If you taped the game, go look a little closer. We never depended on any one guy to contain James. In all cases, several Pistons were playing James for the drive, allowing whoever was on James to play up on him. James shot poorly pretty much the entire game. Good D by the Pistons. Yes, I will still complain about the lack of transition D by Herrmann. Again, go look at the tape, where Herrmann played in the 2nd quarter, and look closely at Herrmann moving in transition. Is that NBA acceptable to get down the floor that slowly? (If your name ain't Shaq that is)
This has been the downfall of our last two coaches. When you leave the starters in for the whole first and third quarters you limit your options the rest of the way. Most coaches in the NBA break the minute distributions down to 8 or even 10 segments. Substitutions begin halfway through each quarter if not a little sooner. We are freezing out our own players with our lack of early substitutions. What good does it do to leave a player in for 12 minutes to find a rhythm only to sub him out 3 minutes later. You have wasted an opportunity for another player that may have played better. Stints of 6-8 minutes at a time should be the goal for the entire team. Go hard for the whole time you are on the floor, grab some air on the bench and go hard the next 6-8 minutes. I understand that players want to play. Look around the league at the substitution patterns of the successful teams and I bet you don't find one that plays their starters all of the first and third quarters like us. Especially clubs that are playing vets like we are.
Felt good to finally watch a game... although I did miss the first quarter in a half, which looks like it was the best part. 3 assists from our starting 5? That's got to be an all time low. Also, very good defense from both teams. Here are the only players out of the 19 who played, who had more points than shot attempts: Maxiell- 6 points on 4 shots. Iverson- 11 points on 8 shots Sheed- 9 points on 8 shots Lebron- 25 points on 24 shots (pretty terrible) West- 12 points on 11 shots. Gibby- 8 points on 5 shots. This was just a game where nothing was open. Playoff-esque... Including the crappy calls that repeatedly benefited Bron. Dreadful game for Senior Stuckey. 6 points and he got blocked 4 times. No free throw attempts. 1 assist. 3-14 shooting with a festival of ugly jumpers. This dude needs a shooting coach and an off-season routine to make his jump shot into a true threat. He tears up the weak defenses, but when facing a wall of defenders, he's nothing. By the way, that fall Bynum took looked pretty nasty. Tough guy for bouncing up from that.
Successful teams actually do not substitute during 1st q, if possible. And their superstars affect games more and therefore it is a lot easier to substitute non star players: starters and bench players benefit from superstar. Even for experienced coach, to lead current pistons team, would be quite a task. There is no need to heroisize all those "pops, zenmasters" etc, w/o superstars their coaching would be pretty mediocre. This is NBA. Superstars affect games far more than every kind of coaching. JD has said several years ago something like that "with shaq in your team you do not need a strategy."
We have had a superstar since the 5th game of the year. Pop or ZMast would have made this team very dangerous. Even Vinnie Del Negro would be > .500.
Oh, the tall guy who looks like he forgets to take the hanger out of his suit jackets before he puts them on.
That was a stupid move by Curry. AI fought hard for that ball. The refs were also lazy calling the TO, really wanting to call a jump ball. AI was being slapped around on the floor trying to get the damn ref's attention. A guy fights THAT hard to save a possession, you don't take him out.
I would have to agree with that. Especially when that player's heads-up time out was the only reason that you were able to take him out of the game.
The ironic thing in all of this is that Stucky may not even be on the team in a couple of years. Or if he is it will not be as a starter.
