Bricklayer
Don't Make Me Use The Bat
Kinda looks like Malone too.
What can I say, we are epic.
On a night when the Jazz had absolutely nobody who could cover either Cuz or IT, it fell to a rookie who no doubt felt my evil grading eye bearing down on him after he was absolutely killing us down the stretch with miss after miss and blown coverage after coverage...and said rookie suddenly stepped up and finally hit a huge shot, the biggest of his young career, as he tied the game with 3 seconds to go and sent us into an overtime where we pulled away. Good on him. And good on us, even if it came against the other bad team in the West, even if it felt a little fortunate we pulled it off. At least we finally did. Tanking record aside, we needed to finally win one of these.
Your Consoritum Graders tonight:
Bricklayer
Uncia03
Rainmaker
Bajaden
Capt. Factorial
Boxscore
Stats: 27min 8pts (2-6, 0-0, 4-5) 4reb 1ast 1stl 0blk 0TO
Williams ( C ) -- Williams didn't take a shot until the 8:39 mark of the first quarter, and left it short off the front of the rim, but Hayes grabbed the board and put it back in. He then got beat off the dribble by Jefferson who laid it in. A bit later, he pulled up and missed an 18 footer. For the most part, other than being beat off the dribble, he played pretty good defense on Jefferson. He went to the bench at 4:50 of the first quarter, and didn't get back until the 5:30 mark of the 2nd quarter. He immediately scored off a nice pass while cutting to the basket. He later did a nice job of getting back on a break and preventing Hayward from getting an easy basket. He closed out his first half by going under a screen and allowing Hayward to hit an open three. He started the 2nd half by going backdoor and getting fouled. Making 1 of 2. He continued playing good defense on Jefferson, but once again, later he got caught in a screen and allowed Hayward to hit a 20 footer. He went to the bench at the 2:54 mark of the 3rd quarter, and returned at the 7:20 mark of the 4th, but for a brief period, played the PF position. Other than fouling Burke to stop an easy basket, and stealing the ball, going end to end, and then getting his shot blocked by Hayward, it was uneventful. All in all, Williams played fairly well, but didn't do anything that really stood out in the game. He did manage to score 8 points on 2 of 6 shooting. He did get open under the basket a few times, but didn't get the pass. He didn't rebound as well in this game either. So I can't really mark him down for lack of effort, because the effort was there. I'll just chalk it up to lack of opportunities, which does happen from time to time. I would like to see him be more aggressive, and perhaps that will come as he gets more comfortable in Malone's system. --Baja
Stats: 29min 11pts (3-9, 0-0, 5-6) 5reb 1ast 1stl 1blk 0TO
Thompson ( C+ ) -- I thought this one actually started off pretty well for JT. Due to our franchise centerpiece making a boneheaded decision less than a minute in and ending up on the bench, we were left with a gaping hole on our frontline and I thought Jason did pretty well doing what he could to help fill that void. He was active on the glass, offered a defensive presence down low but just as importantly offered an inside presence for us on the offense end as he posted up, got to the FT line, was active on the offensive boards and finished a couple plays inside. Missed a few more inside but the intent was correct and I do generally prefer seeing JT being active and aggressive in the paint rather than settling for jumpers. Very solid first half for Jason and if it ended there I would have given him a solid (B), as his presence was felt on both ends, he helped fill the void Cuz left and finished the half with 10 pt and 4 rebs. This was a tale of two halves though, as Jason largely disappeared in the second half. Played the first 9 minutes of the 3rd quarter and came away with 1pt(1-2 FT's) and 1 reb. That would be his contribution for the rest of the night aside from a blocked shot late in the 4th. He did offer both a defensive and sometimes physical presence during his two second half stints but did little on the glass and his overall activity level dropped substantially in comparison to the first half. JT has a habit of starting strong and fading, and as a leader and vet on this team I'd like to see more consistency from him from half to half. --Rain
Stats: 27min 28pts (10-15, 0-0, 8-10) 7reb 3ast 2stl 3blk 4TO
Cousins ( A- ) -- Didn't even break a sweat before picking up his second foul and getting taken out of the game a whole one minute and twenty-five seconds in. He got six minutes in the second and scored five points on a post, a free-throw jumper, and 1-2 from the charity stripe, but had no rebounds until midway through the third. He finished with seven rebounds in 27 minutes, which is decent but not really great. The third quarter was really Cousins' time to shine on offense, scoring 13 points (all in the post or at the free throw line) in just under 8 minutes, going 4-5 from the floor and 5-6 from the line. Kanter simply had no answer for him, and given that Cousins was no longer in foul trouble it was pretty inexplicable that he sat down for nine whole minutes following his beast-mode quarter. When Cousins finally entered in the fourth. the Jazz took to absolutely mauling him in the paint and with calls being a bit sparse we went away from the post as the Jazz put on a 15-point run. Oddly, when we went back to Cousins in the post, we set him up on the wrong side of the floor (Cousins' weak right side, that is) four times in succession, resulting in a bad pass turnover, a miss, a hit, and a pass out for a reset - and suddenly we were down five. Cuz helped us get to overtime by running the floor to follow up a fast break miss for a dunk and subsequently got his easiest two of the game on a pick and roll with IT as the Jazz were guarding the three-point line to pull us within one. After Ben's tying shot, with 3.2 on the game clock, Cousins put in some probably underappreciated effort in guarding Gordon Hayward tight after a switch and forcing the Jazz to take a timeout to avoid a five-second call. Finally, in overtime, the Kings went back to Cousins on the left block and he absolutely destroyed Kanter (we'll ignore the time when Kanter mugged him and the refs swallowed the whistle resulting in a turnover) scoring twice more and fouling Kanter out. Cousins had a huge night in the paint tonight, going 9-14 in the paint and drawing ten FTs, while taking only one jumper all night (a free-throw line jumper, which he hit). Certainly without Favors the Jazz are weak defenders in the paint, but Cousins took advantage of it and probably would have made a little statement towards this year's all-star bid - had anybody outside of Sac and Utah actually watched the game. --Capt.
Stats: 38min 15pts (6-17, 1-6, 2-4) 9reb 1ast 2stl 1blk 0TO
McLemore ( B ) -- now here's a grade that moved around all over the place during the evening, and there's probably not a single grade you could give that fairly encapsulates the whole thing. For three quarters of this one I was vaguely pleased overall, but it was a mishmash of conflicting elements. defensively he found yet another player he can't guard, as he was having problems staying in front of Hayward early, including getting blown by to start the game and quickly get a foul on Cousins trying to bail him out again. And the shot...what is it with that shot? Except for the pretty form, if you watched the first 45 minutes of this one your conclusion about Ben would have to be "great athlete, can't shoot a lick". That continues to mystify. But the positive flip of that statement was that he was doing a lot of very nice things out there with that athelticism that was balancing against the issues. He got a couple of extremely tough racing finishes inside, once bouncing off Kanter's chest and still hitting a tough finish off the glass as he fell backward. He was a big hustle help on the glass, and set a new career high for boards. He saved several balls from going out of bounds with athletic leaps into the stands. Several times he tried to use those hops flying back in transition defense and trying to hit his head on the rim. And he got out on the break and slammed home a huge alley oop. And so it went for 3/4. Exciting plays covering over him messing up all the supposedly simple ones. Then the stretch run came around, we put Ben back in for an ineffective Thronton, seemed like the right thing to do. And the damn rook just about killed us. He was terrible for the next 5 minutes. We got him open jumper after open jumper, and our supposed shootist bricked and bricked. Then he went down to the other end of the floor, kept going under screens or turning his head...and well, if we had lost this, and we might well have, Ben would have been the single biggest culprit as his grade sunk like a stone. At the 18 second mark, with the Jazz up 1, he again mysteriously blew a defensive coverage, completely leaving Alex Burks in the corner. The Jazz got Burks the ball, and by the time Ben recovered Burks blew by him to the rim to get fouled and put the Jazz up 3. Pure rookie stuff. But little did you know he was just showing veteran saavy, setting the Jazz up so that he could play the hero with 3 seconds to go as IT found him one more time for an open three...and he buried it to tie the game and send it to OT. He hit another nice shot off an out of bounds play in the OT to push our lead out there as well. And so there you have about as varied a body of work as you are going to find. Up, down, all around. I'm not sure what this grade should be really, but playing the hero traditionally gets you a bump in these grades...even if you create the need to be a hero yourself earlier in the game. As do career highs in things. So this was still messy. But messy productive with big highlights.--Brick
Stats: 21min 4pts (1-5, 0-0, 2-2) 1reb 4ast 0stl 0blk 0TO
Vasquez ( B- ) -- Vasquez didn’t have a good statistical game, but he that doesn’t mean that he played poorly. They started off the game by posting him up on Burke but he was unable to hit the shot. The second time down they started to run a set to get him post position again but the ball got tipped and they ended up running something else. Vasquez was ineffective scoring the ball, but mostly because he didn’t really look for his shot. Of his 5 shots he really only took a single good shot which was the one he made where he came off a curl screen at the top of the key, got the ball and drove to the rim +1. But the rest of the shots were not really in rhythm and didn’t look great. On defense he wasn’t getting torched by Burke, which was nice. Burke wasn’t really looking to score either and Vasquez did a decent job staying with him and containing him. He didn’t shut Burke down, but Burke wasn’t killing the Kings like so many of the previous guards have been doing. The reason why he really didn’t have that bad of a game is because his teammates really let him down in this one. He ended the game with 4 assists, but he actually managed the game fairly well and did a great job setting up his teammates. I counted a total of 8 times in his 21 minutes of play where his teammates failed to convert on a set-up by Vasquez. If the other guys had been able to make shots that he set for them the Kings would never have been down in this game. Regardless, he wasn’t looking to make plays for himself and his teammates weren’t converting, so it greatly limited his impact. In the second half he looked great for two reasons. First his teammates were converting their shot and it was actually the 2nd half where he got all four of his assists. Secondly, he did a wonderful job working to facilitate the offense through Cousins. In that third quarter there were 15 half-court offensive possessions. Of those 15 possessions Cousins attempted to post 7 times and Vasquez got him the ball 6 of those times in good position. The other 8 possessions where Cousins didn’t try to post Vasquez gets him the ball 7 of the times. You all remember how dominate Cousins was to start the 3rd quarter? Well it’s because Vasquez was making sure that Cousins touched the ball on almost every half-court possession. From a team management perspective I don’t think he could have done much better. He came out of the game at the 4 minute mark of the 3rd quarter with the Kings leading and though the Kings blew that lead and had to crawl themselves out of a hole he never saw the court again. --Uncia
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