Bitter Taste?

[Bayliss]

I hate making ten thousand threads but I felt that the post merits its own discussion and dissection beyond the "Gameday Thread."

Anyway, in the first quarter we hold them to 35% shooting. One of the 4 headed centers started the game. Fortson went out after 5 minutes and Jamison came in for the remaining 7 minutes. From that point forward we did not have a center in the game for the duration. Is it a coincidence that our oppent's FG% continued to rise to finish at around 50%? I firmly believe it is not.

I've discussed this with KG over and over, but even with Nellie fire and brimstone speech to the players after the Atlanta game, he still played the exact same philosophy as he did in Atlanta. He still went small against an inferior team. He still went zone against a quality outside shooting team. He still did not require the players to play their natural position or to "find their man." It is just another example of Nellie telling them to do something by tying one hand behind their back. Or "Do as I say not as I do."

[grndmstr_c]

Nellie's not going to change his coaching philosophies. I wasn't really expecting him to, honestly. I did feel like he relied more on his bigs last year in the playoffs than he did in the regular season, so I hope we'll see a repeat of that, but at least the players put a little more into it tonight. At this point I'm going to take what I can get out of the team, collectively.

[ddh33]

It did bother me that we didn't see much of our centers after that first quarter. I thought Fortson played pretty well.

The only consolation is knowing that we had a lot of forwards playing really well tonight. Playing time was hard to come by...

[Mandyahl]

bradley went into the game for about a minute, and williams was in there for a little bit as well. i do agree that we should've played a true center more, but your first post wasn't entirely true. also, something happened to danny...not exactly sure what, but at one point nellie came down the bench to tell him to go in and fortson pointed to his foot, i think, and then he didn't go in. not sure exactly what was going on there, but hey, at least nellie did try to play danny.

[Murphy3]

Honestly, I don't think Nellie thought the game was ever in doubt past the first quarter so he just went with his preferences instead of keeping the defensive intensity toned up. You didn't see much of the press after the first did you? You didn't see much from the centers after the first did you? Nellie put it on cruise control and decided to win with offense and rebounding.

[mavsman55]

Originally posted by: Murphy3
Honestly, I don't think Nellie thought the game was ever in doubt past the first quarter so he just went with his preferences instead of keeping the defensive intensity toned up. You didn't see much of the press after the first did you? You didn't see much from the centers after the first did you? Nellie put it on cruise control and decided to win with offense and rebounding.

The innovative "hanging on" strategy being employed here. This team needs to stop running out of gas. Yes, they won by a lot. But playing defense for 1 quarter is never going to work in the playoffs.