Opinions? Comments? Obviously Zion being out and BI being hurt were big factors, but what did you guys think about seeing CJ lead the team that series (in Usage % and shot attempts at least)? Should offense be a priority this offseason? Defense?
by Creative-Ad-5257
5 Comments
It was so painful to watch.
Shocker…
They just didn’t show up. OKC was giving the game at times and they just didn’t take it.
Didn’t we rank dead last in open 3s as well?
I very much fear what this team might look like if we lose Borrego to the Lakers.
Willie already is not a very good offensive mind and he seems to ignore offense entirely when he is making adjustments in game. Routinely we would have games where the other team gets hot and we would literally take all but 1(or sometimes less) shooters off the court and try and defend our way back out of a hole with Willie’s favorite hustle guys: Naji, Jose, Herb, Dyson, Nance. In 82 games we didn’t win a single game when heading into the 4th down.
Frankly even without Zion there is no excuse for this. We are an offensively built roster. That should not be a problem for this team.
But it seems like we have a conflict of interests: Willie is a defensive minded coach, the Pels were an offensively focused roster.
Instead of leaning into that identity, Willie was constantly attempting to make up the defensive deficit he was hyperfocused on by loading up the rotations with the defensive guys he had. Which were often offensively limited defensive guys with “hustle” that put a lot of burden on Zion/BI to carry the load in poorly offensively balanced lineups. When Zion went down, BI was hobbled, and CJ was in a funk we simply had nothing to alleviate pressure and get those guys some easier looks or have some offensive rotations we could pull from that could serve as a lifeboat.
We had buried Hawkins and Ryan on the bench so working them in to try and spark something that CJ was lacking was unrealistic at that point,
There was a lot of argument and back and forth about Jonas, who was eating Chet alive, and why he didn’t see more minutes. The excuse always being his defense. Which is fair, most of his lineups were net negative.
But this is where a season with one focus being the defense in your rotations can bite you, cause Naji/Dyson/Jose/Nance are not shooting you back into a game and are not such great defenders they can slow down a great team. But you’ve neglected your offensive guys and neglected building an offensive identity with your rotations so you just have to throw those offensively limited defensive guys in there and hope for miracles.