Great win tonight against a pretty good Atlanta team. I really like what Atlanta did with their roster this offseason, getting some pretty affordable, young building blocks for the next five years or so. I expect athletic teams like this to give us a lot of trouble when our shots aren't falling. Actually, I expect every team to give us trouble when our shots aren't falling. But I'm very happy with this win.
Assorted thoughts:
- We must find a way to hide Calderon on defense. Tonight, I would have liked to see him guarding the guys like DeMare Carroll and Cartier Martin -- guys that mostly float around the perimeter and don't go into the post very often. I liked Ellis' activity against Teague and Schroeder when we saw those match ups.
- I hope we pay Vince whatever he wants this summer. He's so vital on the second unit and is really a Swiss army knife for this team. He grabbed a few nice looking rebounds, had a couple of great moves to the basket, and has been a dead eye shooter off the catch-and-shoot.
- Glad to see Ellis mostly taking smart, high-percentage shots and getting into the paint with decisive moves off the dribble. He took a few off-balance fadeaways off of screens that made me cringe, but I think he made more of those than he missed so I can live with those shots every now and then.
- Dirk is Dirk... his demise as an elite player has been greatly exaggerated. I don't know that we're going to see many more double-digit rebound games out of him but where he has tapered off there, he has also improved his passing greatly. I'll take the trade off there as long as Dalembert, Marion and Vince are still crashing the boards at a high level.
- I don't like the fit of Calderon and Ellis together for extended stretches because Ellis isn't a strong enough defender to offset Jose's lack of talent on that end of the floor, and they don't make sense next to each other offensively, but I am willing to be patient while they work that out on the court. They're going to be a tough back court for opposing defenses, though.
- Piggybacking off of that thought, I would love to see us make a trade for a defensive-minded shooting guard sometime this winter or over the summer... maybe even one that could move Monta to the bench. I have no idea how the numbers would work but a guy of the Aaron Afflalo/Courtney Lee/Gerald Henderson/Wesley Matthews/PJ Tucker ilk would be great to pluck from a team out of the playoff race sometime around the trade deadline. Maybe Devin is actually that guy... I haven't seen a ton of his play as a defensive SG from the last couple of years so maybe he is that sort of guy that can guard the smaller/quicker SGs and waterbug PGs that seem to give us a lot of trouble. If we lose Dalembert for any stretch of time and have to start Blair/Wright in the middle, we're going to need to lock the opposing perimeter players down. But as I said, I'm definitely not calling for any sort of immediate trade or a huge shift in the rotation among the healthy guys we have now. Just a little thinking out loud.
