April 9th - New Orleans Pelicans @ Minnesota Timberwolves - 42-39

Jose is injured and Trey is in the starting lineup. The bench has no scoring punch.

So why is Kira not getting any minutes at all? Dyson is 'defensive purposes' only at this point.

I didn't want to say anything because it was against a bunch of scrubs, but Kira's last minutes were straight up dominant.

He can pass and score. The bench needs scoring. Whats the deal? He's not awful defensively either.

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Originally Posted by luckyman

Jose is injured and Trey is in the starting lineup. The bench has no scoring punch.

So why is Kira not getting any minutes at all? Dyson is 'defensive purposes' only at this point.

I didn't want to say anything because it was against a bunch of scrubs, but Kira's last minutes were straight up dominant.

He can pass and score. The bench needs scoring. Whats the deal? He's not awful defensively either.

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Thank You, Luckyman

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Originally Posted by Pelicanidae

Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.

CJ is playing now exactly like he always does. But he has a serious injury in his shooting hand.

The wise thing to do would be to adjust how you approach the game, when you have such an injury - be more willing to defer, maybe try to prioritise facilitation, use yourself more as a decoy, use motion off-ball to off-set a reduced personal efficiency by improving looks for others.

Instead, he just goes out there and pretends that he's fine, plays the same way, but worse.

The critique I have for him, at least the major one, is the same one I keep making and people continue coming back to me by pointing out that he's injured, to which my response is always the same: I know that - does he? Because he plays as if he has no issues, no injuries, nothing to adjust to. He is inflexible because he refuses to adapt his game to account for his injury, and ignores the issues that result from it. So he's either ignorant, or selfish - or, as I suggest here, inflexible and has trouble doing things any differently.

None of those options are good options, but they're what's on the table.

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Adapt to where?

During the relaxed regular season play, Trey and Herb were hitting 3s and things were great. In the last game, Minnesota ratcheted up to playoff intensity and the young ones found out pretty quick that there isn't as much space when the game is taken to the next level. Now that's not going to be a long time issue as I think our young guys will rise to that next level and start to pickup their offensive game to match that playoff intensity D but since they aren't there yet and Jose and Zion are injured.....CJ can't defer to anyone. He's the vet floor spacer next to BI. The only one. Even iniured. He's inflexible because the roster doesn't have any place else to go. Either Trey and Herb are going to have to pick it up in a week, Zion comes back, or JV, BI, or CJ is going to have to have a monster game for us to pull through. It may even take two of them having monster games.

But I think people aren't seeing how Trey and Herb struggled to find space for 3s in that playoff atmosphere.

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Originally Posted by msusousaphone

Adapt to where?

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I listed several things he could do differently in the exact comment you're responding to.

CJ can't defer to anyone? So just to clarify, the argument has now taken this path:

CJ isn't doing anything wrong -> Okay CJ is doing some stuff wrong, but he's injured -> Okay maybe he could adapt but how? -> Okay, sure but who is he supposed to defer to? -> No, none of the other players on the floor count, they're all worse than him at this

Which leads us to the logical response of ''no they aren't, he's being really bad at it, because he's injured.''

Which is my entire point.

The CJ McCollum defense squad has simultaneously decided that he's so injured we can't blame him for any of the problems he's causing, but also not even close to injured enough for anyone else to be a better option. Which is it? Either he's injured so badly we can't judge him, or he's still better than Trey. He cannot be both.

I also want to jsut note that in order for the idea of Trey and Herb only really being useful during ''relaxed regular season play'' to make any sense, you have to do very weird leaps of logic such as pretending that the 4th quarter and overtime of the Memphis game were ''relaxed regular season play'', since Herb and Trey were both pivotal to that victory and CJ was very much the 4th wheel in that game.

Wanting to defend CJ is fair. As I've mentioned before, he's been put in very tricky circumstances between other guys being injured and his own injury, and it's been hard for him this year. I get that. But when we're at the point of playing down how good other guys have been, often within those same difficult circumstances, just to puff up CJ's accomplishments and make him look better, that's going to be somewhere I'm just not playing ball. Trey and Herb have been excellent and I'm not going to accept that they're both just not up to the task of ''playoff intensity'' basketball just to make CJ look better.

And as a final final side note on this comment, I love the pretend idea that Trey and Herb have just now ''found out pretty fast'' what playoff intensity is now, in a regular season game against Minnsota, when they both went 6 games against Phoenix in the actual playoffs last year. I feel like they may have already ''found out pretty fast'' what playoff intensity was then, in the actual playoffs against an elite team, more than they did in a single regular season game against Minnesota. Just spitballing there.

damn... he spittin ^ !

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Originally Posted by Pelicanidae

Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.

CJ is playing now exactly like he always does. But he has a serious injury in his shooting hand.

The wise thing to do would be to adjust how you approach the game, when you have such an injury - be more willing to defer, maybe try to prioritise facilitation, use yourself more as a decoy, use motion off-ball to off-set a reduced personal efficiency by improving looks for others.

Instead, he just goes out there and pretends that he's fine, plays the same way, but worse.

The critique I have for him, at least the major one, is the same one I keep making and people continue coming back to me by pointing out that he's injured, to which my response is always the same: I know that - does he? Because he plays as if he has no issues, no injuries, nothing to adjust to. He is inflexible because he refuses to adapt his game to account for his injury, and ignores the issues that result from it. So he's either ignorant, or selfish - or, as I suggest here, inflexible and has trouble doing things any differently.

None of those options are good options, but they're what's on the table.

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I think that is asking a lot of a player who has always been relied upon to be a scorer. This team also needs him to be a scorer as we do not have many players that can do so at the same level. If Willie ever decided to call plays and screens for Murphy, it may allow a bit more of him deferring, but Willie has not figured that out yet.

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Originally Posted by PELICANSFAN

I think that is asking a lot of a player who has always been relied upon to be a scorer. This team also needs him to be a scorer as we do not have many players that can do so at the same level. If Willie ever decided to call plays and screens for Murphy, it may allow a bit more of him deferring, but Willie has not figured that out yet.

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If he can't change because he's always played this way, then that is the definition of inflexible. So yeah, that's my point.

And sure, I've criticised how useless this team is at getting shots for Trey, that's also a problem. We were 25th in the NBA in offense after Zion went down (top 10 with him), so our offense has more than enough problems to go around.

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Originally Posted by Pelicanidae

If he can't change because he's always played this way, then that is the definition of inflexible. So yeah, that's my point.

And sure, I've criticised how useless this team is at getting shots for Trey, that's also a problem. We were 25th in the NBA in offense after Zion went down (top 10 with him), so our offense has more than enough problems to go around.

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It's probably part that he has played that way for 10 years or so in the NBA and part that the team relies on him to be a scorer. I do not call that inflexible. How many players do you see completely change the way they play because of an injury? Did you see Booker, Lillard, even Lebron suddenly defer since they were playing through an injury?

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Originally Posted by PELICANSFAN

It's probably part that he has played that way for 10 years or so in the NBA and part that the team relies on him to be a scorer. I do not call that inflexible. How many players do you see completely change the way they play because of an injury? Did you see Booker, Lillard, even Lebron suddenly defer since they were playing through an injury?

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Lebron is already a pass-first player, so probably a bad example from you there, but with the other two yes! One of the biggest problems with Lillard's entire career, one of the primary reasons the Blazers have never achieved as highly as some thought they 'should' based on Lillard's high tier scoring is the fact that he was eternally unable to actually impact the game in other ways, particularly off-ball and defensively.

I know - for certain - that our chances of advancing are much higher with a T-Wolves win. But I'm a dreamer, and the best-case scenario for the season as far as satisfaction is concerned would be to knock the Lakers out on their home floor. The refs would never let it happen... but maybe just maybe we could shoot lights out and make the refs moot?

Screw it, go T-Wolves.