POST GAME - PHILLY - HOME

They almost got trapped. But I'll take it.

The team however remains in a funk.

Brad is still exploring different rotations. Right now it looks like a mess. I don't know what to make of this team. Need 25 games to see what we really have.

Dboss

Crowder is a horrible shooter but he seems to have a knack for making big shots.

Dboss

These son of a bitches are going to give me a heart attack.

A W is a W is a W but I can't remember ever feeling less happy about a W than this one.

Have I mentioned we are a team of terrible finishers?  Well, we are, W notwithstanding.  If this was against the Sixers we would not have won.  Why?  Because we shot 34%, that's why.

1.  IT came to play.  Yeah, we had our obligatory "why did he try to dribble through there?" turnovers, but he played hard and hit shots.  He is the only player other than Amir (3-4) who shot 50% or better.  His 30 points on 11-21 saved our butts.  6 assists and 3 TOs is pretty good too.  I rarely can fault Thomas for his effort, when I do it's usually for his defense and for his ME-balling but without him last night being Isaiah Thomas we would have been on the wrong side of the score.  Shamrock is right about how losing might have helped Philly in their chase of Brooklyn but the beauty of this season is that we can win and still get a high draft pick.  Therefore it is a bit counter-productive to lose.  Thomas had 11 points in the 4th quarter.  I'll talk about that more later.

2.  The Philly announcer referred to the battle between Okafur and Sully as "a couple of heavenly bodies".  Yeah, like Jupiter and Neptune are heavenly bodies.  Sully has the weight to hold off Okie, but Okie has 2 inches on him and so that makes it tough when he's near the rim.  Nevertheless, Sully got his block on Okie in the low blocks.  Another horrendous shooting night for Sully, 4-12 for 10 points, but he grabbed 15 rebounds.  He fought really well against the next Dwight Howard (except with more skills, I think).  4 blocks, 9 rebounds and 19 points on 7-17 by "Jah" Okafur.  Will he grow some natty dreads?  He's halfway there now.  Then "Jah" would make complete sense.

3.  Bradley started out sizzling again and then turned to ice for the rest of the game.  Isaiah Canaan cooled off too when Bradley was defending him.  When IT was on him Canaan felt comfortable taking 3s from anywhere.  With the score 82-80 Celtics, and we're trying to dribble down the clock a bit, Bradley turns the ball over and gives them that last chance to score the tying bucket without us even getting a fga off.  The usual "WHY IS BRADLEY DRIBBLING!!?"

4.  Crowder is a terrible finisher.  Yeah, he hit that 3 with :38 left and us down 1 and the 3 he hit with us down 7 with 3:50 left, but you cannot overlook the 1-9 he was shooting before those 3s.  We could have breathed our sighs of relief sooner if he hadn't bricked those two fritos with 4:40 left.  The 3 at 3:50 made up for those two missed gimmes.  He was 1-6 from the paint last night.  1-6.  I wish I knew how many of those were blocked.  He's built like a linebacker, and he jumps like one too.  8 rebounds, so there's that.

5.  Everybody else sucked.  Let's just sum it up like that.  Even RJ airballed a mid-range shot that was so short it barely tickled the bottom of the net as it passed below the rim.  Our front court bench was a combined 0-7.  Our entire bench scored 21 points.  Kelly had 3 on fritos, Zeller had 2 on fritos and Turner had the rest, 16, on 6-18.  It's hard for me to get excited about 16 points off the bench by a player when he needed to take 20% of the teams' fgas to get them.  3 assists and 3 TOs, including a completely unnecessary travel on an excellent fast break opportunity, doesn't make me feel warm on this cold day neither.  The 9 rebounds, ok, he got those.  Somehow, Rozier only got tagged for 2 TOs in his 2 minutes.  I could have sworn there were more.  Oh, yeah, now I remember, one of the TOs I'm thinking were credited as a steal by ex-Celtic Phil Pressey, who played a helluva game.  Phil did a good job of slowing down IT for most of the game and made Rozier look really, really bad.  So bad, in fact, Brad had to pull him after only 2 minutes.  The steal, then another steal on an inbounds pass by Rozier that Pressey was able to jump and deflect and then outraced everybody to the loose ball.  I'm glad Phil took that last shot for Philly.  Of all the people...We got lucky with that.  There was another play where Phil was able to just lose Rozier for an open shot.  Fortunately, once again, it was Phil Pressey taking the shot and so we escaped that possession unscathed.  I'm happy for Phil, I think Brett Brown appreciates his pass-first, penetrator qualities.  He still can't shoot for shit though.  Fortunately.

6.  Time for a gut check, a ganas roll call.  WHO WANTS IT?!  When we were down 7 and only a few minutes left, who wanted the ball and took the shots and who just passed it to those people?  Let's set aside for the moment whether those players hit their shots, who had the huevos to take the shot when we needed points?  Thomas, obviously.  He had 11 4th quarter points and drove to the hoop with absolute reckless abandon.  Whatever IT's faults are, and he has plenty, lacking stones isn't one of them.  Another?  Jared Sullinger.  He took a 3 (an ATO?  Really, Brad?  You called for a Sully 3 out of a timeout?) which he missed, took a baseline 2 that he missed and then finally hit a baseline 2 that went in.  Other than I would really rather NOT have Sully taking 3s in the first place, he took them.  He wasn't afraid to fail.  The third player I'd cite is Turner.  Yeah, 6-18 and all that, but he took the shots in crunch time, he wanted the ball in his hands for when they were fouling us (and hit 2 clutch fritos).  Not afraid of the moment.  Moving forward you want to know who is unafraid.  Last night, these 3 players had the ganas to demand the ball, and that's something worth taking away from this game.

7.  For someone with a rep for being phlegmatic Brad Stevens sure was spitting fire last night.  At the refs, at his players, he was quite agitato.  He has a, usually, almost serene relentlessness about him but you can see from watching his eyes he's like a duck on a pond.  Above water it looks like it's doing nothing but pick it up and you see those little feet going a mile a minute.  That's our Brad.  Looks calm, NOT calm.  I'm guessing there wasn't a lot of high-fiving in the locker room last night after the game.  If there was they better hope Brad  didn't see them doing it.  You can see the steam is starting to escape from his ears.  My father always told me to "watch out for the quiet ones".  Like Brad Stevens.

Ok, time to take a deep breath and take a step back from the ledge.  We won.  It was butt ugly, but we won and now we have 8 wins.  That's 2, if not 3, more wins than I thought we'd get this month.  We play tomorrow, at home, against the surprisingly staggering 6-6 Washington Wizards.  If we play like we did last night, we will lose.  Brad's job is to pull everybody's head out of their asses by then.  After that it's the road for us @ 7-8 Orlando Magic (they play the 6-9 Bucks before then, so they could be 8-8 when we arrive) and then @ the 9-5 Miami Heat (they play the Knicks in NY before then.  Who knows about that?) in Miami.  Miami's schedule, to date, has been pretty easy, so I'm not as impressed with their 9-5 as I might otherwise be.  

8 wins.  Focus on the 8 wins.  Remember that 8 wins is more than I thought we'd get and we still have 3 opportunities to pick up more.  I'd be ok with 8-10 by the end of Hell Month.  9-9, which is what we'll have if we just win 1 out of the next 3, if we just don't go on a 3 game losing streak, would be truly awesome.  Considering the number of miles we will have traveled by 12/1, the number of back-to-backs and the general quality of our competition through November, .500 would be impressive even if how we got there is a head scratcher. After last night though, confidence is not high.


bob


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cowens/oldschool wrote:bob I like IT's effort too, but hes a constant defensive liability, did you ever think that if we didn't acquire IT last year, we might have Porzingis right now?

cow,

1.  We didn't, and post-coital what ifs aren't worth jack shit.  If I wanted to have a hypothetical past-life experience I'd go for when I was freaking Genghis Khan and was conquering most of my known world and not waste it wondering about how a bunch of pingpong balls may or may not bounce and their potential effect on a sport, depending upon how our position in that draft might change how other teams draft.  Has it occurred to you that, if we did have a high lottery pick like that, that teams like LAL, Philly and NYK might change how they drafted in order to deny us a big we would obviously have coveted?  Has it occurred to you that maybe LAL would have taken Okafur if they thought we might take him at #4?  Or that the Sixers would have taken Porzingis with #3 because Okafur was gone?  They traded for Dario Saric, so it's not like they are averse to Euro players.  After all that, all that losing eating away at our players' souls, all of our lack of progress actually rebuilding and instead going down like a submarine with screen doors while merely talking about rebuilding, and we could have ended up with D'Angelo Russell for our "prize".  

2.  No, I don't think so, I don't think we could have gotten Porzingis and you know how big a fan of his I was and still am.  I don't think we would have ended up with less than the 25 wins we had the year before, even without IT, and to get the Knicks' pick @ #4 we would have had to at least match their 17 wins and then hope we lose the tie-breaker against a team that couldn't win a tie-breaker if they were told the results in advance.  And, suppose we did have close to the Knicks' 17 wins, has it occurred to you that might have just made them tank harder?  Melo was out for the season, so losing was very, very easy for them.


bob



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wide clyde wrote:bob,

I agree that the Cs month of November has been pretty rough and also that 8 wins is far from terrible, but I am very concerned with some of the games of late due to their less than top level efforts for most of these games.

Their depth and numerous young guys should not allow them to have games that are less than 100% effort even if some of those games do turn out to be losses for a wide variety of possible reasons (missed shots, spotty defense, officials or whatever).

To me the total team effort on a nightly basis in the last half of last season (and seen in many early games this season) is what this season is about.  Less than their best total team effort for any series of games both concerns and bothers me.

A team that is going 100 miles per hour on both ends of the floor is not always guaranteed a win on any night, but a team operating with less than the 100% that is trying to regain NBA prominence is very worrisome.

clyde,

Yeah, I'd feel better about things if we looked like we were in some kind of rhythm too, but a win is a win is a win. Obviously, we cannot continue to careen forward like this and expect to do well in the standings. We have to start playing well to continue to win but 8 wins at this time, however we got them, are still 8 wins and a few more than I honestly expected.


bob


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