Bricklayer
Don't Make Me Use The Bat
I'm off looking for a vid of the backbreaking play here.
So, story: I don't know why, but we came out looking unhappy and unready to play. Rudy and Cuz doublehandedly carried the entire team before half, grumpily. Ben got so utterly annihilated by Oladipo that he was benched 3 separate times for the likes of Omri Casspi and Nik Stauskas. We played no defense at all in the first half, the guards couldn't keep anybody out of the paint, and the forwards refused to guard their forwards at the 3pt line. Then a funny thing happened with us just a few minutes from crossing over into blowout city in the third, and we finally found a wind and a will. Ray deserves some credit for stepping up as a 3rd gun for a few minutes there as we cut the lead back down toward 10 and made a game of it. And we kept clawing, mostly behind Rudy and Cuz but with more people making contributions now, until we finally caught up and twice took the lead late in the game.
And then this completely inexplicable brainfart happened (wait until the 1:39 mark and understand it looked even worse watching it live. That was out of an inbounds play and Rudy was too busy texting with his mom to notice the ball was in play):
And it broke our back. So we lost. Again. If we were grumpy coming into this one, I can only imagine what we are going to look like tommorrow. Thought road trips were bonding experiences, and Vlade was supposed to help us with team chemistry.
Boxscore
Stats: 42min 39pts (16-26, 3-6, 4-5) 8reb 3ast 3stl 2blk 5TO
Gay ( A- ) -- Rudy responded to the Spurs debacle in often inspired fashion in this one and yet in the end may have made the play that finished us off. He actually got off to an awful start missing from points all over the court and joining the parade of our forwards who did not realize the NBA had painted on a newfangled 3pt line out there and that's where you could find Orlando's forward crew. But it was actually a defensive play that seemed to get him going, as he became the only King to stop Oladipo with a nice block up top in the mid quarter. He followed that by finally hitting a corner three and he was off to the races. Selfish at times, but he and Cuz just pounded the Magic for the next 6-8 minutes, holding us in the game despite almost complete lack of support. By the time Rudy went to the bench 2 minute into the 2nd quarter he had scored 15pts. He wasn't out long, but missed his first shot after returning and did not really get going again until Cuz also returned, when they resumed carrying us together. Came out of the lockerroom with some real sloppy inattentive defense in the 3rd but after we wobbled and came dangerously close to getting blown out it was Rudy who blew up the largest and was probably the prime mover in getting us back into it. Got very aggressive and scored at will, and when he wasn't scoring he discovered that for a few minutes there in the 3rd he could pass the ball to Ray and it might actually go in too. Eventually the carrying us torch would be passed back over to Cuz, but Rudy was still very much there and involved down the stretch. When he grabbed an Omri miss on the break and laid it in for a +1 at the 3min mark it actually put us up by 1 and in position to win after being down 18 in the 3rd. It was also Rudy's 36th point on the night. Unfortunately he undid that good when he just flat fell asleep in head slapping fashion (hence the Riker facepalm) with 30 seconds to go, compeltely blowing the defense on an inbounds play and just standing around on the opposite side of the court while Harris spotted up for the widest open of all possible wide open 3pt shots to put the Magic back up. Tried to make up for that by hitting a desperation 3 with 4 seconds to go to get eh lead back to 1, but of course if you don't just fall asleep on the play of the game, you don't need to do that, and when Andre Miller (himself full of multiple headslappers in this one) finished us off with a dumb turnover, Rudy's desperation 3 was only so much statpadding. Anyway, 39pts, and more than that, 39pts 8reb 3ast 3stl 2blks and a partridge in a pear tree carrying us for long stretches. But there were also 5 TOs and multiple just sloppy sloppy careless defensive plays that justify the "-" besides this A in my mind. --Brick
Stats: 24min 5pts (2-3, 0-0, 1-2) 5reb 0ast 0stl 0blk 1TO
Thompson ( C- ) -- well...I suppose the good news is that with this game Jason Thompson became the all time Kingsiest Sacramento King, passing Peja Stojakovic for #1 in the all time games played for Sacramento list. I suppose its also appropriate that our all time games leader should never have played for a winner or made the playoffs. And so Jason came out and celebrated by struggling on defense and losing his starting spot to begin the second half. In fact early in the game he may have made the play of the first quarter...for the Magic, hitting the ground for a loose ball, having Cuz dive over him and knee him to the head, and sending Cuz to the bench. Fortunately that did not last, but it was the only memorable thing he did. Defensively he was having to chase around the perimeter, and on multiple occasions he got switched onto Oladipo, who probably was disappointed at not getting to beat Ben again, but still obviously blew by JT. There was a single tough layup late in the half, but with Channing Frye lighting us up with his sneaky I'm 6'11" and standing still out here at the 3pt line but you can't see me! game, Karl tried to put in the defensive awesomeness that is Derrick Williams to guard him out there to start the 3rd. So like I say, happy anniversary/record setting day JT. He got back into the game late in the 3rd in place of Cuz, and was noticeably more active and aggressive on D -- I'm sure that might have been mentioned once or twice in the lockerroom at halftime. But he made an incredibly careless play in the early 4th while we were advancing the ball, throwing the ball to Nik, or rather's Nik's back, while we were still in our backcourt, leading to a TO and a foul. Eventually lost his cool a bit late in the game, giving Frye I think it was a blatant (but fortunately uncalled) 2 handed shove in the back out of bounds, and got yanked. Don't know what that was about, but the whole damn team came onto the floor like they'd just had a big argument in the lockerroom before the game and were grumpy as hell. --Brick
Stats: 39min 29pts (9-18, 0-0, 11-14) 12reb 2ast 0stl 3blk 1TO
Cousins ( A- ) -- With Nikola Vucevic out of this game, you had to figure that Cousins against the depleted Orlando front line would be a slaughter. And for the most part it was. Things started a bit iffy with Cousins missing his first four from the field and then got scary as he collided with JT going for a loose ball, got up very slowly, and had to come out of the game. But he only sat for two and a half minutes and when he came back, he was clearly uninjured. He scored on two drives, one from the three point line, then hit four of five in the second quarter - one in the post and three jumpers to have 17 in the first half. Cousins' second half was a bit quieter, largely because the Magic got extremely physical. They fought him for post position all night long and the referees mostly let it go. That's not to say that Cousins didn't get his chances to go to the line - it's hard to knock 11 of 14 on free throws and Orlando racked up a huge number of fouls on Cuz - but had the refs called this game tighter it might have been different. As it was Cousins had 29 points and 12 boards, and he lost at least four rebounds that I counted being fouled (or not "fouled") on the boards. Cousins' defense was also quite good tonight. He had three blocks, cleaning up Tobias Harris at the rim, running out and swatting Ben Gordon on a jumper, and absolutely stuffing Oladipo on a baseline floater. And while he couldn't clean up everything at the rim, he only allowed 7 points to the Magic bigs if you take away Nicholson's putback that he got by shoving Cousins out of the way and somehow not getting called for the foul. 29 for Cuz, 7 for them...let's put it this way. Cousins is not primarily responsible for defending the three-point line, and that's where we got beat tonight. --Capt.
Stats: 21min 0pts (0-5, 0-3, 0-0) 4reb 2ast 0stl 0blk 1TO
McLemore ( F ) -- ok, this was...pathetic. There's no other word for it. It not only may have been the single worst ass kicking of Ben's young career, which has had more than a few, but it was one of the worst NBA ass kickings I can recently recall. Ben just did not show up. More than that, he didn't compete. If for some reason we seemed to be team grumpy out there, maybe for a too nice guy like Ben that gets translated as "don't want to be here". Whatever the cause, Victor Oladipo stole his soul, or at least his entire store of cred., as he just dominated Ben on both ends of the floor, not only scoring every time down the floor while Ben fluttered about helplessly, but just smothering and shaming Ben on the other end, just flat taking the ball away from him like he was a little kid. By the time Karl yanked Ben 5min into the game the matchup had gone 11-0 to Oladipo, and it was worse than that. When Ben returned to the game he got setup for a wide open three at the top of the circle...and missed that too. Early in the third with Oladipo by now viewing him like a rottweiler views a raw steak, Ben took a pass from Cuz underneath but either blew the layup, or got it blocked. And he, and we, were getting killed so bad that Karl AGAIN benched him in favor of Omri, figuring that Omri might be too tall and too slow but at least he'll scrap. The only time that Ben looked like he even remotely wanted to be there was his final stint late in the 3rd, when he came back in and looked much more aggressive on defense, no doubt after a few kind words from the staff on the sideline. He was still completely ineffective however, and we just decided we could do without down the stretch. This was even worse than Kawhi's pantsing of Rudy the other night. Not sure what is up, but I don't like it. There's a pride thing here that was completely lacking. --Brick
Stats: 32min 13pts (4-10, 1-5, 4-6) 2reb 2ast 0stl 0blk 2TO
McCallum ( C ) -- where to slot this. Generally Ray 1) struggles to run the offense; 2) can get hot offensively, but that plays into #1 when he's selfish; 3) is a solid defender. Well, tonight 2 of those 3 things were pretty much true, but the 3rd one determines this grade I think. Early on was not able to get us into our offense against the Magic defense and at times zone but was the only guy other than Rudy and Cuz scoring at all, even if it just was a smattering of hoops. In the mid 3rd though stepped forward for a few minutes and hit a big three with us down 18 and threatening to die. For a few minutes thereafter Rudy in particular was looking for him, and he gave us a critical 3rd offensive player as we made a game of it. The problem was two fold: first, he still wasn't making anybody else better. And the elephant in the room I have intentionally not mentioned was his defense. Normally you are looking at solid effort from Ray on that end, and maybe on some nights even impact. Tonight the only thing saving him from the word debacle was that Ben already had that title wrapped up. Payton just kicked his butt and went around him at will breaking down our defense time and time again, eventually tying his career high in assists (good for two of fantasy teams, not so good for the Kings). If you've only going to play one end, you better score 39. As it was Ray did not score 39, but that 3rd quarter scoring burst in particular was important enough in making a game of this to keep this score out of the gutter. --Brick
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