And, ultimately, per-game numbers never particularly indicative of how well a player v player matchup worked.
Ultimately, when you refuse to acknowledge that your supposedly star defensive guard dropped the ball for an entire series, no numbers will work for you.
And the fact that he couldn't prevent the switch or take away the long ball is, in fact, dropping the ball.
Also, you seem to ignore the fact that this was more than a two-game fluke situation, since Felton contributed a lot more and more efficiently than expected in 4 out of those 6 games.
Those two are the two that Felton scored the most points in - which one would think might be most representative of 'killing' someone on offense. Yet, of course, those were also the two games the Knicks lost.
And you seem to ignore that they have met in more games than just that series. Ignoring their first game, when Felton was in Denver and Avery only played 4 minutes (Felton played almost 28 minutes, scoring 4 points, 6 assists), they have had 4 regular season meetings in which they have both played rotation minutes and thus have been on the floor together a significant amount of the time.
In those 4 games, Felton has scored more than 8 points just once. He has delivered no more than 4 assists in any of those games. He posted 0 points and 2 assists in the last game they met (last December). His one good game, scoring 18 almost a year ago, March, was, again, the product of having an unusually good game from outside the arc (3 of 6).
Again, as I said, whole-game numbers aren't necessarily particularly revealing of how well a single player-v-player matchup worked out. But if Felton has some sort of advantage that exploits a systematic weakness in Bradley's game, where is it?
P&R defense is a team game, btw.
And finally, just because one player scores a lot of points in a game is not really indicative of whether a team succeeded offensively or not. NY ended up shooting a lowsy 46.2% eFG% for the series - actually lower than the C's did (46.3%). Felton was, for his part, more efficient than most on his team, at 50.0% eFG%.
But while that is a solid performance, that's nothing to get uber excited about. And as a relative share of NY's offense, while it was important, it
paled in importance to shutting Anthony down. Felton took 96 FGA in that series, second most on that team.
But Anthony took 160 FGA! So, as a team, holding Anthony to 40.9 eFG% was simply a far more important defensive goal as a team. We also held their third most prolific shooter (Smith) to 44.5% eFG%. And that's why, overall, NYK did not exactly run the C's over with their offense.
We didn't lose that series because Felton shot 50% eFG. We didn't lose it because of our defense.
We lost because Avery and Pierce shot 43% and 42% (again, eFG), respectively. And while neither took anywhere near the number of shots that 'Melo did, they combined for 148 FGA. Sprinkle in Jordan Crawford shooting a horrid 37% eFG on his 23 attempts, and that (171 shots at 41.5% eFG) is just way too much lousy shooting to overcome.
(Everybody else who took more than 10 FGA actually shot just fine, from 48.3% for Bass to 58.3% for Terry. But those two plus KG & Green only took a total of 228 FGA altogether).
Topic: Stevens: Monitoring Rondo/Bradley duo "huge, huge priority for me" (Read 22999 times)