| game report
Still going up up up. 15-2. And the right way. On the front end of a back to back, Flip used his bench. Man he used it. Great job of Flip trusting his bench players. Now we not only have another win, we are well set up to win again tomorro at Utah.
I believe Detroit tied a record tonight, getting just 3 turnovers. Amazing. And we scored well over a hundred points. A whole lot of scoring. A whole lot of passes. And just three turns. Got to salute CB and Arroyo on that.
Evans had a great game, specificall the first half. He had two offensive rebound putbacks, a nice score inside against seemingly all their bigs at once, an outside shot made, a dive to the floor to get us a loose ball, other rebounds. All in one half. Great game.
Delfino played too. In both halves even. Other than Dyess coming in for Sheed early due to foul trouble, Delfino was the first bench player in for the 2nd half. Quite a change. Delfino had done some pretty good stuff in that first half and clearly earned some more time. Delfino rebounded well, nailed his defensive rotations perfectly, hit a couple of outside shots, got an and 1 with a scoop. Basically, added well to the ball handling chores. Tay got good long rests both halves due to the very capable play by Delfino. (But with Magette not playing, I won't get too excited about this game. I would have liked to see Delfino guard Magette.)
Dale Davis came in for foul trouble and simply played good solid D. Nothing else, just good solid D, something we all know he can do quite well.
More on Arroyo. Cassell is a pretty darn good scorer and made Arroyo look bad on several occasions. But Arroyo in the end managed to do well enough on Cassell by making Cassel get the ball well away from the basket. Not a bad job altogether, and you know what? It actually was helping us having the Clips go against Arroyo rather than go to their bigs for scoring.
Rip just was Rip. Hitting those shots. And CB hit shots. Tay finally hit one outside shot in this game. He has not been connecting of late. Still staying quite aggressive going inside though. Sheed did some scoring. It all helps. That bench scoring was sure a welcome sight though.
Dyess is still not hitting any outside shots. The slump continues.
They tried something stupid, Hack-a-Ben. Never works. Not unless one time or two done strategically. This was nuts. They completely gave up trying to get into the game the old fashioned way. You know, good offensive execution and really working on D. Instead, they sent Ben to the line over and over. And over. Ugly basketball. Ben did not connect on many. But between the ones we made, and the points we got off offensive rebounds from it, it was an effective 40 something percent. Pretty much giving us automatic offense. And then they still could not score at their end. Worse, after it had all failed miserably, their coach still kept going to it.
Other than that nastiness, a good entertaining game against a worthy opponent. Another week at 1 in the polls. All for now. GO PISTONS!!!!! |