And we're going to have to figure out the Jokic/KP issue. He clearly is too small to guard Jokic, and while Horford/X can't stop him either, they at least make it much more difficult for him due to their size.
Not sure what the answer is, other than we just have to play double big more and stagger more of KP's minutes with Jokic on the bench.
We may need to start Horford over Jrue or White in that matchup, if it comes to that. Not sure which. Glad I don't have to make that call.
I was thinking we probably have to sit Jrue. It will imbalance our perimeter defense but we can at least not have KP getting sonned by Jokic.
Or we trap him every time he gets the ball and hope our rotation holds up 
Yeah, I don't know what to do. Don't like the idea of changing the starting lineup for this series alone, which could mess with chemistry and flow. Perhaps it's just taking KP out early and staggering him as much as possible with Jokic.
I think Joe has to more purposefully aim for that, which he didn't do tonight. For awhile he kept both Al and X out there when Jokic was on the bench. Got to better maximize those minutes. But the crunch time minutes are where the real question is going to be.
Just some options I had off the top of my head, without looking at what other teams have done:
1) they could do is just trap him soon as he gets the ball to get it out of his hands ,which is always a risk with a passer as good as Jokic is
2) play a zone to try to wall off those cutters and try to mess up his rhythm
3) play single coverage and force him to beat us individually, just make sure he doesn't catch the ball in the pick and roll going downhill with KP going backwards, and just box out Gordon or other cutters. I think we tried this in Boston but Murray torched us
4) just score more than them
I would be curious to see how teams that have played Jokic well have defended him...it could have been they caught him at a bad day but it's certainly something Joe has to figure out for sure. End of day it's a game of fine margins...it looks like our team did so many things wrong, Tatum was meek, Jrue didn't catch fire offensively till the last quarter, White was out of sync, we missed 9 free throws, we let Jokic get a triple double and kill us by finding cutters...but despite all those errors we were still in with a chance to win with 2 min to go, undeservedly obviously, but it just goes to show how we only really need a few things to go our way of the many stuff ups we had.
If we won it probably would have been one of those lucky, "undeserving" wins but as KP said they played poorly in a lot of areas so there's a lot of scope to improve and we weren't far off in any case. The biggest issue to me is that most of those things we need to improve are in the mind, which is our team's biggest flaw - mentality and becoming mental midgets when it's crunch time. That's why we've lost these games to good teams, we've blown out so many trash ones that when we play ones that show resistance the team doesn't respond well. It's a recurring issue this season with every loss, and it's a lot harder to fix than Xs and Os. I guess that's why Joe wants to expose this particular iteration of the Cs to as many of these pressure games as possible.
Topic: Celtics (48-13) at Nuggets (42-20) Game #62 3/7/24 (Read 11590 times)