Keith Smart's lineups are perplexing at times, but who is he supposed to put at SF? Who at PF or C is worthy of stepping onto a professional basketball floor for 30 mins a game aside from Cousins? I'm pretty sure Keith Smart is yelling at them to not leave the 3 point shooters. What's he supposed to do when his low IQ players just leave them 6 times in one quarter? The Kings stunk with PW and stink with Smart, it's time for the players to get chewed out after getting smashed on by a non-playoff team without 50% of it's 6 best players
The players get a ton of **** on here. A ton.
The thing that frustrates me is that the coach is supposed to be the one stable piece. The players are young, you can't fast forward through life and predict how good or bad, dumb or smart they will be 2-3 years from now. So the coach's job is to make it as easy as possible for these guys to reach their potential.
When you play a lineup that doesn't work... Undersized, too selfish, too offense heavy, too defense heavy .. whatever it may be, your automatically lowering the potential of your team before you even step on the court.
If you go small, you will get out rebounded and mismatched. On a team like ours that needs to maximize EVERY ounce of 'goodness' available to us .. tacking on the downsides of going small to all of our other issues is not the right move. We are handing our opponents advantages every night .. we can't afford to give those things up.
Right now we are going small, rotating our starters in a way that doesn't make sense, playing all of our offensive guys in the starting unit, and including no defense presence in our starting unit.
That is 4 advantages we are giving our opponents every night. Again, these are things that do not have to be this way. What would I do?
Evans/Thomas
Thornton/Jimmer
Garcia/Salmons/Donte
Hayes/JT/Donte
Cousins/JT/Donte
Add two role players ( and our two veterans ) to the starting crew. Both guys are passive players on offense. Hayes is strictly a passer and offensive rebounder who won't steal shots from anyone. Cisco is a spot up shooter.
Have the bench feature IT/Salmons/JT.
It's not perfect, but I think it is the best we can do with this roster.
For those who would rather place Donte in the starting unit over Cisco .. I wouldn't feel comfortable with the lack of 3pt shooting in that lineup, with Thornton being the only guy who can hit 3's at over .300 3p%.