only Kings player to score in the first seven+ minutes of the half. He scored ten before Rudy finally got one to fall, but then he took an amazingly bad and completely inexplicable fading 8-foot jumper that he tried to kiss off the glass instead of going directly to an open hoop, leading to a Mavericks fast break which put them up 3. It never got better, and Sessions only got one more point in the remainder of the game. Defensively, Sessions wasn't the problem, but he wasn't the solution either. I'm pretty sure that it wasn't Sessions that was leaving Parsons and Nowitzki wide open. He had trouble staying in front of the Mavs guards, particularly Barea, and this resulted in a lot of drive-and-kicks and a few wide open shots from the perimeter - although I will excuse Barea's three as Ramon was actually guarding Barea on the weak side until he was forced to go challenge Dirk, who received the ball at the top of the circle completely unguarded. So to sum up, good scoring, poor but not awful defense, and terrible PG play. The scoring saves him, but only barely - you get a plus on that D, Ramon! --Capt.
Thus far Grading Consortium 2.0 is:
Bricklayer
Capt. Factorial
Bajaden
MassacheusettsKingsFan
Kingston Jamaica
Cruzdude
Hadlowe
and eventually Uncia03
The bad news: virtually everything else.
P.S. I am careful never to call for direct violence against somebody online, so I will content myself with saying I hope, sincerely hope, that ruination falls upon the houses of that ref crew. They completely dictated the flow and perhaps even to a significant degree the outcome of this game with a ridiculous touch foul whistle parade before half that quite literally saw 4 of our 6 frontcourt players with 3 fouls, and the other 2 with 2 fouls. That's 16 fouls called on our bigs in their 48min of combined action in the first half. Think about that. May their pets run away from home, their gardens wither up and blow away in the wind, and their cable service be crappy.
P.P.S. If you would like to see the effect of 1) building a team with only 1 PG, and 3 players who can create for others; and 2) having that PG missing and 1 of the remaining 2 players who can create for others not allowed to play by the refs who I hope spill coffee on their best Sunday suits, here it is:
Our two starting guards combined for 0 assists in 75min.
Ben McLemore 39min 0ast
Ramon Sessions 36min 0ast
Our entire guardline combined for 2 assists in 96min.
Ben McLemore 39min 0ast
Ramon Sessions 36min 0ast
Ray McCallum 12min 1ast
Nik Stauskas 9min 1ast
Our entire lineup outside of Cuz (a C) and Rudy (a SF) combined for 4 assists in 172min.
Ben McLemore 39min 0ast
Ramon Sessions 36min 0ast
Ray McCallum 12min 1ast
Nik Stauskas 9min 1ast
Jason Thompson 13min 1ast
Carl Landry 28min 0ast
Reggie Evans 14min 0ast
Omri Casspi 14min 1ast
Derrick Williams 1min 0ast
Ryan Hollins 6min 0ast
Oh, and Cuz and Gay having to try to do too much, then notched 13ast...and 12TO.
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 26pts (7-14, 1-3, 11-13) 8reb 8ast 2stl 0blk 7TO
Gay ( B ) -- Like most of the Kings tonight, Rudy Gay was really good in the first quarter. He had a big hand in getting the Mavericks into foul trouble (and would continue getting to the line all night), and poured in a few tough mid range jumpers as he’s known to do. He also set up two of McLemore’s first half 3’s, fed Cousins for a nice layup, and was generally doing a good job moving the ball around. As momentum was going back to the Mavericks in the 2nd quarter, Gay did a solid job of holding the offense together while Cousins was in foul trouble. It wasn’t pretty, and there were forced shots, but he answered a few big Mavs buckets. This included a deep three right after Dirk hit a three to bring the Kings lead back to 9 right before halftime. After the half, it was mostly downhill. Cousins couldn’t stay on the floor, and the Kings offense turned into the Rudy Gay show. That’s where most of his 7 turnovers took place. Do we blame Rudy for his ballhoggery, or the Kings offense for a lack of creativity? I don’t know. It felt like a pretty respectable performance from Gay overall, but serves as evidence that he cannot do it himself, and he never could. This team runs on DeMarcus Cousins, and if he’s not on the court, the Kings are going to struggle. I wouldn’t say Gay was a problem on defense tonight, either. Chandler Parsons hit fair share of threes, but a lot of those came off of total team defensive breakdowns, and Parsons was basically chucking threes every time he touched the ball. Games like tonight are always tough to grade because the team goes from playing their A game to F game in a matter of minutes. This felt like a solid B to me, as Rudy was the one of the few Kings who managed to stay out of foul trouble, and did a decent job holding the offense together for as long as he possibly could.--Mass
Stats: 13min 0pts (0-3, 0-1, 0-2) 4reb 1ast 0stl 0blk 1TO
Thompson ( F ) -- I almost gave JT a D- because he only played 12 minutes, which borders on an INC. However, had he played better, he would have played more, so the onus is on him. He wasn't one minute into the game and he fouled Nowitzki. He liked it so much that he did it again a minute and a half later, and happily headed to the bench, not to be seen again until the 4:55 mark of the 2nd quarter. He topped of the half by getting fouled and missing both free throws. JT got the second half off to a good start by missing an 18 footer. The cherry on top the cake for me was when he just stood and watched Nelson stroll past him to the basket. Nelson missed, but Chandler tipped it in. Shortly thereafter, he was on the bench and his night was over. I suspect that he and Williams must have eaten the same thing. All in all, a dreadful night for Thompson.
--Baja
Stats: 30min 16pts (7-13, 0-0, 2-2) 11reb 5ast 0stl 0blk 5TO
Cousins ( C ) -- what to do with this? This was a game defined not by Cousins' game oncourt, but by how much enforced time he spent off of it. Cuz is leading the league in fouls again at an astounding 4.9 per game in only 30min per, a pace for 7.7 per 48. He's not the only top center with a beef with the refs, Howard and Drummond have been screwed too, but nobody else is as absolutely critical to his team's fortunes (more on that on a thread I will start once these grades are done). And so you had Cuz playing a very good smooth first quarter in which he quickly chased Chandler from the game took several excellent charges (and risky ones given that he had already been given one of JT's fouls to start the game), was strong on the glass, and was battling around Mavs reserves Greg Smith like a chew toy. he added a brilliant pass to a cutting Sessions as we were blowing them out, and then, just when I was thinking "coach, might want to get him out of there before that second foul", boom, there it came when he went up to block a shot at the 3min mark. That was a pretty close call too -- I would say bad but I didn't get a replay of whether he hit his wrist or not. Anyway, its the game within the game for these Kings. By far the most critical play in any Kings game now is a Cousins foul. You would rather the other team hit back to back threes and Stauskas dribble the ball off his foot in between than to see the big guy pick up another foul. Well Cuz did, and it set up our collapse. He got back in in the 2nd, and too quickly got whistled for his 3rd, and the team which was already beginning to sputter then quickly kicked into a full fledged death spiral as Boogie only got 11min of first half action. The huge lead evaporated, the offense stalled, and the wonderful zebras went on a ridiculous whistle spree, which included the revelation that Dirk Nowitzki is made of glass and cannot be touched on his old age, especially not when I am reffing a game where Dirk might get to establish a historical record. The third quarter was the tipper here, and why despite playing a pretty good game while he was out there I had to knock this grade way down. The third quarter was more about him, and the team, than it was the refs. The lead was largely gone, the rest of the team was struggling, Ben's hot streak was over, and in a repeating pattern nobody was able to get Cuz the ball, and he started getting frustrated, started forcing and getting agitated. And if his first three fouls had been weak little things that may or may not have been right, he got his money's worth on his 4th, giving Chandler a Shaq bump so hard that even Chandler's flop looked natural. And so he was gone, and Rudy was left out there alone with...well pretty much nothing. Sessions looking for himself. Ben long gone. PFs who were mentally out to lunch. By the time Cuz got back to start the 4th we were well behind, and he was still not happy. But the thing was, despite a scruffy beginning, it was Cuz scruffy, not aieee! aieee! we're all gonna die scruffy. He comes back, and suddenly the bleeding stops. The entire team was too mentally out of it to make a real run, but the big guy was making enough plays that we hung in and matched them throughout the quarter while he had 8-10pts, 5-6reb and several assists, including one to Ben to get him his first points since the first quarter I think on a backdoor cut. He played well, when he was out there. And one more note on the refs: they faked this. Cuz played 17min, and THEN with the game ruined they let him play the 4th despite several things they would have called fouls in the first half. So he gets to play down the stretch, gets to have his 29-30min in the box score. But he's not able to be on the floor through the heart of the game when it matters. --Brick
Stats: 39min 17pts (6-12, 4-8, 1-1) 4reb 0ast 1stl 1blk 1TO
McLemore ( A- ) -- Ben came into this game in an upward trend and kept it going. He started the first quarter with a real smooth flow in shooting and being very active in defense. In fact Ellis got nothing going in the first half and Devin Harris was not having it easy either thanks to Bens efforts and good backup defense from Cousins. Monta Ellis and Devin Harris are two of the fastest SGs in the league and usually score heavily. Ben Mac was playing an A game in the first half, and his draining four three pointers in our early rush was a big part of why everything looked good early, but somehow disappeared in the third quarter almost reducing his score to B+. However, considering that he had his seasons best performance in scoring and with a good clip (50% FG and 3pt) in addition to the fact that he kept Ellis below his average in scoring and shooting % as well as Harris below his PPM (points per minute), he was contributing his part in a very convincing way. He played a very mature game with rebounds, steal and a block to go with his good stats line.--Kingston
Stats: 36min 18pts (6-9, 2-3, 4-5) 3reb 0ast 0stl 0blk 1TO
Sessions ( D+ ) -- Ramon Sessions is what he is - a score-first point guard. Things started out with a bit of creation for his teammates, but after drive-and-kicks on the first two possessions, Sessions settled in to swinging the ball around the perimeter and basically stuck with that for the rest of the evening. I did count seven entries to Cousins in the post (five in the first quarter), but he only set up four shots in the entire game and he had ZERO ASSISTS because not a single one of those went in - including a very nice pass to Landry who was unable to finish in traffic despite deep post position. Starting in the second quarter, the Mavericks decided to apply pressure on Sessions instead of giving up the game, and consistently were able to stifle Ramon into having to give up the ball before he even got across the timeline. From a scoring standpoint, Ramon did a very good job tonight. Late in the first quarter he came screaming down an open lane and caught a nice pass from Cousins for a two-handed flush that I'm not sure any of us thought he had in him. And while the third quarter was a massive debacle, Sessions was perhaps the only thing keeping it from being...what's worse than a massive debacle?...by being the only Kings player to score in the first seven+ minutes of the half. He scored ten before Rudy finally got one to fall, but then he took an amazingly bad and completely inexplicable fading 8-foot jumper that he tried to kiss off the glass instead of going directly to an open hoop, leading to a Mavericks fast break which put them up 3. It never got better, and Sessions only got one more point in the remainder of the game. Defensively, Sessions wasn't the problem, but he wasn't the solution either. I'm pretty sure that it wasn't Sessions that was leaving Parsons and Nowitzki wide open. He had trouble staying in front of the Mavs guards, particularly Barea, and this resulted in a lot of drive-and-kicks and a few wide open shots from the perimeter - although I will excuse Barea's three as Ramon was actually guarding Barea on the weak side until he was forced to go challenge Dirk, who received the ball at the top of the circle completely unguarded. So to sum up, good scoring, poor but not awful defense, and terrible PG play. The scoring saves him, but only barely - you get a plus on that D, Ramon! --Capt.
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