Celtics/Pacers - STUDS AND DUDS: PAUL GEORGE, PACERS OUTSHINE CELTICS

It's good to be Paul George.  It's pretty good to be the team that has Paul George too.  You could tell it was going to be a long night when George hit a falling backwards 3ptr with 2 Celtics draped over him at the buzzer to end the first.  We pulled it together a bit in the 2nd but then shot 31% in the 3rd.  We still scored 25 points in the 3rd, but imagine how many we could have scored if we had shot at a percentage even a bit closer to a coin flip.  We gave up two 30 point quarters.  Not good.

It's amazing all the things that did not go right this game.  Only 42% fg%, only 77 fgas., giving up 48% fg%, 18 TOs and just generally ineffective offense.  Yet, we only lost by 11.  We started the game off with 3 TOs and having a shot blocked.

Had the Indy announcers again.  Quinn Buckner is about to be inducted into the NCAA Basketball Hall of Fame.  He is only one of seven players to ever win an NCAA National Championship (Indiana University, 1976), an Olympic Gold Medal (Montreal, 1976) and an NBA World Championship (Boston Celtics, 1984) and he is only one of three players to do all that and win a state championship too.  Can you name the other two?  He always has nice things to say about Boston, and the Celtics, every time he comes back here to announce games.  His description of his championship season in Boston?  "Larry carried me".  Keep saying that Quinn and you'll probably keep your job of being the color guy for Larry's Indiana Pacers.  Quinn Buckner was Marcus Smart before there was a Marcus Smart.  Literally, Smart wasn't even born back then.  Damn, the years just fly by like SR-71 Blackbirds doing speed tests.  Oh, wait a second, they've been put out to pasture too...Shit.

1.  Thomas is killing us.  Another 4-13 night.  He's down to 37.5% fg% for the year and 26% from 3.  When Sully shot that from 3 we begged him to stop taking them.  He doesn't dribble out.  It's great that he can get in there, and yeah he does spin a few of them in, but when he gets swallowed up he doesn't realize that until he is already up in the air and when he tries to pass out he gets caught at it and intercepted.  His defense is NOT good.  He's in because his offense, when it is working, is worth the inferior defense but when it isn't?  Have a seat, son.  If only...Unfortunately, he really is all we've got right now.  Some of the bloom has come off the rose for me with Thomas, at least as a starter.  Off the bench?  Yeah.  Throw him into the waning embers and watch him light them up, but going up against their best from the start?  Only as an act of desperation, which is where we are right now with Bradley out with his shin bruise and Smart coming off the bench to slowly work off his rest and not rush back.  Take it from Clint, Isaiah, coming off the bench is where you should be.




2.  Smart is back and so is his horrid shooting.  1-6 and 0-4 from 3 but man, his 3s weren't even bricks, they were a ton of them.  They almost broke the back board, I don't think half of them even hit the rim.  By the end of the game Brad was so at wits end he had Smart guarding 6'9" Paul George.  Didn't help, of course, but that's where we were at.  One thing I'll give him is that he took more ftas than anybody else despite playing a carefully monitored 21 minutes.

3.  Amir is not being effective.  David Lee, on the other hand, is getting his feet under him.  Lee had 13 points on 4-5 shooting and 6 rebounds.  He was moving without the ball well for pnr buckets.  He was also using a spin move from the frito line to rocket (or as close to "rocketing" he gets) down the lane.  He's looking more like David Lee now.  Amir, though, is struggling.  He was out on top with Monta Ellis, NOT a favorable match up for us, but damn, did you have to break his ankles like that Monta?  Welcome to SportCenter, Amir, and not in a way you wanted it.  Amir sprained his ankle vs Indy in our first game, has been less effective since, and I'm sure that move by Ellis isn't going to improve it.  Time for another lineup change, Brad?  I know that will make our starting lineup shorter and less athletic but that's what we are anyway.

Here's the video of Ellis dropping Amir.  Mike Gorman is so matter-of-fact about it.  Quinn Buckner was not.  I love Mike but Quinn was closer to the truth.




4.  Sully played hard and got boards, 11 of them with 3 offensive, and most of them came from just outworking people.  On the other hand, he didn't box Lavoy Allen off the boards, 2 points.  He didn't box Mahinmi off the boards later, 2 points.  We saw that happen a few times in Milwaukee too.  God, and your mom, didn't give you that maximum gluteus maximus just to make sitting nice and cushy.  Stick it in someone's stomach, man, or, if they're a lot taller than you stick it into their knees but use it.

5.  I asked this question a few times on the Game On thread and I'll ask it again here, "When did Jae Crowder become such a shitty finisher?".  He hit a 3 and 2 fritos for his 5 points, but was 1-5 overall because he missed, badly, a shot from 3' and from 5'.  Smart's bricks were from 21'+, Crowder's were from less than the length of his body.  If there was one part of Jae's game that was working for him, and there was maybe only one part, it was that he will continue to lead the league with steals with the 5 he had last night.  You gotta finish, Jae, you gotta.  Another player that would be better coming off the bench.

6.  Watching Kelly carefully again last night.  A bad shooting night made him just as painful to watch, on offense, as most of the rest of the roster.  His defense, though, is starting to grow on me a bit.  He made a nice stab at the ball and almost got a steal off Hill (the Pacers were able to retain possession, but he disrupted their flow with it).  He played good defense on Hill down low.  Every time I say that, "Kelly with good defense down low", I really ask myself if I'm talking about the right guy because it is NOT who we have been watching for 2 years now.  He rotated nicely to force Paul George into a much tougher shot.  Paul George shot 10-22 for the game, so it's not like a lot of other defenders were having a lot of success making him miss either.  Hill, who had a great game against us as a starter in Indy, finally hit one from down low against Kelly but it was what Sam used to refer to as a "bull shot", just muscling it in.  He did a good job of forcing Hill to turn into defensive hands rather than away from them.  Kelly is getting to his position faster.  Another year of experience, another year of learning his opponents.  He's standing there, with his cute little alligator arms up, and he's actually forcing shooters to change their shots because of that.  It's hard to believe, he is NOT long (to say the least) but he's there, his arms are up and they feel like they need to shoot around him and that is producing some positive effect on throwing off their shots.  He'll never be a superior defender, not unless Danny hires Tomas de Torquemada to put Kelly on the rack to stretch him out a bit but this is, I think, the 3rd straight game where I can say nice things about his defense.  His offense, this game, however, sucked like the rest of the bench's.

7.  Speaking of the bench, as a whole, they were largely useless except as a collection of living "How Not Tos".  The second game of a back-to-back is when our depth was supposed to shine.  We got a glimmer last night, from David Lee, and that's it.  A combined 10-31 for the bench.  Take Lee out of that and we were 6-26 for a Seniors-Only league level 23.7%.  This is what I meant about so little going right this game.  Rozier was pressed into action, with Bradley sitting this one out, and he was 2-9 and a Thomas-esque 0-4 from 3.  Or is that Smart-esque?  Doesn't matter, they both sucked too.  Rozier doesn't have a rookie's fear of the bright lights and big stage but he does sometimes have rookie judgment.  RJ Hunter hit a shot from, what was it, 30'?  I thought Quinn Buckner was going to fall off his seat.  Hunter's defender was waiting for him around the 3pt line, thinking he'd dribble up, but RJ Sniper just said "Nah, I can see it from here, I'm good" and swish.  I could hear the crowd from 3000 miles away (with the help of microphones.  Whatever) after that.  Hunter and Rozier, and certainly Mickey, are such after thoughts Brad isn't running plays for them.  If he really is looking for offense because Thomas hasn't accepted the fact that Trick-or-Treat day has come and gone already, then he should be running plays for RJ.  I know bobc agrees with that (I think bob sleeps in an RJ jersey).  He took a brief hiatus from posting because he was settling in with a bag of pistachios and I was afraid he'd start choking when he saw RJ hit that.  Safety first, Bob.

8.  The biggest stud we had was Indy's throwaway, Evan Turner.  9-13 for 20 points.  When Turner is on, he's good.  When he's ME-balling he drives me crazy.  When he and Thomas are in together and doing their ME-ball thing, somewhere, an angel dies.  Last night he was pretty much all we had, and that's sad.

9.  Stat roundup:  They shot 48%.  That sucks (as in "we sucked at stopping them from scoring").  They got 10 offensive boards, a lot of it on the strength of Jordan Hill's 3 which came, like Lavoy Allen's by going over Sully.  We shot 4-24 for 17% from 3.  Roughly 30% of our fgas were 3s and we shot 17%.  Open up your dictionaries and look up ugly and you'll see what I'm talking about.  Our bench, itself was 1-13 from 3.  What does it say when your bench is taking more than half your 3pt fgas despite shooting 8% on them?  It says to me your bench has no shot discipline, isn't running an effective half court offense and is settling for the wide open shots the defense is giving you specifically because they can see you cannot throw the ball in the harbor from the edge of the pier.  Smart was rusty and Rozier is still quite the rookie, so who is running that bench offense?  

Despite all this badness, we were still in the game, down only 5 points at 92-87 with 6 1/2 minutes left, and we had 6 turnovers to go down 100-89 in 3 minutes to break the game open.  And that, more than anything, is why they are better than us right now.

Brooklyn beat Houston in Houston.  In other words, last night sucked from soup to nuts.

A day off to lick our wounds, or maybe for some film time to run salt into them, and then Atlanta, also known as "Spurs-lite" or "Celtics 2.0", comes to town.


bob


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rambone wrote:For the season the Celtics are +18 with Hunter on the court.

That's fourth best on the team.

Who is fifth?
http://stats.nba.com/league/player/?ls=iref:nba:gnav#!/?Season=2015-16&SeasonType=Regular%20Season&PerMode=Totals&TeamID=1610612738&sort=PLUS_MINUS&dir=1

rambone,


After telling us that +/- is not a reliable statistic unless it covers a long time period and many, many data points, and that is why Kelly's +/- is a reliable indicator, because it is over the period of years and with a myriad of teammates, now you are talking about +/- for RJ Hunter after a grand total of only 58 minutes played in his career. In doing so, you just kneecapped your own credibility on this.

Time to forget about +/- and let the players play, the coaches coach, Danny trade and let the chips fall and then see if statistics, be they +/- or any other interpretive stat, support what we are seeing. If they do then it will be obvious, and if they don't then continuing to tell skeptics they are wrong convinces nobody since the stats are not intuitively, obviously correct.

Last night I watched GSW beat Minny fairly handily (it wasn't as close as the final 13 point difference for most of it). Curry had 46 on just insane shooting. 4 GSW players played 35 minutes or more and Andre Iguodala played 30 minutes. So, those 5 players were on the floor together a lot since they represent 175 out of the total 240 player minutes (73%). Curry was a +21 while Iggy was a -5. Harrison Barnes, who played 35 minutes, was a -3. Bogut was a +/- 0 despite playing 21 minutes and getting 6 rebounds and 3 blocks. Karl-Anthony Towns played 30 minutes and had 17 points on 7-15 and 11 rebounds and yet he was a Minny team worse -24. I watched the game, like I said, and I can tell you Towns was a powerhouse. The +/- for that game doesn't make sense. Players' +/- for the season are nothing more than the accumulation of individual games. If the numbers going in are garbage then the numbers coming out will be garbage.

You've made your point. Very few, if any, agree with it but you've made it. Repeating it again and again is neither helpful nor productive, if you know what I mean. Time to move on and let actual events lead the discussions. I know you watch the games religiously, you have a lot to say about actual play without relying on interpretive stats. At the end of the season when we've all seen which players are getting the job done, and which ones aren't, we can reconsider which stats are worth something and which are not.


bob


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