Bricklayer
Don't Make Me Use The Bat
Down by 2 with 1:45 to go, Rudy gets the ball out on the break, maybe could have passed to Isaiaih, does not, maneuvers around a lone defender swoops in...and blows the layup. We don't tie. We then proceed to collapse and lose the final 1:40 by 11 points.
Of course much had gone into getting to that point. Boogie was back, notably subdued, and really solid. He could not miss his jumper early, was a man on the boards, and barely barked at an official. There is a way this automatic suspension thing could work out for Boogie -- if he has to hold his tongue for 20+ more games, learns how to do it, it might really help in upcoming seasons. Rudy was huge in the first half, completely ghosted out on us after half. IT was in control until late. Evans and Acy gave us twin hustling bangers. McCallum looked more aggressive and less drab than I have seen him...but still shot terribly. So how'd we lose? Well poor Ben got annihilated again -- remember Kevin? Yeah, that one. JT seemed to be doing a good job on Love...and then you look up by the end of the game and its 22-10-7 to 2-2-1. In other words yeah, big three big 3'd. But our two weak positions got destroyed again. 48pts 14reb 9ast for their SG and PF, 9pts 3reb 2ast for ours.
Oh, and just to add to the angst, tonight:
Marcus Thornton put up 25 pts in 24min
Tyreke Evans put up 22pts 9reb 5ast
How badly did we **** up our backcourt future when we blew up the Beno/Reke/Thornton trio to go chase lottery pick rainbows with Jimmer and Ben?
So theme tonight, was going to be basketball related, but since Putin seems to want to restart the Cold War, I thought I'd go with Cold War Closecalls for all of you too young to remember those days. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
Your Consoritum Graders tonight:
Bricklayer
Uncia03
Capt. Factorial
MassacheusettsKingsFans
Boxscore
Stats: 33min 24pts (8-14, 4-7, 4-4) 6reb 1ast 2stl 1blk 3TO
Gay ( B ) -- this sort of game is very hard to grade, as you basically have 2 entirely different players wearing the same jersey in different halves. In the first half after starting the game with a fugly clunked three he missed so badly it triggered a fast break, he settled in to put on a dazzling shooting display from all over the court. Inside, outside, he was pulling up for threes that had you going, well that's not a good shot...but did not matter. Corey Brewer, who's main job is precisely to slow down wings for the Wolves, could not contain him. And when he got the switch against KMart, Rudy's eyes lit up. Cousins was strong, IT was efficient, but Rudy was the goto guy who had us in position to win this one. He was up to 22pts by halftime as he dominated and felt like he was in compelte control, whetehr scoring or passing. And then halftime happened and despite what your obviously defective eyes told you, Rudy Gay never returned to the court. He was just gone. Early in the third the non-entity that took his place threw a pass 2ft over Ben's head, and that was kind of a highlight, because otherwise he was no longer playing. Not missing shots even. Just suddenly completely uninvolved. Not taking shots, not creating, not anything. He went as invisible as our SGs normally go. And with him went our offense as we collapsed in the third. With 3 min left in the game he had taken ONE shot in the entire second half. Then he drew a foul after an offensive rebound and hit both FTs. That was it. To cap off the utterly puzzling disappearing act, at the 1:45 mark, with us down only 2 and on a run to get back into it, Rudy got out on the break, did not pass it to the trailing IT, tried to swoop in a layup...and blew it. And that completely killed us mentally. The air just went completely out of our sails, all the momentum was gone, and Minnesota just bang bang bang finished us off. Very strange. You would have thought he was hurt or something. But if he was I did not see it and it wasn't reported. --Brick
Fun in Thule -- during the Cold War an important Air Force stop off point and early warning site was an Air Force base maintained at Thule, Greenland. Sounds like a good idea until one of your own nuclear armed B-52s falls out of the sky in January of 1968 and crashes a mere 7 miles from the base with a nuclear payload. And to make things REAL exciting, the high explosive portions of the nuclear weapons actually exploded...and these were not weapons which were guaranteed at the time to be one point safe (in other words, guaranteed not to go off accidentally). If that payload goes up, the base would have been annihilated in the blast, and it would have looked just like a Soviet preemptive strike.
Stats: 29min 2pts (1-2, 0-0, 0-0) 2reb 1ast 2stl 0blk 3TO
Thompson ( ) -- --Uncia
Stats:33min 21pts (9-16, 0-0, 3-5) 17reb 3ast 0stl 3blk 2TO
Cousins ( A ) -- This was a really effective, smart game by DeMarcus Cousins. These are the sorts of performances that impress me more than your average Cousins game. Let me explain. Early on in this one he was deferring heavily to Rudy Gay who was working on a 20 point first half. It was the right move at the time. So instead of scoring, Cousins went after every rebound in his vicinity, and he got just about all of them. As the game went on, Cousins would chip in points when the offense called for it. When Pekovic was on him, he dragged him out of the paint and knocked down jumper after jumper after jumper. That is how you are supposed to attack Pekovic if you have the talent to do so. Pekovic is a strong, albeit slow, post defender. If Cousins’ jumper is on (and tonight it absolutely was) than taking that guy out of the paint to an area where he cannot guard you is just good basketball. When some of the Timberwolves smaller, weaker defenders were on Cousins, he took them inside, and either scored or was fouled on most of those attempts. Down the stretch, Cousins and Thomas ran multiple pick and rolls that lead to Kings baskets. I thought he played about as well offensively as you could expect when you consider how well he picked his spots. DeMarcus certainly had a few good moments on defense in this one, too. He stepped in for more than a couple attempts at drawing charges with mixed results, but those plays are not easy to make, and to Cousins’ credit he makes most of them. I think he had 2 or 3 tonight. He also had 3 blocked shots, and I thought his defense got much better as the game wore on. It wasn’t perfect, and Pekovic definitely burned him a few times inside or on the pick and roll, but I felt as though the plays Cousins made sort of even that out. Some of Pekovic’s points came off of team defense breakdowns that I wouldn’t necessarily put on Cousins shoulders. Outside of the actual game, Cousins had a different demeanor about him. He’s had verbal back and fourths with Kevin Love in the past, but tonight he had multiple conversations with him on the court that looked oddly friendly. I don’t know what was all about, but I thought his complaining in general looked a little bit better tonight coming off of his one game suspension. I didn’t think Cousins was ever dominant in this one offensively (he was certainly dominant on the boards). It was more like a steady stream of points that were scored when the opportunity presented itself, but he played an incredibly smart, composed basketball game worthy of an A. --Mass
Its Good To Ignore Orders -- on September 26, 1983, an incident took place just on the brink of the Reagan/Gorbachov thaw that could have spelled disaster. The Russians had a high security bunker where they monitored their satellites watching the U.S. for nuclear missle launches. On that night, all of a sudden one of their satellites saw one launched, or rather 5 launched, and the absolute duty of the officer in charge of the bunker was to immediately report this to the high command so that they could retaliate. Luckily for everybody, the officer in charge was a man named Lt. Colonel Stanislav Petrov. Petrov knew that the satellites were mistake prone, and he figured if the U.S. was launching a strike there would be more than just 5 missles coming. And so he gulped, and he held off picking up that phone, and called it in as a false alarm instead, and then waited as the minutes ticked by to see if he was right or screwed. As it turned out the satellite had just caught a glint off a cloud and mistaken it for a missle launch, but even though he was right that did not stop the event from ruining Petrov's military career. Once the incident came to light after the Cold War was over, he was honored by the United Nations for possibly preventing a holocaust.
Stats: 21min 7pts (3-7, 1-3, 0-0) 1reb 1ast 0stl 0blk 5TO
McLemore ( D- ) -- sigh. Its getting to the point where the only way not to have to bomb Ben with a terrible grade is to just not be the grader on duty that day. This is an F BTW. But because of a few early moments I softened it up a smidge just to distinguish it from the even worse game last time out. The good sign this time was that for a few early minutes Ben actually looked like he came to play. But what was as obvious as the nose on Barbara Streisand's face was the way that his own incompetence just leached his confidence and energy away within a quarter. But the intent was there, the energy early. On offense for a few minutes he looked like a real NBA guard. He hit an early feet set three, made a nice pass inside to Gay for a layup, and probably for his best move freed himself up along the baseline for a little pullup jumper that splashed in. There were little signs there. But wow wow wow. Even while he was still doing a few things, the other side of the ledger just filled up so fast. Kevin just destroyed him on defense. Scored over and through him in every way possible, put him in foul trouble. At one point I thought we were going to start trying to hide him on Rubio, but then he was back on Kevin and the beating continued as KMart and Rudy carried their respective teams. And to make matters worse, Ben had even for him a terrible night with the ball. Through a weak pass up top that was picked off by Kevin as he went off to the races. Committed his third foul in the open court on another one of those can't change direction with the ball so I'll just charge things. Handle caused him to miss another layup attempt in the early 3rd in just amateurish fashion, and by then the confidence was shot, he missed all his shots, through a terrible pass in the corner...you get the idea. There was just the slightest sign of effort/confidence/intent early in this one, and then it was just swamped. And Malone, whatever he has said in the past isn't as cool with this as is made out. Ben only played 20min tonight because Malone just could not stand it. He tried Johnson, he's now turning to McCallum frequently just because Ray at least has a clue defensively. And it is that defense which just takes this to another level. If he could guard a phone book (how long until the next generation of kids sees that phrase and goes "phone book? what's that?") maybe we could play him long enough for him to work on the offensive kinks. But you could just see how getting beat every single time down the floor sapped the little confidence he had to start this one, and pretty soon everything turned to jello. --Brick
Cuban Missle Crisis I -- so I'm not going to relate the entire very famous Cuban Missle Crisis here -- suffice it to say that it may have been as close as the world ever came to nuclear holocaust and let it go at that. But several of the incidents that happened while it was transpiring highlight just how close that close was. The first one involved the Soviet nuclear armed submarine B-59, which started nosing around the American blockade of Cuba on Oct 27, 1962. An American destroyer started dropping non-lethal depth charges in an effort to get them to surface. But the captain of the Soviet sub didn't know they were non-lethal. He thought he was under attack, and that World War III had begun. And so he damn near began it as he ordered his men to load the sub's nuclear tipped torpedo and prepare to return fire. Luckily for history the sub's second in command refused to concur (another movie tie in -- ever see Crimson Tide?) and convinced the other officers that they had to surface and get more orders from Moscow before nuking the American navy.
Stats: 34min 22pts (10-18, 0-5, 2-2) 2reb 8ast 0stl 0blk 2TO
Thomas ( B ) -- IT got straight-up burned by Rubio on a drive to the basket on the first defensive play of the game, but from that point he actually played relatively solid defense. He allowed 9 points on 9 shots overall prior to the garbagetime fouling, and didn't actually allow a basket until the back-breaking Rubio three late in the fourth - a shot that, to be fair, was probably the shot we wanted the T'Wolves to take. He did a good job passing the ball, setting up Cousins for six makes and Rudy for another two. Outside of one category, Isaiah did a very nice job shooting as well. He went 10-13 from inside the arc, and took good shots, getting four shots (and two free throws) at the rim and another make on a floater on top of five made jumpers. He scored six points in short order (I think four possessions) in the mid-fourth, bringing us to within two points, and was trailing the play on a fast break where Rudy took and missed a difficult finger roll that would have tied the game instead of passing off to IT for the easy layup. We never managed to tie the game. But despite his nice shooting night inside the arc, from the three-point line Isaiah had a big off game, missing all five of his attempts. If he hits two of those five, he's real close to an A in the grade, and we very likely win the game, but that's the way the ball bounces.--Capt.
Wargames....for real -- you remember the early 80s movie Wargames? Very early career roles for Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy? Well...something pretty close happened in real life just a few years before that movie came out (doubt the author could have known, but who knows). In any case, in the 1970s we switched NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command -- the under the mountain hardened military bunker in Colorado in charge of our nuclear arsenal) over to these new fangled things called computers so that the computers could watch the other side for signs of attack. on Nov. 9, 1979, the computer detected just such an attack, as it saw a wave of missles coming in from Russia -- we beleived it far enough to launch intercept fighters, launch the President's doomsday plane, and warned launch control to prepare missles for a retaliatory strike. Luckily the kid made the computer play tic tac toe...or in more adult terms scrambling technicians checked satellite data and saw no such launch. The culprit? Some technician had accidentally left on a training program simulating an attack on the U.S.. Again, the movie was eerily prescient if not actually based on the incident. The Russians weren't amused, and Premier Brezhnev even wrote Jimmy Carter a chiding letter noting the danger of such errors.
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It's the inherent problem of having a scoring PG. You use the shooting PG in the pursuit of 20-20-20 and get nothing from your SG or you get a passing PG and let the SG shoot.
