Okay so, game 5 is our 4th road game so far, so that's nice.
Tonight's game is against Oklahoma City, and it seems fitting that on the last night of this pretty awful year, we're playing against another team at the start of a rebuild, looking forward to better years in the future. They're loaded with young guys, some of whom are already breaking out like SGA, and some of whom are promising but still clearly some way off like Aleksej Pokusevski. Thus far they are 1-2, having lost against the Magic and the Jazz, picking up their only win against Charlotte. Meanwhile, we're looking for the opportunity to poke our heads up above .500 again. The beginning of our schedule this year is (yet again) incredibly tough, so if we can keep it about .500 until the end of January then we're in a decent spot in the playoff race, should that be our intention.
Again, it's still too early for me to want to post league rankings and ratings in these pre-game write-ups, so I won't, but it is worth mentioning that thus far OKC has been wholly unimpressive in those areas, ranking far outside the top 10 in everything but blocks per game thus far. This is not a team which has come out of the gates on fire, partly due to the aforementioned youth and inexperience of the roster combined with a few tough games early.
We played a fairly poor game against Phoenix the other day, leading to a pretty resounding loss, the motivating factors being a combined lack of defensive integrity and continuing our ice-cold shooting. In fact, as strange as it may seem, our shooting has gotten steadily worse over nearly each we've played so far. For me, this is our largest concern: of course, the defense needs to improve from the Phoenix game as well, but in general it's been better so far this year than last and defense is one of the things that takes the longest to really click anyway. Shooting, on the other hand, cannot be this bad if you want to win anything. Here are our percentages in each game so far:
@ Toronto: 45.2% (19/42)
@Miami: 28.6% (10/35)
Vs Spurs: 20.8% (5/24)
@ Phoenix: 12.5% (3/24)
This is, frankly, unsustainable. We desperately need a bounce back game. You cannot win games shooting 12% from 3, not without minor miracles, and certainly not consistently. We are, as it stands, the worst 3pt shooting team in the NBA: we are the only team which is collectively shooting below 30% from 3, at 29.6%. Of course, we're only 4 games in and it's almost certain that this will improve as the season goes on, but if we don't want to get in a hideous hole then that turnaround needs to start immediately. JJ Redick, a career 41.6% 3pt shooter on over 4500 attempts, is currently shooting 29% from 3 this year. That alone tells you everything you need to know, both about our shooting luck and our bench contribution issues.
And this is without even touching the problem that is our starting guard duo.
Tonight I don't expect perfection, but I do want to see some kind of improvement, some kind of effort on both ends to run the game properly. Stop devolving into iso-ball, stop taking bad shots, and bring back the Toronto/Miami defense: leave last game's defensive effort in Arizona.
If we do that, a win should be totally achievable here. So end the year positively.