So now that Martin is back were giving up less PPG but scoring less PPG. Who woulda thunk it.
After last game it was "Evans and Martin cant play together" Now its "The rest of the team cant play with Evans and Martin" I feel like this team is an episode of LOST, For every one answer we get ten more questions.
JT was horrible
Hawes was bad
Udrih was invisible
Udoka should be banished
Casspi had open looks and missed them
I'll point to every one of those things before I complain about the Martin Evans pairing. They did there thing tonight. Was it perfect? no. In the fourth quarter it was Evans 1 on 1, then Martin 1 on 1 .. back and fourth for 5 minutes. Stupid basketball. Frustrating basketball. But Once again we were right there in the fourth quarter and blew it. With or without Martin, this team has been collapsing in the fourth quarter for the last 15 or so games.
Long post. Will hit many points:
These collapses have come against two 12win - 26/28 loss teams who let absolutely everyone they face score at will, and we could not score at all.
And its a little obtuse to think that this is all magical, that gee, when Kevin was with us at the start of the season everybody else struggled badly. Then Kevin returns again, and gee, what a mystery, everybody struggles again. Obviously we need Sherlock Homes to figure out the cause/effect here.
Setting aside my dripping disdain for apologists and "you're a hater" types and all their drivel, I will offer this olive branch: saying that the problems are evidently because of Kevin, is NOT the same thing as saying that Kevin intentionally caused them. With the second implying a conscious decision by his volition.
Ponder for a second the problems they have had up in Portland this year. And I mean the problems aside from the injuries. They started off the season struggling (relatively) and out of rhythm. The two biggest changes/problems vexing them? Greg Oden and Andre Miller. Greg Oden is one of the nicest guys in the NBA -- he would never do anything to intentionally hurt his team. If I had a daughter and she was going to have to marry an NBA player he would up near the top of my preferred list. So would Kevin for that matter (of course I would have given my approval to her marrying Tiger Woods before a few months ago too, so maybe I'm not that geat a judge of these things). In any case, Greg Oden was messing with his team's offensive chemistry, because they had to stop and give him the ball, where they had run pick and rolls with Roy and Aldridge almost exclusively the year before. Andre Miller is one of the more unselfish PGs in the league, but he was messing with Portland's offense because that is not what they need -- Roy is the main ballhandler, Miller was in the way. Does that make Greg Oden or Andre Miller bad people? Does it make Brandon Roy and Aldridge bad people that they can't work well with them on offense? No. And it does not make Kevin a bad person that what he brings clashes with what we have done well this season with him out. These are deeper problems. Structural problems. Basketball problems. Its not just about "how many shots did they get", although that's a good start. Its about where did those shots come from? Were they their preferred shots, or just leftover shots. Did they come in rhtyhm, or just when the other guys couldn't get one off?
Think about it: Who initiates offense on a basketball team? The guards. They bring it up. They start the plays. So now you have one of them looking to score all the time. Ok. Fine. That can work. Just so long as the other one is passing the ball off and trying to get the other players involved. But now what happens if BOTH of them are looking to score all the time? Well I'll tell you what happens -- the guards do. They can. They have the ball, they control their own offense. But everybody else is probably going to get left out in the cold. The problem only gets worse, much worse, when one of these two guards looking to score is a combo guard, and the other is primarily just a pure scorer -- not a creative guy. Not a natural assist man. As far as team involvement, you have now hit just about the nadir. And when we discussed this a month ago or whatever, I pointed out that there have only been a tiny handful of teams that have ever had 2 20pt scorers in the backcourt for even one season. None so far as I recall were big winners. And even the ones that did almost invariably had two guys who both created a lot of shots for teammates. Two PGs, or a PG and a combo guard (the Run TMC Warriors were the exception, with Mullin being the second creative guy at SF). Two guys up in the 5+ assists range keeping everyboyd else involved. This is why BTW, the second scorer being a big man is not as disruptive -- the big man does not initiate the offense. He has to have the ball brought to him. So everybody else can play/gets to play before the ball necessarily ends up in the post guy's hands.
Kevin has come back playing like Kevin Martin, as he said he would. He did not come back as an ogre. Or an Iverson. Just a Kevin. But the problem is that a Kevin is problematic for us as it stands. Not because being a Kevin is always bad, or because he is intentionaly messing things up. But because of the structural difficulties of having both your backcourt guys shooting all the time. Put another way, only a handful of players in the modern history of the league, even for a single season, have done what we are trying to have Reke and Kevin do. And most of those pairs were broken up and/or fell off within a season. If Reke and Kevin fail at it does not necessarily mean that they are bizarre failures at this nifty strategy that should work. It may mean that the strategy just CAN not work, at least not at any high level. The whole idea is flawed, more than the players, who could work in other situations.
You ponder these great backcourts who never did it:
Hamilton and Billups -- never two 20pt scorers, both better passers than their counterparts here
Parker and Manu -- never two 20pt scorers, both better passers than their counterparts here
Zeke and Dumars -- never two 20pt scorers, both better passers than their counterparts here
Porter and Drexler -- never two 20pt scorers, both better passers than their counterparts here
Magic and Scott -- never two 20pt scorers, both better passers than their counterparts here (with Scott its at least close, Magic not so)
you get the idea. Our best models are dating all the way back to the early 70s, when it was a different game and there was a lot more scoring (i.e. they may not have both scored 20 today), and again all the guys were big assisting players -- West/Goodrich and Monroe/Frazier (who did it only once). There is next to no historical proof that what we are trying CAN work, let alone that it will.
, maybe we should wait a few more games to see if the slump is just that or instead just that, a slump.
