I can't believe we pulled down so many offensive boards.

__________________
Momma was queen of the mambo, Poppa was king of the congo, deep down in the jungle, I start banging my first bongo
Every monkey like to be, in my place instead of me, cause I'm the king of bongo baby, I'm the king of bongo bong
-Manu Chao

Defense leads to offense. Remember all those great transition oppurtunities with Amir and AA ?

I agree our offense is scatterbrained, but i still think the problem lies elsewhere. Also that Stuck/Amir pic -n- roll was starting to look really good . . .

We run too many ISO's, but Flip can't seem to stop that. Mainly all we need is ball-movement, and more penetration.

We're not always going to have the O rebound advantage like that to fall back on. SA will not play zone when Bowen's back, and few team do.

Micro,

Getting Theo takes a lot of pressure off of Dyss and Sheed. He is just learning to fit in. We go from being undersized to having an incredible big rotation including our young bigs. We should be able to board with anyone now and bring the energy without worrying about fouls.

Lprl,

In playoff basketball like we had tonight, it is harder to get out and get easy baskets. That is why The Suns have always had so much trouble. We will need the young bigs to bring that extra something to change the pace of a tight game. That one steal, that one break away. Their presence allows the entire front line to play with abandon.

But our offense is as it was two years ago. I think it is the only thing that can stop this team. How often do we get the lead early against the good teams??

Our strength showed tonight. We come with quality in waves and sooner or later a wave overtakes our opposition.

Your right on both counts, but if tonight is any indication our young bigs won't play so it negates all the positive.

Honestly if we win anything i believe it will be because of outstanding defense. This team isn't built to win with offense just to be efficient and score enough points and let the defense do the rest. I don't really see that changing with the personnel we have. Even in terms of talent Joe D went out and got mostly athlethic defenders. AA/Amir/Max all brought in for defensive talent. Hayes is really our only offensive pick-up. Stuck is both.

It seems like Joe/Flip are talking but not to eachother.

I agree. It amazes me how much better SA offense is. They pass the ball with a purpose. You can't count how many time DET passes the ball between 3-4 players for a total of 12' while barely breaking the 3 point line. Look how much harder a time DET has simply feeding the post? If Flip were a defensive genius would many point per game would they give up, 120, 125?

SA had only 10 players dressed and their high man in minutes played less than 4 of the 5 DET starters.

How many excuses would Flip have come up with if he was down 2 guys? Not a lot of fight there.

I am glad they won, but..........

Pop obviously watches Pistons tapes and knows we will throw up as many jumpers as possible, so the zone worked long enough to get them back in the game. Where was zone buster Flip Murray when we needed him. Pistons go almost six minutes without a score and for the longest appeared that not single shot was made in the paint. Lucky that Manu was off tonight....

I agree that this would have been a loss with Bowen in the lineup. That is the most frustrating thing about the Spurs... they have the official Rip stopper.

The biggest thing that stood out to me in tonight's game was that the refs let both teams play. I believe that when the refs stay out of the game, it is always advantage Pistons. Without the intentional fouling at the end of the game, the free throw were 6 for the Spurs and 9 for the Pistons. That is how it should be. That is also why we were able to play such good defense and get so many rebounds. Sheed and Dyess are wrecking balls when they aren't afraid of the whistle. Dyess with 17 boards! Sheed blocking Duncan 3 times! Stuckey with 2 steals. The strangest thing about this though was that Chauncey got 0 free throws. That is the first time that has happened this season. On the other hand, Ginobili also had 0 free throws. That has only happened 1 other time this year.

This game was very important for the Spurs and very meaningless for us. That is why I'm surprise Popovich played his bench 73 minutes and Flip played our bench 47 minutes. And the Spurs bench was sucking, but he stuck with them. By the way, Bonner and Oberto are terrible. They would not play 1 second if they were on our team.

How bad was Maxiell's pass to the ref? I haven't seen a pro pass that was that bad in a long time.

No Afflalo, no Amir

__________________
"Will was rolling, wasn't he? I roll with the guy that's hot." MC

i didn't see the game but holy cow on the complaining!! listen, even if the starters play 40 mins a night for the rest of the regular season (they won't), they've been rested enough this year for it to not matter. even chuck daly on the radio said that in the next 20 games you're going to have to weed down the roster to 9-10 guys, so i don't mind us doing that for individual games (like tonight) to see what these guys can bring to the table.

i'm comfortable enough with ANY of our current players on the floor, so whether or not AA or Amir get minutes is not as big of a concern to me. if nothing else, they rested the starters throughout the year and also built themselves up for their future as pistons. mission accomplished.

i'm waiting to pass judgment on flip's playoff preparation until the playoffs actually start.

I went and supported a local highschool team tonight. They won. Got home, watched the game. Another win. Good night for watching some hoops.

Sheed, Rip, and Tay were all clutch down the stretch. Nice to have a guy who can all his free throws in the last moments of a tight game. Way to go Rip. I was surprised Tay hit that shot though late in the game with so little rest. Flukes do happen I guess.

We managed to win another game without Afflalo. By simply playing Tay the whole first half. No problem. Tay is a very good option at shooting guard indeed. But you got to find someone more capable of playing small forward minutes than Hayes so that Tay can get some rest at least in a half. Tay did get some rest in the 2nd half at least, so that Dixon could come on and trigger a major run by SA. Why not just play Afflalo? A pretty good player.

Amir got another DNP. I am sure Flip just said everyone can't play. We won this game, a game we probably would not have won if Bowen was playing tonight, but that does not mean we can beat a complete SA team in the playoffs.

We did play some good D. The Rattler had a much better game than the last one for us. We fell behind during his first stint, but gained ground to start his 2nd. Ok in that regard. He certainly does have some size to guard Duncan, and tonight he scored some points here and there.

Dyess hit another outside shot. His 2nd in what, 3 games? But he did a lot of work inside. I like that. Lots of rebounds. Helped, though not that well, guarding Duncan. (Duncan in all was held to some pretty poor shooting.)

For the most part, our perimeter D was pretty solid. Some trouble though with letting come inside on us too much in the 1st half.

JMAX barely played in this one. Let me see. No Amir. No Afflalo. Hardly any JMAX. Hunter scheduled to take Stuckey's spot soon. Anyone want to hear my theory on why Dixon is playing minutes? To make Stuckey look bad. Now, Stuckey had a pretty darn good game tonight actually. Hit a jumper. Cut to the basket for a score on a high toss by Rip. Stole the ball. Played good D. But hey, when Hunter takes his minutes, people will have forgot all the good stuff and probably point to this game where SA started a big run with Stuckey in the game. It was not Stuckey.

We took way too many 3's. Made few.

Rip was the scoring hero. Except for one brief stretch in the 1st half where he missed a few, he was pretty awesome. He was part of that darn good perimeter D too.

Subs. Won't count Dixon, as he barely played. Ditto for JMAX. So there is Stuckey, who again played enough even if not a whole lot. Theo, who does need to play himself back into shape if he is going to do us much good in the playoffs. Hayes, who basically spelled Rip indirectly did hit a shot or two. You can definitely count him as someone who played some minutes. And Hayes did spell Tay in the 2nd half for a bit. So basically, we played our starters, plus Hayes, Stuckey, and Theo. An 8 man rotation. Once Hunter replaces Stuckey, the rotation will be complete. And we will exit the playoffs in the first round.

Tay had a good shooting first half. Mostly stuck to drives in for the 2nd half. With SA trying to get away with a heavy dose of Stoudemire, our guards were towering over theirs for the most part. (Except of course when Dixon got his minutes so he could trigger that run for SA.) And then we made that even more noticeable with Tay playing shooting guard.

So why were we settling for quite so many 3 point attempts. With the starting lineup SA chose to play tonight, no way you shoot outside shots. But we won, so can't complain too much about that.

By the way, that run by SA, about 13-0 for much of the 4th, put us down about 6 points. So those clutch shots by our guys were really clutch, getting us back on top in this game. Again, good job Sheed for hitting those midrangers over your defenders. Good job of Rip in getting open and canning midrangers. And good job Tay for hitting that 3.

Time to get some sleep. Though the amount of caffeine I had to drink to stay up to watch the game means I probably can't get to sleep for an hour yet. Got to try. Got plans to try and play some hoops in the morning.

Are you being sarcastic lee? Tony Parker did everything he wanted. We almost lost this game because of our weak perimeter D. Neither Rip nor CB were good match for Parker