Bricklayer
Don't Make Me Use The Bat
Ok. This game was absolutely as clear as day, all the way through. no confusion, should be no arguments about anything that happened:
1) as I mentioned pregame, Cuz had to be a monster because the Nets try to smallball, swarm, and cheat, and because there are no Cousins in the EC, they get away with it. Well, Cousins WAS a monster. But he got absolutely no help whatsoever.
2) in the Game Thread I mentioned this game was separating the wheat from the chaff, and oh boy did it. We had exactly TWO guys show they could play against this tough veteran team, and Cuz and Gay were dominant for 3/4.
3) since our competitiveness was based on two guys, when Gay got hurt, and Cuz picked up his 4th late in the 3rd quarter, it was sayonara.
4) Marcus Thornotn is exactly the sort of personality you DO worry about facing after you trade him. He's got that "getcha" in him. And he got us in nasty fashion. As much as anyone he singlehandedly whipped our entire backcourt and flushed us in the second half. Our entire backcourt? IT/Ray/Ben/OUtlaw/Orlando? 26pts on 32 shots. Thornton? 27pts on 15 shots. That would be an in your face complete with crotch grab. He may have just peed on our corpses just for frosting. BTW, I am increasingly aggressive in suggesting that the new regime, and old one too, fundamentally screwed up our SG spot. We traded two away, and they have kicked the crap out of the sad sacks we replaced them with.
5) Reggie Evans suffered from Rudy Gay in Toronto syndrome. Returns to his former team, plays a bad game. The coach bizarrely did not even go to him until we were in deep trouble in the first half. And he struggled.
6) Everybody else was terrible. IT and McCallum did not appear remotely capable of handling the pressure the Nets put on them defensively. Could not run the team at all. but nobody did anything. Pretty much Cuz and gay were so good for 3/4 that we were right in it. Then we lost both, and the game was over.
Ok, in other news, we have not 1, but 2 guest graders tonight. Thanks to Padrino and The Jamal.
And of course, we get Girls. Damn good thing people keep making more of them, because after about 5 years of this crap we'd be running out if there was a limited supply.
Your Consoritum Graders tonight:
Bricklayer
Padrino
The Jamal
Bajaden
Capt. Factorial
Boxscore
Stats: 32min 20pts (9-18, 1-4, 1-2) 4reb 0ast 0stl 0blk 1TO
Gay ( B+ ) -- Gay didn't get off to the best start, but once he got into a flow, he looked like the gay were used to.. He started the game by picking up his first foul while guarding Joe Johnson. He followed by missing his first shot, a highly contested three pointer with the shot clock running down. He then missed his next shot, a floater in the lane. It was about this point in the game, where nothing was going right for the Kings, and the Net's started to pull away. After Gay drove into a crowd in the lane, and had the ball stolen, he suddenly started to reverse his fortune. It was a bit of a struggle at first. He started, by again driving into the lane, cutting left and hitting a left handed half hook. On the next possession he used a ball fake to freeze his man and went unimpeded to the basket. After a breather on the bench, he came in and promptly turned the ball over. Next trip down, he drove into the lane, almost loses the ball in traffic, but manages to score. He followed that with a pullup 18 footer. At this point he started to get some help from Cousins who hit a cutting Gay right under the basket for a dunk. They would repeat this play later. From this point on, Gay either scored, or Cousins was there to put back his misses. It all came to a stop when Gay went up for a three point shot and came down on Livingston's foot and sprained his ankle. He did return later, but by the time he got back into the game, it was obvious that he wasn't himself. Defensively, he was just OK. He got caught in a couple of screens that cost the Kings some baskets, and he got caught in what should have been a switch, but ended up with two Kings guarding the same man. Which of course left someone open. He didn't rebound as well he normally does, but this was a night when Cousins was gobbling up just about everything that looked like a ball. --Baja
Shu Qui
Stats: 24min 4pts (2-4, 0-0, 0-0) 4reb 1ast 0stl 0blk 0TO
Thompson ( C ) -- Throughout the first half, he was mostly invisible. Really, he was mostly invisible the whole game, notching a single made basket in each of the 1st and 3rd, while playing his usual hustle-just-enough-to-keep-the-starting-job game. In my mind, JT's "highlight" came in the 4th, when he received the ball at the free throw line, and threw a nice, crisp, decisive skip pass to McCallum for 3. In a game where the Kings' turnovers more than doubled their assist total, it was nice to see a sequence where the ball moved with purpose. Thompson was also the only starter who succeeded in not turning the ball over, and while that is mostly due to the fact that he didn't touch the ball very often, I'm looking for positives wherever I can find them. It's getting rather difficult to know how to grade JT these days. One can't expect him to be terribly involved in the offense, and he converted 50% of the shots he did take, while playing some measure of defense the other way, though Kirilenko got the best of him on more than one occasion. So I'll call it a solid "C," considering Thompson could hardly be blamed for not doing more in a game that didn't ask him to do much. --Padrino
Alexandra Daddario
Stats: 32min 28pts (13-19, 0-0, 2-4) 20reb 3ast 1stl 1blk 6TO
Cousins ( A ) -- Welp, if I had to grade this game, at least I got the right guy. I flirted with adding the “+” but we A. lost the game and B. He had too many TO’s. Cuz was downright dominant from the start to finish. The gaudy numbers aside, what really stood out was the effort he displayed. A big reason I get so frustrated watching Cuz at times, is how blatantly obvious it is when he’s going 100% and when he isn’t. Tonight, he was going after it. He dominated the boards on both ends. He had several great passes to Gay in the 2nd quarter that lead to points. He was taking great high % shots and displayed great patience in the post several times. A noticeable play was grabbing when he grabbed an offensive rebound, set his feet and positioning, and simply overpowered Jason Collins for an easy dunk. The move reminded me so much of Duncan’s patience in the post. Defensively, he was fine, but essentially got the night off going against Mason Plumlee and Jason Collins. Still, he was much better at getting back on D and showing better on the PnR. We can’t ask anything more of him. His teammates just let him down. While I don’t expect 28-20 on 19 shots every night, I refuse to not hold Cuz to this standard of energy and hustle on the floor. This was a top 10 NBA player performance. Hopefully, Cuz realizes that if he wants to start stacking the accolades, all-star games, and be a winning franchise player, then this is how he needs to play every night. Oh, and actually getting more than Rudy Gay to play basketball would probably help that winning part too. --Jamal
Stephanie Fantauzzi
Stats: 30min 8pts (3-4, 1-2, 1-3) 4reb 0ast 0stl 1blk 1TO
McLemore ( B ) -- Offensively, McLemore was essentially the forgotten man tonight. He got 14 touches in 30 minutes -- half the rate of either Outlaw or Orlando -- and it's too bad because he was actually efficient from the floor, hitting 3 of 4 shots including one three in the second quarter and two layups in the fourth (he had a third layup taken away by an offensive foul off the ball). Defensively, he also played a very solid game, one of his better games as a King in my opinion. He started off the game strong, with a huge weakside block on a Mason Plumlee drive on the very first Nets possession of the game, and for the most part, he kept things up. He stopped a couple of drives, he forced Joe Johnson into a tough turnaround jumper in the post (he made it, but still it was good D), he harassed Thornton into a turnover, and he got down on the floor during garbagetime to earn (and win) a jumpball with Jorge Gutierrez. Notably (for the doubters out there) a grand total of zero of Marcus Thornton's 25 points came against Ben tonight - and while Ben wasn't primarily on Marcus, he did pick him up half a dozen times or so. I actually only thought Ben made three mistakes on defense all night -- he was a little too aggressive closing out Joe Johnson at the 3-point line, allowing him around (for a miss), he made the mistake of trying to steal the ball from Kirilenko instead of sticking with Livingston when the cut brought him by the ball, leading to a Livingston layup, and he went under a screen and wasn't able to recover quick enough to stop an Anderson three. That last defensive mistake (in the mid-second quarter) resulted in an immediate timeout and a benching, and I really don't think Ben made a bad defensive play in the entire second half. So, efficient scoring? Check. Getting to the rim? Check. Good D? Check. I'm hoping for a lot more games like this out of McLemore going forward. --Capt.
Abbie Cornish
Stats: 36min 10pts (3-14, 1-9, 3-4) 3reb 4ast 0stl 0blk 7TO
Thomas ( F ) -- after I was wriggling around trying to find an excuse to bump this upward in the first half, IT made this grade all too easy and obvious after Gay and Cousins went out. Basically just got his butt kicked out there, and had roughly 2 minutes (the first couple of minutes of the third) in the entire game where he felt like he had control and was running the offense. Made a bad pass attempting to feed Cuz to start this one off, and it was very much a sign of the way the whole thing was going to go. His first shot was a contested three, and again, you could have just turned things off then and you'd seen basically what there was going to be to see. Turnover after turnover, most of the overpenetrate, drive into trouble and at 5'9" have no chance of throwing it over the trees that have surrounded you variety. forced shots of a similar vein. But even when they were open they rarely fell, and he missed several wide open threes. There were a couple of mini-bursts of competence, mostly centered around actually hitting Cuz with a pass, instead of passing it to him off the backboard on another brick. In the first half he was was up and down but competed on defense at times. But maybe that was part of this too as the Nets are Kidd's team, and Kidd loved to postup guards, and so does his team. When they saw our collection of midgets and rookies their eyes must have gotten as big as saucers. It found himself banging in the post against DWill for half the night, and it may have taken something out of him. At the beginning of the third quarter there was briefly a hint that Isaiah might turn things around. On back to back plays he made good passes to a cutting/rolling Cuz for shots in the paint, and he capped a big Cousins/Gay run by pulling up and hitting a three off his dribble to cut the lead to 2pts. That was our big push. Then we lost Gay, and I'm not sure you can say we lost Isaiah because he was never there. Made some sincerely terrible drives/decisions, and missed two open jumpers on one possession as Cuz got the ball back for him, and then threw a pass leading him right into two Nets to pick up his 4th foul, so we lost Cousins too. Tired to turn up the gunning a bit after they were gone, but had nothing. May have capped things blowing a break where he refused to pass it. Just fugly stuff. Has to be right up there as one of his worst of the season. Had as many TOs as FGs + AST combined. --Brick
Skye Sweetnam
Last edited:
