This is part coaching sorry to say. How are you allowing the team to keep jacking 3s and not emphasis something else? How can you not bench guys who aren't playing hard? How are marginal guards having career games against us?
Its thought to say but it is partly a coaching issue. Everyone likes Steven's but this is on Steven's and Kyrie to figure out...they are the leaders and the star PG should translate what the coach wants.
I really hope that we don’t have a coach, when faced with adversity will emphasize “something else”. You have to have a philosophy and make incremental adjustments as needed. And as I’ve said before, forcing the ball to the rim (for example) is not going to work either. What we need to do first and foremost is make shots we should make.
And therein lies the issue IMO. The fit is causing chemistry issues. I’m seeing guys drive and kick multiple times in a possession because guys are taking the open shot. That’s just terrible offense. We need catch and shoot guys that aren’t so hot and cold (e.g., brown and rozier).
When you take the ball to the basket, it does two things. It helps your mentality to be aggressive and it helps get easy baskets. You always want to work inside then out.
Percentages say a 5-8 ft shot is much easier than a 15- 20 ft shot.
We’re driving to the rim and kicking it out when the defense closes. Then the next guy drives and kicks. Then the next guy drives and kicks. We need guys that will take and make the shot the first time because we’re not getting easy shots at the rim.
But I understand that guys can be more aggressive. But again, we were like 1 for 17 at some point today. Should we not take threes at all? Or, how about we make more that 1 out of 17? I think would be a lot better.
Either way, we need to run the offense and take the best shots.
When a team is still bad at 3-point shooting nearly a quarter of the way through the regular season, I think it's fair and legitimate to question whether open threes are, in fact, good shots
for that team. People keep calling open threes "good shots," but I think they may need to alter their definition of what constitutes a "good shot."
This is not just a little slump that Boston is experiencing—it's been virtually
the entire team, for nearly a quarter of the season, struggling to make open threes (or open shots of any kind, really). Right now, an open three really isn't a good shot for this team, and simply continuing to chuck 30 or 40 of them a game isn't going to suddenly turn them into good shots.
Some people keep bringing up how this team was so much better at 3pt shooting last year, and surely they'll snap out of this flukey funk any game now ... but has anyone stopped to consider that the fluke might've been
last season? What if guys like Tatum and Brown and Horford really aren't great 3pt shooters and are regressing to their respective means? Horford, for example, shot nearly 43% on threes last year ... but his career percentage is only 36. Brown shot 39.5% last season, but in his rookie season shot only 34%. Tatum shot a whopping 43.4% last season as a rookie, but maybe he benefitted from lower expectations and now is having trouble handling the pressure.
Anyway, I think living and dying by the three is a bad strategy unless you're Golden State; it's predictable, it's inefficient, and it's lazy.