Chuckle. I thought tonight's game would end the "it's all Kyrie's fault" threads. But nope. This loss is on Kyrie even when he's not playing.
At what point is there some personal accountability? Rozier is playing inherently selfish basketball. Brown has been extremely up and down. Hayward has sucked. Tatum has at least in part regressed. Horford hasn't been himself. The entire team looks mentally weak.
And yet, it's Kyrie's fault.
I mean, Kyrie isn't perfect. I've spent hundreds of posts on here talking about his faults. But seriously, place the blame where it belongs.
How exactly has Tatum regressed? I'll give you he isn't shooting like Steph Curry from 3 this year, but I think we all knew he wasn't that type of shooter, especially as a rookie. Other than that, I see no regression at all. His 2PT% is nearly identical, he is shooting and scoring more, he is rebounding more, passing around the same, etc. In the games that he gets #1 touches, he scores like a #1 scoring threat. His defense has improved and he is making better decisions. In other words, he has improved in every facet of the game except outside shooting and that was more just a regression to what type of shooter he actually is.
FG%: 47.5% -> 44.5%
3PT%: 43.4% -> 36.7%
2PT%: 49.2% -> 48.6%
eFG%: .538 -> .509
TS%: .586 -> .551
His efficiency has taken a significant hit. That's regression.
Beyond that, his FTAs are down, his assists, steals, and blocks have all stagnated, and he's only scoring about two more points per game on three more shot attempts. If you like advanced metrics, his ORtg, DRtg, VORP, BPM, DBPM, OBPM, WS/48, etc., are all down.
The only area where he's upped his game is rebounding. More than statistically, though, his "feel" seems a lot worse this year. He's just taking more bad shots than he did previously. It's hard to quantify this, but his FG% on all shots outside of 10 feet is down, and significantly fewer of his buckets are assisted.
That said, he was excellent tonight. On the year, though, not only hasn't he taken a step forward, but he's actually worse in some areas than he was as a rookie.