Its very simple. As soon as the opposition starts playing some defense, this team folds like a tent. Happened all last season. It's continuing this season. Its a function of your talent level.
It's easy to seemingly score at will when the other team isn't defending.
This has little to do with a lack of talent. The culprits in this game were horrible defense, poor shot selection and idiotic line up decisions.
Mike
If it happens repeatedly, its talent. Shot selections lineup decisions, refs calls, that stuff evens out over time. This pattern has repeated itself since the start of last season. They fold in the face of good team defense because they don't have enough talent.
Yeah, you don't understand the game.
You don't need great talent to play decent defense.
You don't need great talent to have good shot selection.
It doesn't matter how much talent you have when your coach is constant making atrocious rotation decision.
If it was just talent, then every once in a while you'd get lucky and the other team would miss and you wouldn't and you'd back into a win. OKC without Durant and Westbrook wasn't more talented than us. Toronto had a couple of players out and they weren't more talented than us. And I don't understand how anyone could watch this game and think Atlanta's comeback was about talent.
Mike
If you don't think Horford and Millsap are better than anything we have up front, you're the one who doesn't understand the game. Toss in Korver who's a proven NBA commodity, and Teague who's a respectable PG - and the Hawks area a more talented team than us right now. So no, it was no shock that we blew that game.
I would also argue that the OKC team that beat us WAS more talented than us because at least they could defend and lock a team down. This team can't stop anyone.
The Celtics can score - when its easy - as Stevens pointed out post game. And its easy when the other team isn't defending very hard. When they pick it up, C's players can't get to the spots they want, the shooting percentages plummet, passes get deflected, turnovers happen, no one is good enough offensively to bail them out of a bad set, and the whole thing falls apart.
Not sure which league you're watching but most non blowout games in the NBA come down to the 4th quarter when the intensity always picks up. Good teams can still run their offense and score points against the best D the other team throws at them. Bad teams cannot. Good teams can also get stops at that point of the game. Bad ones can't.
You could argue that defense is about lack of effort. But when you've been losing as many games as they have the same way for more than a full season, I think it runs deeper than that.
