Disappointed!
Can I take back my desire to make sure Rudy played in this one now? Not that Rudy alone lost it. In fact in many ways this was the most "solid" loss we had all season. No great story to it. We were better in the first half, worse after half, and we lost. No grand collapse, no records shattered, no upset. Pretty evenly matched teams, but we simply did not get enough good performances, and got pulled down by various gremlins we have been trying to hide under the carpet. Rudy heard national TV and decided to mess up his rep with a return to forcing selfishly. Ben turned back into a pumpkin at the worst time. Nik hit a couple of shots, and then the Pelicans drew a target around him and attacked him right out of the game. Landry absolutely refused to guard Ryan Anderson, and so the Pelicans decided they would just keep on getting open threes until he changed his mind. McCallum still does nothing half the time he's out there. We STILL don't have anybody to stop our old player Reke, who reeked for the first half, then came on strong and just went around Ben and Rudy like they were standing still after half (which in turn frees Davis up)., and hit the dagger on a dupplicate move of his very first game winner for us his rookie year (vs. Denver, over Kenyon Martin). Even Malone made some odd substitution decisions, leaving people on for mysterious amounts of time, forgetting about others (JT may have been our 2nd best player and designated Brow stopper but the Pels were able to chase him from the game by playing Anderson).
On a more positive note Boogie v. Davis was good. Boogie at least took this national TV opportunity to burnish his burgeoning cred. And if we could clone 4 more copies of Casspi, we might actually have ourselves a bench.
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: 37min 15pts (6-17, 0-2, 3-5) 4reb 5ast 1stl 0blk 4TO
Gay ( D+ ) -- not exactly the performance to stoke the enthusiasm for tomorrow's press conference for his new contract. Got off to a slow start in this one and only had 5pts and 1 reb through the first quarter. He returned at the 8min mark of the second but in what would become a nightlong issue despite the Pelicans not having a good matchup to slow him (they tried both little guards and Luke Babbit) he was still cold and not able to take advantage. What finally got him going was a hustle play, coming up with a strong offensive board and follow off a missed FT. And he followed that up clicking into gear, added another jumper, a three, a good hustle board...the lead opened and it looked like it was just a slow start. Was not to be though. We came out in the third repeately going to him in the post vs. Tyreke, but he could just never gain a clear enough advantage, kept getting the ball poked away by the guards he was tryng to overpower, and worst of all really began to play a particularly selfish forcing style of basketball that became a poster child for an offensive collapse that saw us notch 0 assists for the entire quarter. Worse, Tyreke began to awake the other way and open up a can of whoopass on us again (he dropped 18pts 4reb and 5ast in the second half). And because he was forcing, and not hitting, Gay was almost useless as a supposed stabilizer to get us through those scary bench moments. There was a lone 3pt play at the 9 min mark, but it would be the last time Gay scored, and worse than not scoring he continued to get hurt on defense and take offensive touches away from the Big Guy who WAS scoring. Unfortunately timed bad game, and I'm not sure whether to hope it was because of, or that it had nothing to do with the possible Achilles tendinitis. Another national TV game on Thursday. TNT this time. Has to be better.--Brick
Stats: 25min 15pts (6-10, 0-0, 3-4) 9reb 0ast 0stl 0blk 2TO
Thompson ( A- ) -- just to prove that last year was not a fluke, Jason came out here and once again, get this, pretty much took it to Anthony Davis. JT's work against some of the league's top PFs remains his single best argument why he should stay the starting PF. But tonight it wasn't just his nearly unique in the league ability to get into Davis and make his life difficult defensively, he also came out of the gates scoring, and in fact at halftime led us in scoring, and had basically matched Davis point for point. There were one or two post moves, but mostly he was a beneficiary of our strong first half ball movement, and in particular of the attention they were paying Cousins, and Cuz's willingness to quickly move the ball to beat those doubles. He moved to the hoop and guys were finding him. What was surprising was the degree to which Davis's presence really didn't bother him defensively. He ended up getting his 10th point of the first quarter unintentionally throwing the ball off the glass and seeing it ricochet in. We went with the shorter bench rotations again, and kept JT on as a fullsized center to anchor the bench teams inside, but other than drawing a few fouls on Ajinca trying to hold him to keep him away from boards, he wasn't as effective. Per usual that bench crew needed points, and while JT was thriving early as the forgotten man with the starters, he wasn't going to beat guys 1 on 1. After leaving the game for a spell after clumsily running over Ryan Anderson in the open court for his 2nd foul, he returned for the final minutes of the half (replacing Cuz who also had 2 fouls), resumed playing really good defense on Davis, and even went right at Davis and got a strong hoop right in his chest in the final minute of the half. Unfortunately there was a halftime break however, and the game turned thereafter, and soon didn't even include JT at all. We came out flat in the third, and while JT was still playing some very active/physical defense on Davis for a while, the ball movement died, our guards resumed absolutely refusing to hit an open shot, and then the twin disasters of Ryan Anderson and Reke waking up happened. And the Ryan Anderson thing was the real kicker. The Pelicans realized they were losing the big man battle of Ajinca/Davis vs. Cousins/Thompson, and so after half they largely gave up trying to play a big center on Cuz, and instead went to Anderson, who apparently just entered the league yesterday so surprised did our guys seem by his 3pt shooting game. Malone got spooked that JT couldn't stay with him on the perimeter (and really, since JT's job was to stop Davis, it would have been Boogie staying with Anderson if we wanted to keep the JT/Davis matchup), went to the bench first for Landry with apparent instructions to absolutely not guard the big guy at the 3pt line under any circumstances, and then to Casspi, who was a logical matchup. And with Casspi again providing some bigtime hustle as well as having the size/mobility to stay with Anderson, JT was basically finished for the rest of the game. Wasn't his play, it was a smart substitution by the Pels, and a coaching decision on our part. --Brick
Stats: 34min 24pts (10-18, 0-0, 4-7) 17reb 3ast 0stl 2blk 3TO
Cousins ( A- ) -- well, if there was one piece of good news about this thing, it was that Boogie showed well against Davis in a game people were paying attention to, setting the potential stage for a natural Boogie v. Brow rivalry in upcoming years if we can just lock in this whole winning thing. And in the early going it was a noticeably smart and focused Cuz, almost too interested in playing it right. He had multiple strong contests form the beginning of the game, including one on Davis insde, and he came up with a great contest of an A.D. jumper at the end of the first, forcing an airball. And he did it while avoiding fouls on a night when he and the refs finally weren't a major story (a couple of his calls actually were of the ticky-tack variety, but he was barely limited minutes wise this time). He was on the glass from the beginning, mopping up everything on the defensive boards. And he was efficient offensively, very efficient as the Pelicans were doubling him and Cuz was patiently picking them apart with his passing. A picking apart that would have been more obvious in his statline if Ben McLemore was a better shooter than my great aunt Myrtle. He flashed in a couple of strong offensive moves, a drive right through the scrawnies the Pels call a frontcourt when Asik is out, a nice hook shot over the middle, he got his 6th point while flipping up a shot while spinning and getting hit, and ended up in a heap with Davis as A.D. tripped over him. But in general he was making the right pass, the right play, not forcing any issue, and I think he only had 5 or 6 shots by halftime. But his overall play was very strong, and a beefy 8pt 9reb type half where you could feel his impact, while A.D. was scoring more, but had kind of a soft and empty 14pts 3reb. Unfortunately we did not come out of half in good shape, and Cuz was about the only King who seemed to have kept his focus. And as other guys started to really struggle and force, the gap between the play of Cuz and the rest of the team only got larger. He started getting aggressive, maybe a bit too much as he started to get into it with the refs a bit. But whatever it was, he surged at the end of the quarter and pretty much singlehandedly was holding us in it. Got a strong +1 finish. Made a spectacular chasedown block in the open court that you thought surely was going to get him his 4th foul, but he got it clean. Added another drive, and until a poor selfish force in the final seconds that ended up costing us a hoop the other way (and on which it was blatantly obvious he had no confidence in McCallum standing wide open 10 feet to his right) was carrying us. We probably sat him too long in the early 4th, as he only had 3 fouls, and we needed every minute of his we could get. When he did get back in you were treated to the frustrating lack of recognition by his teamamtes, as the Pels got away with guarding him with Ryan Anderson because our nitwits couldn't recognize the obvious mismatcha dn execute a simple ball reversal to go pound on it. He played big down the stretch again but we were never able to get the stops to close the gap. We poured in 31 in the 4th...and let the Pels counter with 30. Boogie got a big muscle +1 at the 1:10 mark to cut the lead back to 3 and give us a legit shot, but it was old friend Tyreke who ended up once again rubbing our noses in it, duplicating his game winning move rookie season over Kenyon Martin, droving into the lane, spinning, and sinking the little fallaway jumper over Cuz's outstretched hand. Good battle, and if there was any comfort for me in this loss, it was in that the Boogie rehabilitation narrative was not damaged. He did his part, he just didn't get much help this time. --Brick
Stats: 29min 2pts (1-6, 0-3, 0-0) 3reb 1ast 1stl 0blk 2TO
McLemore ( D+ ) -- Tough shooting night for Ben. In 29 minutes of play, he managed two points on one of six shooting while going zero for three from hinterland. About the only thing Ben did very well tonight was play defense. Never thought I'd say that! He started off the game by staying in front of Gordon and making him give up the ball. However at the other end, he took a pass from Collison just past mid-court and drove to the basket and missed. He followed a bit later with a drive down the left baseline against two defenders and threw up a wild looking shot that had no chance of going in. Both shots were highly contested, but his next miss was a wide open three from from the right elbow. No good from there, lets try it from the left elbow. Same result! He went to the bench at 1:13 of the first quarter and came back at 6:31 of the second quarter. Defensively, once again he was solid. In one instance he did a great job on Holiday. He managed to squeeze in both his turnovers in the remaining time in the second quarter. One a bad pass, and the other a travel. He started the third quarter by blowing down the lane and laying it in for his only basket of the night. He managed two more misses in the second half. One, another wide open three from the right corner, and the other, a pull up 10 footer that he left short. His one glorious moment came in the last two minutes of the game when the Kings were trying desperately to claw their way back into the game, when he stole the ball from Gordon. Too little too late though. Believe it or not, Ben actually got a plus one in the plus/minus rating. And I believe Cousins got a minus 8. Someone explain to me why that rating has any merit. I]--Baja[/I]
Stats: 31min 13pts (3-10, 2-3, 5-6) 2reb 11ast 0stl 0blk 0TO
Collison ( C ) -- Collison started the game out on fire. He tallied up 5 assists in the first quarter and another 3 in the second quarter. While in my opinion two of those assists were home cooking, there were several very good ones, including a very nice leading entry pass to a fronted Cousins for a dunk. Going into half, Collison was 2-4 (2-3 from three) and was 5-5 from the line for 11 points to go along with his 8 assists. Then he came in for the third quarter and completely forgot how to play. He went 0-4, repeatedly passing up good shots to set worse shots and contributed zero assists - it wasn't that people were missing, because he only set up one shot in his 8.5 minutes in the third. It was a miserable quarter, but things didn't get better when he went to the bench, and despite McCallum doing his best Ramon Sessions impression Coach Malone iced Collison on the bench for nearly a full 12 minutes. It's a shame, because when Collison came back in the fourth, he sparked the team. The Pelicans committed two consecutive turnovers and Collison threw ahead to Omri for a layup on the first and was on the receiving end of a layup only a few seconds later to get the team and the crowd back into it. He then fed Cousins in the paint for an and-1 before New Orleans finally put the hammer down. He rushed and missed a "freebie" three that could have turned into a huge four-point play when Cousins was fouled while he was in the process of shooting, and that was basically that. Defensively, his numbers will look very good tonight. My charting has Collison allowing 5 points on 9 shots, which is fantastic, but it is worth noting that the Pelican were able to peel Darren off the ballhandler with screens basically at will - it's just that they chose to do this in the first half when our help defense was outstanding. Perhaps going away from that was part of what gave them some success in the third quarter. At any rate, Collison didn't get consistently burned, and he ended up with 8 real assists and 3 home-cooking assists on top of that, so that pretty much counteracts his miserable third quarter into an average game. --Capt.
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