I will acknowledge his shot isn't falling at the insanely high percentage it was to begin the season. In my opinion it hasn't fallen enough to justify a slump label.
Printable View
Calm down :hihi: I promise you, nobody is impressed by your snarky name-calling on an internet basketball forum.
Coach K is not a great coach, contrary to popular belief. Very good recruiter, not a great coach. The Duke team that Zion played on last season wasn't actually a great one overall for a bunch of reasons; part of it was because of the lack of spacing in the lineups, sure, but part of it was Coach K's weird insistence on RJ Barrett being the secondary playmaker despite his general lack of talent for it.
That is to say, Zion's played with a Coach who's failed to design a strategy that plays to his strengths before, and he still managed to have one of the most dominant college seasons of the last 20 years and get drafted first overall. When you're that good, coaching can only hurt so much. Zion will come in and he will perform well, and be fun. We may not win that many games, because that's a team effort, but even with the coaching impediment, Zion will make the games at least entertaining. Which, right now, they're not.
I'm still going to disagree. Gentry is a scapegoat.
It's players going cold and missing shots. They're getting the same good looks but just go cold. The system is working, the players aren't knocking them down. Then dumb individual plays in the final minute.
In defense we're getting exposed because Hayes and Okafor just can't play good team defense. Hayes will get there. Ok will always be a liability. He's a bench player. Melli isn't even worth mentioning, here. Lol
Missing both Favors and Zion has absolutely killed us inside.
But then all of this would be moot if the game were officiated evenly. More foul calls would lead to slower developing plays from the opposing team and better team D from us......and just the points alone......
Everything Jrue and Ingram get they have to work for.. almost everything everyone else gets Jrue and Ingram have to work for. You guys are correct, it's up to the coaching staff to implement a system and schemes that generate open looks. It just rarely happens..
This year is a waste with Alvin Gentry here. His scheme sucks. He doesn't develop players. He has been well BELOW average his entire career.
Gayle did everything else right except firing Gentry. Now the life is just sucked out of the fan base and the team.
Call up Didi. Starting lineup should be: NAW, Jrue, BI, Hustle, Jax. Didi needs to play with the big boys off the bench.
I’ve heard it all now...:hihi:
I wanted to say this same exact thing the other night. You can justify it if we are winning. You CANNOT justify giving Moore minutes over these guys if we are losing. In fact, I’d wager that Gentry’s reluctance to let the young guys play is hurting the team overall.
Pels DRTG with Jaxson on the court tonight: 97.2
— Shamit Dua (@FearTheBrown) December 2, 2019
Pels DRTG with Jaxson off the court tonight: 127.3
Yeah, not surprised by this.
I'm going to eat crow on Okafor.. I thought he'd be better than what he's demonstrated thus far. I had no idea he was this bad on defense.
Sad.. You were right man... I remember being excited about what he might bring this season, you weren't all that optimistic. Now I can see why.
@JJ This was my thinking but even in limited minutes, he's really bad on defense. Like he's not even able to defend 2nd and 3rd string interior players.
College. Coaches. Aren't. Good. Prospects.
Hopefully Favors is back next game so he and Hayes can shore up the center position.
I also dont understand benching Lonzo in the final 5 minutes.
While it looks like he has lost all confidence to drive into the paint, he still tends to get the ball moving. Still has active hands on defense.
Instead we get treated to yet another closing minutes of Jrue looking like a deer in headlights.
Sadly there's probably truth to this.
What should happen is that when Favors comes back, Hayes should continue getting his 20 minutes a night, and those minutes should come from Okafor and Melli, with Favors getting the other 28.
What will probably actually happen is Okafor will somehow find a way to get 15 minutes a night, Melli will get 8 minutes per game at really inopportune moments, Favors will play 34 minutes a game, and Hayes will only ever come in for 3 minutes at a time in garbage time.
It's a bit of a hyperbole, but Gentry is gonna fumble the minutes up badly like he does every night.
I'm ready for him to move to the FO. He's a great person and personality. I would love for him to stick with organization that are short on basketball minds. I personally think the game has passed him by a long time ago outside of one lightning in a bottle. There is nothing wrong with it, but he has done a lot of great things for this organization that don't show up on the W/L record.
The game hasnt passed him by. On the contrary, he's trying to be too far in front of it.
This is 7-9 Sean Payton 2.0. There are certain fundamentals of football and basketball that will never change.
Just like Sean Payton tried to throw the ball 40-50 times per game and resulted in 7-9 seasons, Gentry wants "at least 40 threes per game." and the results will be the same.
You have to run the ball in football and be balanced. Sean Payton adjusted and it's paid dividends.
Gentry has to draw up sets to get into the paint and draw fouls or get uncontested layups or mid range shots.
Naturally Zion will help fix that, but it shouldnt be reliant on one player. It is a fundamental coaching flaw.
His lightning in a bottle was the Sun run. It got figured out and he never learned to overcome that coaching wall.
Don't let the Warriors run fool you. That was a hall of fame squad and the only one to really successfully to run a diet verison of Gentry's offense.
Maybe I'm just being cynical, but I almost feel like Gentry had very little to do with the success of that Suns run either.
Nash was still there in that first year (the most successful year, the WCF trip) and he was still going bonkers. He averaged 16pts and 11asts per game that year, and shot 50/40/90. He was incredible still, despite his advancing age, and it was one of his last really healthy seasons (he played 81 games that year). I'm convinced that it was Nash's continued incredible play, combined with the roster continuity of guys like Stoudemire, that propelled the Suns on that run, not Gentry.
It was momentum that pushed through one more year, not the coach.
Nope, you're not.
Gentry has glaring track record of poor talent development and lack attention to details. He had a vet squad and basically was a caretaker. Buddy Heild looked like bench player at best with Gentry and soon as he flipped. His game changed overnight.
Something isn't right in that practice facility.
I was just looking things up to compare, now that there's a slightly larger sample of games:
If you look at our first month of games (October 22nd until November 22nd) you find that only 33% of our shots were at the rim, and 42% were from behind the arc. 25% of our shots came from midrange.
Shooting at the rim, we generated 1.26 points per shot. At the arc, 1.15. In the midrange, 0.74.
It's clear that the most valuable shots this team can generate, in terms of creating-points-per-attempt, at at rim attempts. Followed by threes, followed by the midrange in the last place. So how come we're taking more shots from 3 than at the rim? What sense does that make, strategically? It's a simple calculation to find out that the best shots in terms of creating value are at-rim attempts, so why are we prioritising threes which are less valuable? Why 33% at rim and 42% from 3, and not the other way around?
And then, get this: since November 22nd until today, the shots we're creating are even worse!
At-rim attempts over the last 10 days or so are down to only 26% of our shot profile, despite us having become more effective at scoring on those attempts: the points per at-rim attempt has gone up to 1.31. Meanwhile, our mid-range shooting has dropped off from 0.74 points per shot to a truly disgusting 0.66 points per shot, yet our volume of midrange shots has crept up to being 31% of our offense. That's right, we are now taking more mid-rangers than shots at the rim, despite having gotten even less efficient at them. Our 3pt shooting has stayed fairly stable in terms of volume at 43% of our attempts, though our efficiency has fallen a little to 1.09pps.
And get this: In the 4th quarter, despite our efficiency soaring to 1.5 points per shot on these attempts, at-rim shots have dropped off even further to only 18% of our offense during this time period. Midrangers stay the same, roughly, in terms of volume (31% still) but our efficiency continues dropping off: we have been generating only 0.52 points per shot on midrangers during this stretch.
The real change is the volume of three pointers: others have pointed out how many aimless threes we've been shooting off isolation plays or bone-headed fastbreak choices, and that shows up: since the 22nd, 51% of our shot attempts in the 4th quarter have been 3 pointers, and our efficiency has dropped off to only 0.8 points per shot on these attempts. This is largely because they're bad shots, rushed shots, isolated shots, etc etc.
So why, when 3 pointers are working less for us, and midrangers are working less for us, do we continue to keep taking those shots at such high frequencies, while ignoring the fact that we're actually generating extremely efficient offense at the rim? Why do this? Does Gentry not check these numbers? Does nobody on the staff check these numbers? Does nobody look at our efficiency from various spots on the floor and ask, hey why don't we take the shots that we're creating lots of points on, and fewer of the terrible shots that don't give us anything?
This is a legitimate problem with our scheming. Obviously Zion returning will bump up the volume of paint attempts, as will Favors, but there's still no excuse for taking only 18% of your shots at the rim in 4th quarters. That's unforgivable.
People seem to forget Mark Jackson built the Warriors. Not Kerr or Gentry.
It's crazy what revisionist history does.
You look back at Mark Jackson's actual time with the Warriors, you find everyone mad at him for refusing to run the ball through Curry in key situations because he preferred to post-up David Lee, and telling players that their teammates were possessed by demons, and then a few years later everyone runs around pretending he was some closet-genius who gifted Curry his shooting prowess via some strange alchemy.
I think losing AD kind of give Gentry the green light on doing what he wants to do instead of catering to Ad's play style.
You know how many open runs Hayes get passed on in a game in the paint.They watch film... About 20+ games where Hayes has anywhere to 5-10+ easy looks and alley opportunities. They don't focus on it. The spacing Hayes gets is disrespectful.
Hayes is probably the one who gets short changed the most by this, although not entirely (Jrue should be driving more, Ingram should be driving more, etc etc) but you're right. I've said it before as well, and it's obvious to anyone who watches the games: Hayes should be getting about 3 or 4 wide open dunks a game from his off-ball movement, rim running, and streaking out ahead of the play. But nobody sees him, nobody's looking for him, nobody cares. Easy buckets that just get left on the table.
Another disappointing and pathetic game. TERRIBLE to watch.
Here is something else that you'd enjoy... That closing rotation that Gentry put out to win the game...
That lineup had only played together for 9 minutes prior to tonight.
We are stunting the development on NAW for that. Gross incompetence 20 games into the season.
I mean, the 17th is more like 9 weeks but I guess they might give him a little extra time just to get through some practices.
The reality is that, unless there's been some complications or some twinges, he could probably play in the next game we have, but they'll want to take it cautiously and even if he was technically ready to go today, at 6 weeks, they'd probably still leave him until at least 7 just to be sure.
Obviously I'm not saying he is ready to go, I'm not there examining him and I'm not a doctor so nobody get at me for that hypothetical
No need to rush Zion back one bit. We need Favors back though, what the hell is going on with him
About 10 days ago.
https://www.nba.com/pelicans/news/da...chedule-return
Quote:
“Where we are with Zion is he’s on schedule. He’s progressing exactly as we hoped he would,” Griffin said on ESPN New Orleans 100.3 FM. “(In terms of a timetable), I think we’re on target for eight weeks. Probably not to the day, but in or around that.”
And for those wondering, Favors mother just passed away and funeral was Saturday.