I've got to be one of the biggest Eddie House fans on the planet, but this notion that Sam Cassell is killing us is absolutely absurd. I'm so tired of reading people who know nothing about basketball telling me how Sam Cassell is killing our offense, or waxing about how incredible our 2nd team offense was prior to his arrival (it wasn't). Cassell has had a few huge games for us in the playoffs, shooting us into a few games we had no part being in. When he's missing, he's missing for a few minutes of playtime, and he's definitely calmed down after a few early missed shots.
He does sometimes take awful shots, but the thing about Sam that is very useful for us is that he's been willing to take shots. Many of you are very unfairly criticizing him in lieu of other players, when lots of guys, especially on the road, are becoming pump fake and pass guys, almost all our role players including Posey are getting trigger shy, which does a few things:
1) forces paul, ray, and to a lesser extent garnett (he does a lot of this himself) and cassell to take harder shots or force the offense more. We almost universally get evil paul pierce when our role players stop shooting, because Paul starts to drive too much and get into traffic, which is when he gets the ball slapped away and he puts on his sulk face and complains to the refs instead of getting back on d
2) makes our offense incredibly one dimensional. We do a lot of really dumb things on offense, and in my opinion one of those things that somebody like Simmons should see is that Ray Allen is NOT a pick and roll player. We've tried to get him going, in fact, they've really pushed it toward him in the series, but for some reason we act like he's a pick and roll player, when he's the worst pick and roll player on our team. He dribbles away from the rim and into a double team, and has no ability to pass out of it, it's murdering our offense and his offensive output. We'd be far better served giving ray isolation plays on the wing, because that's truly what he's good at and whre most of his points are coming from. He's not Rip Hamilton, he doesn't shoot particularly well off screens nad he's got a lot of bad habits in terms of shooting while falling away from the rim to the left or right. In many ways we're setting him up for failure by trying to force him into a type of player he isn't. We'd be much better served running Paul off those same screens, and he's quite adept at the pick and roll.
As far as House goes, I think he should be playing, possibly even in lieu of Rondo, who has played like complete dog[poop] the last few games. It's nice when he's hitting his runners, but the PGs are eating him alive defensively and cleveland just isn't concerned about his outside shot, and he's doing the pump fake and drive routine which allows them to reset defensively.
Just a few observations that probably should have been put into their own thread instead of this Simmons one, but anyplace will do. I did like "The Big Two featuring Ray Allen", that was clever. Reading this site is extremely frustrating right now because so many of you are just parroting back simple themes that are largely untrue.
Please refrain from profanity. - Thanks, Redz
Topic: Simmons - New Column Bashing Doc, Sam, Big 3 (Read 14647 times)