Preseason Discussion

[Betrayer]

Let’s talk about the meaningless games!

[Betrayer]

1st quarter in the books. Casey already doing his 5 in, 5 out lineup garbage. Stew with a clean looking three. Cade looking rough. Ivey with a three and a bucket in transition. Also got rejected hard. Bey struggling. 

[Hart]

I would say Bey is struggling with his decision making more than anything.  He needs to play more like Bogdanovic and instead tries to play like Cade.  

[RandyMarsh]

Yeah last year when Bey was brutal those first couple months it felt like he was trying too hard to prove he was more than just a spot up threat and was capable of creating shots on his own. Then he went back to how he played his rookie year and relied more on Cade to create the offense for him and he played a lot better.  

[Hart]

Bummer for the starters to get blown out the first preseason game.  It happens in the NBA but it sucks to see it right away when you are excited to see your team kickoff a new season.  

[Betrayer]

Turnovers killing this team. That’ll be an issue all year but vets are as guilty as the young guys. 

Stew doesn’t fit with the starters. Too small, no lob threat, no weak side shot blocking, rebounds are a struggle. I’d rather see Duren in there with the starters, young or not. 

[Hart]

If he gets this amount of minutes, I think we will know within a few preseason games if Cade has made any kind of big leap from year one to year two.  We are seeing the same issues tonight we are saw last year.  It's only one game but still not an encouraging sign.  

[buddha]

just a preseason game.  means nothing.

that said, ivey looks exciting!  finally, someone on this team who can beat a guy off the dribble to the basket!

[Hart]

6 hours ago, buddha said:

just a preseason game.  means nothing.

that said, ivey looks exciting!  finally, someone on this team who can beat a guy off the dribble to the basket!

The score means nothing.  Individual performances MIGHT mean something.  Hoping we see somebody has improved a lot.

[Tigeraholic1]

Insane amount of turnovers, gotta clean that up. 

[Betrayer]

I love Stew, but the starters need a player in Duren's mold who can be a vertical threat, grab rebounds, and add some size to that unit. Conversely, the bench could use Stew to help space the floor with Bagley in there rather than having both Duren and Bagley clogging the paint.
-- Stewart with 1 rebound in 22 minutes.
-- Duren with 14 in 24 minutes.

Not to be left out of this preseason discussion is Casey. No matter what roster we have we're still going to contend with:
-- All 5 starters coming out for a 5-man bench unit that will play for 6 minutes straight in both halves.
-- Soft switching everything so the other team can get any mismatch they want anytime they want it.
-- Terrible offense - 3 DHO's and a couple passes around the perimeter...defense doesn't shift at all...5 seconds left to chuck up a shot.

 

[Deleterious]

Preseason basketball is the most worthless thing in sports.  Every year multiple guys across the league put up big numbers and never get off the bench in regular season.  Good play, bad play.  It means nothing.

[Betrayer]

Means about as much as the G-League play of Victor and Scoot, but it doesn't mean we aren't going to talk about it 🙄

[buddha]

1 hour ago, Betrayer said:

Means about as much as the G-League play of Victor and Scoot, but it doesn't mean we aren't going to talk about it 🙄

let the mad tank scramble begin!  victor is 7'5 with a guard's handle and a smooth 3 point shot.  he's the next big thing.

like chet, only good.

[Deleterious]

And hopefully not hurt before training camp.

[RandyMarsh]

If you look at Victor's scouting report it sounds alot like Darko's pre draft,  of course Victor has actually shown to have the ability to do the unicorn things in competition where as Darko's was based off what people projected while seeing him in workouts or garbage time. 

Edited October 6, 2022 by RandyMarsh

[Hart]

Jaden Ivey looks really, really, good.  I knew we needed some explosiveness on this team but I didn't realize just how much until watching Ivey out there with Cade and Saddiq.  I really like Keegan Murry as well but I think Ivey fills a much bigger hole for us.  

[Hongbit]

Not good

[buddha]

watching andre play for the bulls.  he looks even more out of shape than usual.

[sabretooth]

Ivey looks good with the ball.

Cade's shot is still a brick.

[buddha]

it would help if they can have someone other than [squints] killian hayes make some shots.

[casimir]

14 hours ago, Hongbit said:

Not good

Remember when they had too many bigs on the depth chart?

[Betrayer]

Been a rough couple of preseason games. Ivey is legit. He's going to make a bunch of mistakes (turnovers), but he adds something we desperately need and will likely lead this team in free throw attempts.

Sad to see Bagley go down in preseason, but when has he ever been healthy for more than a minute? We knew this was coming at some point. Hopefully Duren can continue to gobble up rebounds in his absence and stake a claim to that starting Center role where he'll eventually belong anyway.

3 games into preseason and Casey is already driving me nuts.

Soft Switching is bad: It's good to be a team that can switch, or even a team that switches fairly often (Boston, Miami), but "Soft Switching" (switching everything, even before the screen is set) is a very bad scheme. It literally took 5 minutes for the Pelicans broadcast team (Antonio Daniels) to start talking about how easy it would be to expose this defense.

Opponent knows they can get whatever mismatch they want, whenever they want it. Rebounding suffers because you have Corey Joseph trying to box out Jonas Valanciunas constantly. You wind up having to double far too much. You put a lot of wear and tear on your guards trying to guard and box out people the size of Zion. And you constantly pull your rim protection far away from the basket leaving them in a bad position to guard the paint and contest shots.

Offensive Scheme is still trash: The offensive is so vanilla and does nothing to shift the defense. Three DHOs that don't move the defense at all, then a simple pick and roll at the end of the clock to try to salvage something from the play. It's funny (and sad) to see them run the play and then look up confused like they expected it to create something. Maybe it works in practice against our own bad defense since we're switching everything, but this offense isn't working at all in games. Zero creativity. Zero use of individual player strengths.

Rotations are the same garbage as last year: Should we get into his 5 man bench units with no staggering? One of Cade and Ivey should be on the court at all times, but that might require Casey to actually come up with a slightly more complex rotation scheme like every other team in the league. Right now, he's doing like I would in a video game.

This team isn't getting anywhere with Casey at the helm and they'll constantly underperform. I get that he's good at developing young players, but get him into a development role then. We need an actual coach or my 35 win prediction is going to be way off - and that's what really matters 😄

Edited October 12, 2022 by Betrayer

[buddha]

look, all this means is we win the lottery and get wambanyama.

[Betrayer]

This podcast is up and down, but here's a really good episode backed up with some facts and stats in the second segment of the show. Worth a listen if you want to understand why Soft Switching is a terrible scheme, especially for this team, despite Casey's arguments and JEIII's Athletic article:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adrLoAY755s&t=143s