The Kings were not going to win last night. It is hard to beat a fairly talented team twice within the span of a week on the second of a back to back and relatively long travel. Boggy was out of sorts for the 3rd straight game. There was no defensive intensity. The Kings commit a lot of unforced fouls with handsy habits. You don't get consecutive stops when you keep giving the ref an excuse. Buddy came to play, but no one else among the starters did. I am not going to get worked up over what Joerger did, in fact, at halftime I said he should give the starters the rest of the night off.
The Kings are fairly predictable. When running on most to all cylinders offensively we are highly competitive. We overwhelm inferior teams. The offense show up 3 out of 5 nights, or to be generous 4 out of 5. On the 1 out of 5 nights they do not have the offensive juice, they do NOT have the defense to stay in the game. This is why we are not elite, yet. This is where the next step of the evolution needs to occur, from within and with a trade or free agent.
It is hard for us to win 95-90, heck even 100-95. We don't have the personnel, the strength, the size or rebounding to stay in games when we go through extended cold stretches. Shump would have helped last night but I doubt affected the outcome. If we have multiple players out of sorts offensively, no Bagley, games can get lopsided relatively fast. Willie is not going to step up and score 30 because Fox is off. Jackson is not going to score 25 when Buddy is cold. We need our top scorers to be mostly on (Buddy > Fox > Boggy > Bjelica). When this fails to occur, we don't have complementary players to pick up the slack, and more importantly we don't have the ability get consecutive stops to win "ugly", like Denver (blow out), in Milwaukee (blow out), the home game against the Lakers (pretty much non-competitive) and a few others.
Joerger knows this as well as anyone. He knows our half court offense is Bottom 5 and our rebounding is Bottom 5 (26th). That's why he is always telling them to run. He knows what his guys do well and what they don't. Now in the defense of the critics criticizing him, I think he was probably pondering what to do if the Kings got within 10 or less. We got the lead as low as 12 points. If the backups got the lead to 10 or less, at about the same time they would be due for a rest anyways, I think it is conceivable Joerger would have went back to Buddy and D-Fox at least. But he was never in the position to make that decision. Hypothetically, if the Kings would have made the Wolves nervous to this extent, I think I would have been critical for not going back to Fox and Buddy, and probably Bjelica too. But since we never got that close, and the lead quickly expanded to over 20 points, I have no bone to pick. Onto the next, bring on the Thunder.
Worth it!
