Celtics (13-12) at Wizards (6-17) Game #26 2/14/21

[kraidstar]

Trades are going to have to be made. DA can't play the long game anymore, he has two All-Stars, it doesn't matter how old they are. You try to win every year.

There are no more 'wait and see' seasons. Utah have similar higher end talent but significantly superior supporting cast. Celtics had Jayson and Brown on rookie deals for 4 years and all they have to show is an aging All-Star point guard, a solid undersized center, an All-Defense player who was already on the team, and a bunch of young guys who literally cannot string together two good games.

New players won't matter if guys still refuse to pass the ball. We need to work to get shots for the team instead of working to individually score.

This is why Durant disappointed in OKC but thrived in Oakland. The mindset on those two clubs was wildly different. Not shockingly, the team that played together and unselfishly had far more success.

Eh. I don't see guys unwilling to pass, I see guys passing and failing to make shots which I think is an overall talent issue. Outside of the Jays and Kemba (and Kemba himself is a mixed bag), there's a talent drop off. We just saw how good this team could be when role players are making shots, but we can't on guys like Semi to do that consistently.

Mike Dantoni coached similar rosters and racked up way more assists.

Have you ever watched G-league ball? The problem isn't that guys can't make shots. These are NBA players. They can do it. G-league guys can do it. I'll bet most of those guys hit 80% of their 3s in practice.

But the team is not dedicated to getting the best shots at the right time. Without this commitment and flow, the defense has a little more time to adjust when you do pass, and you throw up bricks.

This is the mentality that stops a lot of G-league scorers from having success in the NBA. When you pass as an afterthought,  you are not properly breaking down the defense, and your shooters are always under duress.

Our top guys don't get their teammates involved enough. The fish is rotting from the head. The Jays and Kemba need to set the tone and make the game a joy to play. No, Ojeleye, Grant, Pritchard, and Theis aren't going to hit every shot. But if they play in sync with those players, keeping them involved, then they will compete through stretches when they're missing shots. Right now they are folding under the negativity of selfish play.

D'Antoni had guys like Steve Nash and James Harden running his offense. I don't think those teams are comparable.

I get what you're thinking is in terms of thees are NBA players and should be able to hit shots, but some guys are more skilled than others. Would you rather have prime Kyle Korver or prime JJ Redick taking open 3's or Kelly Oubre? Danny hasn't done a good enough job constructing a supporting cast.

I mean, we were  down 25 against the worst defensive team in the League. Reddick or Korver could have replaced Ojeleye and gone 6-6 and we still lose. And they would have been worse on defense,  too.

Our best players are not sharing the ball enough. Jaylen penetrates as well as anyone in the league, and he couldn't set up a single easy bucket for his teammates? LeBron makes the exact same moves as Jaylen but is looking to get his teammates going instead of racking up points. Look at the way he carried those trash players in the finals against golden state when Kyrie and Love were out.

LeBron literally gave Matthew Delladova a career from making sure everyone was involved. That team was garbage yet they competed. Our guys are not competing.

If our top guys don't change that mindset, all the Kyle Korvers in the world won't help.

[liam]

We lost our best passer last year in Hayward and our second best is Smart. Pritchard passes the ball well but he's rookie and plays off the ball a lot. Passing and Defense are the keys to this team winning. When we did that against the Raps we won. It's as simple as that.

[Ogaju]

Trades are going to have to be made. DA can't play the long game anymore, he has two All-Stars, it doesn't matter how old they are. You try to win every year.

There are no more 'wait and see' seasons. Utah have similar higher end talent but significantly superior supporting cast. Celtics had Jayson and Brown on rookie deals for 4 years and all they have to show is an aging All-Star point guard, a solid undersized center, an All-Defense player who was already on the team, and a bunch of young guys who literally cannot string together two good games.

New players won't matter if guys still refuse to pass the ball. We need to work to get shots for the team instead of working to individually score.

This is why Durant disappointed in OKC but thrived in Oakland. The mindset on those two clubs was wildly different. Not shockingly, the team that played together and unselfishly had far more success.

Eh. I don't see guys unwilling to pass, I see guys passing and failing to make shots which I think is an overall talent issue. Outside of the Jays and Kemba (and Kemba himself is a mixed bag), there's a talent drop off. We just saw how good this team could be when role players are making shots, but we can't on guys like Semi to do that consistently.

Mike Dantoni coached similar rosters and racked up way more assists.

Have you ever watched G-league ball? The problem isn't that guys can't make shots. These are NBA players. They can do it. G-league guys can do it. I'll bet most of those guys hit 80% of their 3s in practice.

But the team is not dedicated to getting the best shots at the right time. Without this commitment and flow, the defense has a little more time to adjust when you do pass, and you throw up bricks.

This is the mentality that stops a lot of G-league scorers from having success in the NBA. When you pass as an afterthought,  you are not properly breaking down the defense, and your shooters are always under duress.

Our top guys don't get their teammates involved enough. The fish is rotting from the head. The Jays and Kemba need to set the tone and make the game a joy to play. No, Ojeleye, Grant, Pritchard, and Theis aren't going to hit every shot. But if they play in sync with those players, keeping them involved, then they will compete through stretches when they're missing shots. Right now they are folding under the negativity of selfish play.

D'Antoni had guys like Steve Nash and James Harden running his offense. I don't think those teams are comparable.

I get what you're thinking is in terms of thees are NBA players and should be able to hit shots, but some guys are more skilled than others. Would you rather have prime Kyle Korver or prime JJ Redick taking open 3's or Kelly Oubre? Danny hasn't done a good enough job constructing a supporting cast.

I mean, we were  down 25 against the worst defensive team in the League. Reddick or Korver could have replaced Ojeleye and gone 6-6 and we still lose. And they would have been worse on defense,  too.

Our best players are not sharing the ball enough. Jaylen penetrates as well as anyone in the league, and he couldn't set up a single easy bucket for his teammates? LeBron makes the exact same moves as Jaylen but is looking to get his teammates going instead of racking up points. Look at the way he carried those trash players in the finals against golden state when Kyrie and Love were out.

LeBron literally gave Matthew Delladova a career from making sure everyone was involved. That team was garbage yet they competed. Our guys are not competing.

If our top guys don't change that mindset, all the Kyle Korvers in the world won't help.

This x a million times.

[liam]

It would also help if we stop walking the ball up the floor with Brad screaming at the point guard. Run, Run, Run. I know the team is tiered but the end of the bench guys can run. There's a reason Nesmith was the most active player on the team today. He's been sitting forever.

[Who]

https://twitter.com/keithsmithnba/status/1361063626946342916

it is a serious problem with this team. The ball never moves, the players do all the moving. That is not how you play winning ball. You have to move the ball to keep everyone engaged on offense. They have to figure out why the ball is not moving and FIX IT.

Al Horford

Big Man Passing

Need to replace Horford's high post passing. He enabled superior ball movement. He kept the ball moving & teammates involved on offense. Without big man passing, everything is off the dribble. One v one.

[Birdman]

Team lacks a true point guard..Walker is more of a shooting guard.. a guy like Rubio would do wonders

[Tr1boy]

Brad was naive to not double team Beal

[RJ87]

Team lacks a true point guard..Walker is more of a shooting guard.. a guy like Rubio would do wonders

Honestly, Rubio would be really good for this team. He's a playmaker and good defensively - in the past, at least. I haven't watched the Wolves this season.

[gouki88]

Team lacks a true point guard..Walker is more of a shooting guard.. a guy like Rubio would do wonders

Honestly, Rubio would be really good for this team. He's a playmaker and good defensively - in the past, at least. I haven't watched the Wolves this season.

He's been worse defensively this season than usual, and his 3 point shooting has hit rock-bottom. But it's hard to give a genuine evaluation of Wolves players sometimes.

I mean heck, even Andrew Wiggins has turned it around completely.

[JBJT619]

Even with Smart we only ever have 4 startable players on this roster. Marcus Smart would not be starting on other teams. Our frontcourt is horrible, our depth is horrible, our bench is either incredibly inexperienced or washed, one of those 4 (Kemba) has seriously lost his juice, and we literally have no assets to upgrade unless we trade Smart, 1st round picks (which probably aren't valued very much right now unless we tank), the Js, or Langford/Pritchard which at this point would make zero sense considering we don't have a contending roster.

[Tr1boy]

Team lacks a true point guard..Walker is more of a shooting guard.. a guy like Rubio would do wonders

Honestly, Rubio would be really good for this team. He's a playmaker and good defensively - in the past, at least. I haven't watched the Wolves this season.

He's been worse defensively this season than usual, and his 3 point shooting has hit rock-bottom. But it's hard to give a genuine evaluation of Wolves players sometimes.

I mean heck, even Andrew Wiggins has turned it around completely.

Rubio would help

He makes the right plays usually

[gouki88]

Even with Smart we only ever have 4 startable players on this roster. Marcus Smart would not be starting on other teams. Our frontcourt is horrible, our depth is horrible, our bench is either incredibly inexperienced or washed, one of those 4 (Kemba) has seriously lost his juice, and we literally have no assets to upgrade unless we trade Smart, 1st round picks (which probably aren't valued very much right now unless we tank), the Js, or Langford/Pritchard which at this point would make zero sense considering we don't have a contending roster.

This is simply nonsense.
Smart would start on Atlanta, probably Brooklyn (for Harris), Charlotte, Chicago, probably Cleveland (for Okoro), Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Golden State, Houston, Indiana, LAC, LAL, Memphis, Miami, Milwaukee, Minny, NOP, NYK, OKC, Orlando, Philly (ahead of Green), Portland (ahead of Jones Jr.), and San Antonio.

You can be critical of our depth without making out there claims

[Somebody]

https://twitter.com/keithsmithnba/status/1361063626946342916

it is a serious problem with this team. The ball never moves, the players do all the moving. That is not how you play winning ball. You have to move the ball to keep everyone engaged on offense. They have to figure out why the ball is not moving and FIX IT.

Al Horford

Big Man Passing

Need to replace Horford's high post passing. He enabled superior ball movement. He kept the ball moving & teammates involved on offense. Without big man passing, everything is off the dribble. One v one.

To be fair I don't think that a team without a passing hub in the pivot will be relegated to picking off scraps from one on one basketball - a look at the mid-00s Suns teams when Diaw wasn't on the court would blow your socks off if you think it's impossible to assemble a movement heavy offence that yields dynastic results without a passing big man, but I think your point is quite valid for teams without an offensive megastar to build around - basketball teams without that focal point of attack on the perimeter seem to be optimised on offence when there's a passing hub in the pivot and the team plays to his strengths.

1. Ramsay didn't invent this sort of system. From what I can tell, the Original Celtics did in the '20s and they used it to be the become the best basketball team in the world. And they did it with this guy at the pivot:



That's Dutch Dehnert. He was 6'1". Can you imagine how much better that guy would have been if he had the passing angle of a man 10 inches taller than him? Jack Ramsay, I'm quite sure, could. (Sidenote: Dutch was incredibly thick wasn't he?)

I think it's really important to understand that the guy we'd think of as the more traditional coach (Wilkens) was a decade plus younger than Ramsay, and that Ramsay had been a coach a lot of other places before he came to Portland (when he retired in 1989, he had the record for most overall coaching wins between college and the pros). I would suggest that Ramsay didn't come up with his approach with Walton because he was the new avant garde, but because Ramsay was old enough to have played back when a time when center pivot systems based around cutting were still a dominant paradigm.

With the coming of Mikan the focus of the game thus went away from various guys cutting to the rim - with a distributed scoring across the team - to an actual human focal point: Put Mikan by the rim, get him the ball. And quite frankly, while much has changed about the game, this use of such a scoring focus has basically dominated the NBA for decades now. Most teams use volume scorers after all, whether they're big men, or perimeter threats.

But what if the NBA gets to the point that it learns to mitigate for the volume scoring big man? Might it then become more optimal to go back to a cut-round-the-pivot approach?

I'd say the answer was essentially "Yes". To be clear, I don't think that the Blazer offense around Walton was the best of all possible systems - but they were excellent.

2. After Walton went down with injury, while the Blazer defense fell apart, the offense actually held up pretty well. This is particularly fascinating when you look at the Blazer roster both in 1977 and a few years later. The immediate skeptical thought about Walton's offensive value is that he must have just had some great offensive teammates...but he really didn't have guys around him that were obviously amazing. I'd encourage folks to look into bkref for themselves on this, but as I tend to see it, what was happening is that once the team got used to playing in this way, they got good at playing this way. It's an offensive scheme that makes everyone proactive, which means they're always thinking and trying to make something work.

I would suggest that the hard part with a system like this is getting it started at the NBA level when you don't have an outlier passing big on your roster because up front there's naturally going to be a lot of kinks if you don't have a magician out there making everything just seem to work, but over time they don't necessarily need to rely on a genius to do the job pretty well.

It's interesting to note that Ramsay's downfall didn't come from Walton's fall but Clyde Drexler's rise. Ramsay wanted to keep playing his way, and Drexler was a superstar talent who didn't really fit. Bye coach!

I'll conclude this post there and for now just say to forget about who was better between Walton and Kareem or anyone else. There's something far more interesting going on here with how the Blazers played. It's really worth asking how different the NBA would be today if Walton had had a healthy career. The Blazers would likely have one several championships, and been a major contender against Magic & Bird (they were already more than major contenders against Dr. J of course). Entirely possible that the basketball world looks to copycat the Blazers success like crazy and you have many more guys of the Walton-Jokic type...but he didn't, and we haven't.