Our Complete Lack of Offense/Movement, in Pictures

[Larry89]

Our guards cannot use screens effectively and in a timely manner at a good angle to get into the paint and just draw a simple double team and kick it out.

10-12 seconds is continually waste every possession just walking up the court or standing outside the three point line with the ball letting the defense set

Our bigmen are not setting great screens (hickson likes to fake a screen and roll off for a stupid jumpshot)

Thorton still looks injured and his handles need to improve GREATLY, Tyreke only has one go to move ( a wrong foot spin move)

salmons just sucks

 

[Hadlowe]

Tyreke only has one go to move ( a wrong foot spin move)

He has a great euro-step that he doesn't use enough. The spin move is beautiful when it works, but he does got to it predictably (Rubio got him for charges twice last night on that spin move.)

The one guy we have who has a bundle of moves at his disposal is Cousins, who gets the ball passed to him in good position about once per quarter. That needs to change above all else.

 

[pshn80]

Come on guys, enough with the escalating internet tough guy/credentials thing.

I, for instance, am MJ's long lost pasty brother, and used to kick his *** so bad in the driveway that I was what inspired him to true greatness. That whole being cut in high school myth was just made up because he didn't want peeps to know that never at any point was he the best basketball player on the planet.

I think I've always suspected. Oh, if we could only experience the glory.

 

[pshn80]

Our guards cannot use screens effectively and in a timely manner at a good angle to get into the paint and just draw a simple double team and kick it out.

10-12 seconds is continually waste every possession just walking up the court or standing outside the three point line with the ball letting the defense set

Our bigmen are not setting great screens (hickson likes to fake a screen and roll off for a stupid jumpshot)

Thorton still looks injured and his handles need to improve GREATLY, Tyreke only has one go to move ( a wrong foot spin move)

salmons just sucks

Agree that the guard problem you describe is a big one. What happens up top on too many plays. It's part POV - our two guards just naturally look to score, certainly look for something, and time passes, defenses set and are on alert, then pass, in a hurry because they've lost time, and the pass is too often like grade school, leaning, pointing, tentative. Oh for a quick, hard pass, right away or with some experience thought given to it. As it is, the time and any advantage is lost, lost, lost. Seems like we're always working from behind the eight ball.

 

[Larry89]

If the players just randomly starting running around the court and setting random screens to get players open in specific spots it would be better than what the players are trying to do right now, I mean just starting passing the ball like crazy and moving somewhere open and when two players are too close to each other just move away and just take the first available shot

garcia could just run back and forth along the baseline from corner to corner and eventually he would be open or they could just dump the ball to cousins in the post and maybe one of the corner men will come help then he can throw it to the corners and they can either shoot it or swing it, Problem is that Salmons cannot shoot and would rather huddle up with other players by driving it like hes a penguin trying to stay warm in the arctic.

 

[Spike]

I wasn't going to respond to his post, because frankly, he doesn't know what he's talking about. Not his fault though, because its a likely assumption that you'll learn all these things in highschool. To be fair, there are some highschool programs that are very solid, but the majority are severly lacking. My best friends son was the PG on Matt Barnes team at Del Campo, and I went to lot of their games. Barnes was the tallest player on the team, and guess what? He played center. Now you tell me how in the world that prepared him for playing SG in college? Add in that his highschool coach was more concerned with keeping the parents of all the players on the team happy, than he was with winning, and the result is a lousy program.

Fortunately, or Unfortunately, players like Evans are the stars of their highschool team. And for the most part, they're given the keys to the car, and have carte blanche on the court. In some cases, if the player goes to college for more than one year, old habits are broken, basics are revisited, and fundamentals are instilled. I watch as many highschool basketball games as I can, and there are more televised all the time, especially if you get the sports package. There are some solid programs out there, but they're few and far between. And unless your dealiing with one of those elite programs, remember that the highschool basketball coach is likely to be your english or history teacher as well.

My point is, that when you draft a one and done player out of college, you're for the most part, getting a very fundamentally raw player thats been getting by on his natural, god given, physical attributes. We like to point to players like Jordan, Bird, etc. as players that came out of college and had an immediate impact in the league. But almost all those guys went to college for 4 years. There are those rare exceptions, but not many. Look how long it took Jermaine O'Neal to finally become a good player. Four years!

Tyreke Evans has never had to change his game. Westphal saw him as a horse to ride, and unleased him to do what he does best. Now Evans is being asked to conform, and change his game. To think that will happen overnight is ridiculous. When crunch time comes, a player tends to fall back on what he knows best. Thats not an excuse, thats just the way it is. Personally, I've seen improvement. But to be honest, I don't think it helps to have Salmons in the same lineup with him. Especially when it looks like John would rather be somewhere else. To aske Evans to change his game and play within a system, when other players on the floor aren't doing the same, isn't going to work.

I swear Baja, some days you read my mind and steal my thoughts. Your point bears repeating. Do you know the hardest kids to coach? Those who are developmentally ahead of their peers, whether natural talent or more experience. At a young age, their goal is the next level, not their current HS team. On that, no coach is going to neuter a top prospect by working on the fundamentals if he knows that when push comes to shove, you have that elite talent and he's going to do his thing, which usually means take the guy 1 on 1. Then he goes to a place that's meant to showcase his talents like a 5 out system in Kentucky, and there's no surprise that he doesn't know the pick and roll.
A lot of this relates to not being in a structure for 4 years, and I think this is one area where early entry has hurt the product, because we expect a polished product from professionals, but if you look with a bit of reality, you see a team with kids who are learning. JT was probably the "most polished" in this group, and you can see the growing pains he has gone through.

 

[sanho]

Id love to see this laid out in video

 

[ppine]

New to this forum. Tyreke is lackadasical bringing the ball up. The Kings have an 18 second clock in effect. The Kings stand around offense is the most lethargic in the league, especially considering that they are young and spread the minutes around. Then they they force shots that frequently have long rebounds that lead to fast breaks the other way. This is a formula for continuing disaster. On nights when the Kings are shooting the ball well, they are in games at the end. On nights when they can't hit, they are pathetic. Defense comes from effort and moving the feet. It is all about desire. Smart will drill that into their heads and the team defense will improve. Show some defensive balance please. The offense can not get by averaging 85 points every night. The Kings still need to outscore people.

I am a third generation Washington Husky and love to watch IT play, but he is not the answer as a rookie. I would not hesitate to bring him in the game in the first half however, when the Kings start playing stand around ball. Nate Robinson is also fun watch with the Warriors for the same reason. These two guys understand that basketball is a game of effort and energy.

 

[IfAt1st]

It's not an 18-second clock for the Kings.
Go look at the plays, and average them. I've been watching it fairly closely.
The AVERAGE time on the clock when they actually start their first offensive move is around 13 seconds.
Many times it is 10 seconds or less, which blows my f-ing mind.

Where do they get off acting like they are so good at executing that they only need 10 seconds to get a good shot off?!

The rel scary part of this reality is that (if y'all remember), Paul Westphal harped about this for almost a month last year, saying "We MUST bring the ball up faster, it's killing us not getting earlier into our sets".

Yet, here we are a year later, and Tyreke has shown ZERO actions to speed up the driible-up. I've noticed again this year many times he BARELY gets the ball over midcourt before 16 seconds on the clock.

Think about that for a second :
This entire organization (and the league) knows that this team has difficulty executing half-court sets, often running out of time to get a good shot up.
Yet, even after years of failure, and their (former) coach publicly addressing the need at length, and pleading with his team to bring it up faster, they still don't even do that most basic of thing.

What does that say about the team, and especially Tyreke?

 

[bajaden]

Of course I know what I was talking about. I read the post of rainmaker and certainly I know what I wrote in response to what I read. As rainmaker pointed out those were fundamental/basics to a basketball player especially for those who have reached the college level of basketball. They should know these, unless they played baseball and pretend they know basketball too just like you do. Basketball is very different from baseball.

I guess my whole point is players are not exerting that much effort to apply just even their very basic knowledge of basketball. They are plainly lazy and contented just play however they want to play. We are probably all non-NBA players posting in this board. Why is it that we see those elementary mistakes and the Kings' players can't? It has something to do with their desire to win or effort to be better.

I wasn't being critical of you. I said you were wrong, but it wasn't your fault. I said that its an easy assumption to think that players actually learn all the fundamentals in highschool. It just happens not to be true. I've been watching professional basketball for over 50 years. That doesn't make my opinion better than anyone else's, but it does make it creditable. I just happened to be a very good baseball player. But I also played basketball, football, tennis, and ran track.

I watch over 100 highschool basketball games every year, if not more. How many do you watch? God knows how many college games I watch every year. Do you know who Anthony Bennett is? How about Isaiah Austin? I do! And I've seen them play more than once. So don't tell me to stick to baseball. My point is, that for every good highschool program out there, there are probably 100 bad one's. And I explained why. Highschools in general can't afford to pay big bucks for top coaches. And few if any of the coaches are able to see beyond the current season and trying to win. It even happens in college to some extent. Why the hell do you think Gerald Wallace played center in college? Because they had no one else on the team that could do a better job. Thats all well and good for that team, but how many fundamentals did he learn about playing the SF position?

So Wallace, who played center his senior year in highschool, and then played center his freshman year in college, comes into the NBA and is moved to SF, a position he's never played, and you expect him to know how to play in the NBA at that position!!!!! Look at Corliss Williamson. He played center at 6'7" his entire college career at Arkansas, and then is moved to the SF position in the NBA. Suddenly he's a fish out of water. Low post skills don't help you much on the perimiter.

Now I'm trying to be nice here, but apparently you don't want to be. You said you were a professional basketball player. If so, you should know that everything I just said was true. You would know that highschool basketball in general, are hardly at the same level of teaching fundamentals as college is, unless you luck out, and happen to get into one of the top programs. And when I was in Sac, there were programs like Jesuit, which I think was one of the better ones there. Del Campo was up at the top for a while, but that was mostly because of Barnes, and Ryan O'Donnell, their PG. But Barnes wasn't used properly, and if you could talk to him, which I have, he would say the same thing. He was very ill prepared when he arrived at UCLA.

In closing, I'm 70 years old! I've been shot, and shot at. I've won and lost fights in bars and alleys. I've been chased naked across a field by a girls grandfather in Hawaii. I saw my dream of playing for the St. Louis Cardinals go up in smoke with an injury. I've lost a child to a hunting accident. I have a great son and daughter, and I wouldn't change my life for anyone's. So frankly, I don't give a tinkers damm what you think of me.

 

[Bricklayer]

Actually given the simplicity of our plays, I rather doubt it takes us even 10 seconds to run them. There's never more than 1 screen, and rarely more than 2 passes.

And enoguh with the Tyreke stuff. Really now. What do you thnk all those fullcourt raceouts he;s been doing are? Precisely an attempt to follow the coach's instructions to get out into the fullcourt. But there are all kinds of probelms. When you see him do those, how foten does he have teamamtes with him? Given that we lost the rebounding edge we finally had last year, we have probelms getting the ball to start the break. given that we are 2nd from worst in the entire league in Opp FG% we are always taking the ball out of the hoop, whcih agian makes it difficult to run. Adn when we do come in the halfcourt, everythign is slowed down because its not instinctual. Reke has been calling plays since smart comes over. Walks it up, calls the play. If that's bad basketball, then John Stockton was a ****ty basketball player. But we aren't quick or decisive with anythign we do out there. Everything takes longer than it should, and because the sets are simple and we don;t execute them well, we frequently get chased out of them and forced into desperation 1 on 1 shots against the buzzer.

 

[Npliam]

Actually given the simplicity of our plays, I rather doubt it takes us even 10 seconds to run them. There's never more than 1 screen, and rarely more than 2 passes.

And enoguh with the Tyreke stuff. Really now. What do you thnk all those fullcourt raceouts he;s been doing are? Precisely an attempt to follow the coach's instructions to get out into the fullcourt. But there are all kinds of probelms. When you see him do those, how foten does he have teamamtes with him? Given that we lost the rebounding edge we finally had last year, we have probelms getting the ball to start the break. given that we are 2nd from worst in the entire league in Opp FG% we are always taking the ball out of the hoop, whcih agian makes it difficult to run. Adn when we do come in the halfcourt, everythign is slowed down because its not instinctual. Reke has been calling plays since smart comes over. Walks it up, calls the play. If that's bad basketball, then John Stockton was a ****ty basketball player. But we aren't quick or decisive with anythign we do out there. Everything takes longer than it should, and because the sets are simple and we don;t execute them well, we frequently get chased out of them and forced into desperation 1 on 1 shots against the buzzer.

I don't think You watched John play that much. The Jazz scored a ton of points on the fast break and secondary break.

 

[Hadlowe]

I don't think You watched John play that much. The Jazz scored a ton of points on the fast break and secondary break.

When they were getting knocked out of the playoffs in the first and second round, they did. When they went up against the bulls, they were the slowest offensive team in the league. Also, the best . . . except for that Jordan guy.

 

[Npliam]

When they were getting knocked out of the playoffs in the first and second round, they did. When they went up against the bulls, they were the slowest offensive team in the league. Also, the best . . . except for that Jordan guy.

Well the Bulls always had 3 extra players on the floor

Do you have a link for pace of play during those year or are you just going off memory. The Jazz would run if the break was there and they got into their sets really fast before the defense could set up.

Comparing Tyreke in any way to The GREAT John Stockton is really, really bad.

 

[Hadlowe]

Mostly off memory. Used to live around Utah when they were great and got my introduction to the NBA watching Malone, Stockton and Hornacek. Loose recollection of Hot Rod Hunley saying that they were the slowest offense in the league the year they finally beat the rockets to take the western conference finals.

Might also be colored by the years that Payton and Kemp knocked them out. Now, THAT was a team that ran the break.

 

[IfAt1st]

Actually given the simplicity of our plays, I rather doubt it takes us even 10 seconds to run them. There's never more than 1 screen, and rarely more than 2 passes.

But, see, many times professional basketball teams don't get their 1st or 2nd options on the court!

They have players running around the court, setting screens to free up guys who swing it to the weak side, just to set up the guy who does shoot the shot.

How many times this year have we seen the Kings play solid defense just to have the other team end up with a shot in the last couple seconds because they had been putting pressure on the Kings defense for the better part of 20 full seconds?

I can't remember more than a handful of times this year - you know what? I can't remember ONE TIME this year that the Kings did that to the other team.

When the Kings don't start their offense until 12 seconds, they are requiring that their 1st or 2nd options work.
They are giving up on a 3rd or 4th option simply because they are too slow setting up the offense.
This is like playing with one hand tied behind your back, and THEY are the ones doing it to themselves!
Purposely.
Against the previous coach's haranguing.
Against all NBA knowledge.

 

[Bricklayer]

Well the Bulls always had 3 extra players on the floor

Do you have a link for pace of play during those year or are you just going off memory. The Jazz would run if the break was there and they got into their sets really fast before the defense could set up.

Comparing Tyreke in any way to The GREAT John Stockton is really, really bad.

All I can do is refer you to databasebasketball's Pace statistic, which I don't even know exactly how its calcualted. In any case, during their two Finals years the Jazz's Pace was 92.3 and 91.5 (the Bulls was 92.1 and 92.0 during those years). For comparison last year Boston has a 92.5 Pace, the Bulls a 92.1 and the Mavs a 93.4. We had a 97.8 -- whic was 5th in the whoile league, and in fact HIGHER than Golden State's. Fans jsut have unrealistic expectations.

In any case there is nothing wrong with taking yor time and setting things up. If you are a smart veteran team it is in fact exactly what you want to do. Just take the other team's defense apart. Our problem isn't our pace so much as that we don't have the second part of it -- we set nothing up, so we aren't doing anything productive with the extra time taken.

 

[Npliam]

All I can do is refer you to databasebasketball's Pace statistic, which I don't even know exactly how its calcualted. In any case, during their two Finals years the Jazz's Pace was 92.3 and 91.5 (the Bulls was 92.1 and 92.0 during those years). For comparison last year Boston has a 92.5 Pace, the Bulls a 92.1 and the Mavs a 93.4. We had a 97.8 -- whic was 5th in the whoile league, and in fact HIGHER than Golden State's. Fans jsut have unrealistic expectations.

In any case there is nothing wrong with taking yor time and setting things up. If you are a smart veteran team it is in fact exactly what you want to do. Just take the other team's defense apart. Our problem isn't our pace so much as that we don't have the second part of it -- we set nothing up, so we aren't doing anything productive with the extra time taken.

I agree that a slow pace with no real idea what you are going to do on offense is just a bad idea.