This job gets hard sometimes.
So silver linings....If you're going to lose, at least lose colorfully?
Not so silver linings: losses like this can sap the will and cohesion of a team. If we have lost Cousins again (apparently this season we are only going to get to watch him every other week), it could even trigger a spiral. Don't compete vs. Bucks on the last game of the trip, come home and Anthony-Towns feats on us without Cousins, Warriors smash us down, and we end up at 5-13 and clinging for playoff life again. But brave little chins up everybody, maybe it works out ok. Cuz comes back, and we take it out on the Bucks. You never know. We're actually still on my .500 by Jan. 7 pace. I predicted a spit of the Charlotte/Milwaulkee pair. then we beat Minny, lose to the Warriors, finish the month 7-11, etc. As long as this doesn;t dishearten us. As long as we haven't lost Cuz again.
Ok, the game in snippets:
-- poor start, Rudy irrelevant
-- Hornets packing middle, so Boogie settles and settles some more for jumpers, but starts draining everything pulling us back into the game and chasing Jefferson.
-- Cousins picks up 2nd foul, not enough attention paid -- always a critical moment in Kingsland
-- Karl returns Cousins too quick in the 2nd quarter, he barely lasts 2 minutes before he has his 3rd foul. Uhoh.
-- We were up 5-6 when he left, but wobble, collapse, and barely scrounge out a buzzer beating tie at halftime (one of two Gay buzzer beaters tonight)
-- start of 3rd quarter, obvious attempt to get Rudy going, orchestrated masterfully by Rondo. Rudy explodes, Rondo general, Cuz keeps perking, and we blow the hornets off the floor. Up 22 at one point after being tied at halftime. Then the trouble starts.
-- at some point, on a play I did not see, Cousins starts hobbling and clutching his back or hip. Slows down up and own court, lacking explosion. Eventually gets pulled and heads to the locker room -- but by the way the time we actually increased that lead without him this time.
-- we lose focus and begin to suffer the non-Cuz doldrums down the stretch of the 3rd, the 22 pt lead is down to 17 by the end of the quarter, and we barely managed to hold that.
-- beginning of 4th Cuz returns, but now the Hornets have a new tactic as Cody Zeller is inserted and he initiates the if you touch me I'll flop like a little ***** defense. And its effectie. Cuz gets a foul, starts getting really tentative (after having already had to play passive defense much of the game) on both ends, gets a 2nd foul, and you can see how reluctant and careful he is being about everything. He doesn't drive hard as the Horents are trying to take a charge, every time he posts Zeller Zeller bends like a reed waiting to fall and Cuz backs off. Once the 5th foul is there he can't challenge Kemba blowing by the defense very hard either (Kemba had already repeatedly treid to put fouls on him in the 3rd).
-- we begin our collapse. Nobody on the perimeter can stop anybody, but especially Kemba, who shreds us. With Cousins tentative, and possibly hurt, we start to panic. Gay turns back into a pumpkin. Belinelli misses all his shots. Karl keeping going smaller and smaller thinking that will fix things. We allow 53 Hornets points in the final 17 minutes of game time. Which is grotesque -- that's a 149.6pt per 48 minute scoring pace.
-- in the final minute we fall behind, Karl pulls Cuz entirely. On the final defensive play of regulation, game tied, Karl does not put in ANY of our 7 footers. our two largest players are Casspi and Gay. Walker sees this and drives right to the win for the apparent game winner.
-- in a miracle finish Rondo hits Gay with an out of bounds pass for a semi-oop layup with 0.7 seconds to go to tie it and send it to overtime.
-- Cousins never returns. In OT now its Jeremy Lin's turn to carve up our defense at will.
-- We lose.
Fun stuff huh?
Boxscore
Stats: 42min 28pts (13-21, 2-4, 0-1) 10reb 0ast 1stl 0blk 3TO
Summary: 28-10, but over half of those numbers in one explosive 3rd quarter. Somehow he'll get blamed for this.
Gay ( B ) -- ok, sorry for the delay. Had much to do. Rudy started this one off in quiet and largely ineffective fashion. It was not so much he was forcing up a lot of bad shots as he was simply not even getting any off. But there was an obvious decision made at halftime to get Rudy involved, and Rajon was going to be the getter involver. And it worked in a big way. Gay came exploding out of the halftime, and aside from missing 1 technical FT, he hit our first 4 FGs, and just kept on pouring it on as we as a team did the same. He finished with 16 points in the quarter and until the final minute could not miss. Unfortunately the great run was the bulk of his production in the entire game. He scored 16pts on 7-8 shooting in the 3rd, and 12 points on 6-13 for the rest of the game, 6 in the first half, and 6 in the 4th and OT. But if he'd merely seen the scoring dry up the grade would have ended up higher. Instead he got stuck playing PF and made some really dumb fouls down the stretch without any FGs to alleviate them. He picked his one late moment well, tipping in the miracle typing tip at the regulation buzzer with 0.7 second left as Rondo found him for the alley oop. And then hit an early jumper to start OT, but that was it, he disappeared again. Cousins had already been disappeared, and the game tier to reach OT turned out to have been wasted. So one tremendous run, and a huge tip, surrounded by largely subpar, although not horrendous, mediocrity. --Brick
Stats: 8min 0pts (0-0, 0-0, 0-0) 1reb 1ast 0stl 0blk 0TO
Summary: played surprisingly spotty defense in his brief time on the court, but 8 minutes? Really? When they scored 53 on us in the 4th and OT?
Cauley-Stein ( INC ) -- he played 8 minutes? What is there to say? But to be fair to Karl, they were not a grand 8 minutes. And the surprising thing was the number of defensive coverages he was blowing up op on the perimeter. Of course we never got a chance to see if was going to correct that, since Karl just entirely benched him. Even when the Hornets went with 2 near-7 footers of their own. Even on the very last defensive possession of regulation when Karl inserted 5 guards and SFs, and then watched, shocked, when Kemba Walker sized up thesituation and drove right to the undefended rim for a layup to put the Bucks up 2 with less than a second to go.--Brick
Stats: 31min 30pts (13-21, 2-6, 2-4) 11reb 1ast 1stl 3blk 4TO
Summary: terrifying thing is his AVERAGE games now are 30-11, and yet we may have lost him to another injury.
Cousins ( A ) -- To the extent it is possible to have a low-key 30 point game, that is what Cousins provided. At the beginning of the game, Jefferson was playing well off of Cousins, giving up the jumper. Cousins started the game with two three point attempts, neither of which was very close. He then moved in a few feet and couldn't miss for the rest of the quarter. Once he started hitting his 18 footers, Jefferson moved out and gave Cousins the opening for the upfake and drive game. Unfortunately, foul trouble popped up with a minute left in the game (this is a secondary effect of small ball - Cousins is the only goalie on the floor so he picks up more fouls.) He still managed to score 14 in the quarter on 6 of 8 shooting. The rest of the game was a little more up and down, with the midrange becoming less effective and foul trouble having an effect on defense. He also had a few magic Cousins misadventures that brought his game down from an A+. Midway through the third, during the Rudy show, Cousins tweaked his back or hip, possibly with some help from Cody Zeller who was playing the role of whiny thug tonight. After that, Cousins was done. He still scored a few points on jumpers, but he never really got going inside the paint again. There were numerous possessions late in the game where the Kings had zero presence inside on offense with Cousins not even making a feint at going toward the middle. He ended up sitting out down the closing stretch as the game turned into a smallball chuckfest and Kemba ran roughshod over the team's pitiful defense. --Hadlowe
Stats: 19min 10pts (4-6, 0-2, 2-2) 1reb 1ast 1stl 1blk 2TO
Summary: was a positive contributor, but saddled with even more foul trouble than Cousins
McLemore ( B- ) -- Ben started against the Hornets. Within a minute from the start Ben was on the scoreboard after two made free-throws, but picked up his first offensive foul also before the second minute of the game had passed. Ben guarded alternatively Kemba Walker of Nic Batum. In less than 5 minutes in the game he picked up his second foul and left the floor. Ben came back with 5 minutes left of the 2nd QT. Guarding Kemba Walker appeared difficult and Kemba managed to draw BenMc's 3rd foul and the return to the bench was fast. The missed corner 3-pointer didn't help either. Ben was not too involved in the Kings offense in the 3rd QT, but made a nice layup and a long 2-pointer. Ben left after drawing a foul from Williams with less than 4 min left of the 3rd QT and Kings up with 18 points. Ben came back with 6 minutes on the clock in the 4th, survived a few minutes and was gone. The loss was not because of BenMc and his effort. One of the few SAC players in + in the +/-.
--Kingston
Stats: 46min 14pts (6-12, 1-4, 1-2) 8reb 20ast 4stl 1blk 6TO
Summary: like Cousins, we're growing almost immune to the immense numbers. 20 more assists? Really?
Rondo ( ) -- --Brick
placeholder...
Last edited:
