I loved Coach Ham's comments after the game last night. He didn't pull any punches with anyone and was spot on throughout. We have our long term coach.
At the end he says this is the film (they’re going to be showing the team) or something like that. Is this an ongoing thing he does for the team and gets paid for? Good stuff. LeBron doing his best impersonation of Russ last year ball watching and not paying attention to his man. That’s not on feeling under the weather. Get on ‘im Darvin.
Seperating Russ from Lebron this season, is exposing the fact that Lebron was already doing a lot of the same stuff, folks were all over Russ about on defense last season. Double trouble lol. I'd play Gabriel at 4-5 more to cover up Lebron a bit on the wings. I mean Lebron will be 38 this season, we can't have everything. If he was knocking down shots, his defensive lapses wouldn't be as big of a deal.
This is it, isn’t it. At 38 you just can’t expect old man Lebron to be a one man wrecking crew. So what do you do? Get him to carry the offensive load and hide him on defence? Or get him to lower his monopoly on ISO ball when he is on the court and increase his distribution and defence? Russ playmaking better the last 4 games gives you more optionally, but like everyone else I’m curious if this is a mirage in the desert or the real thing.
Russ is a better PG than Lebron IMO, dude just avg 12.5 assists in Washington. That is not a fluke, but of course Lebron is still the superior player. The problem is that Lebron needs to control the action, in order to get into his rhythm too. He's been playing the same way for almost 20 years. His shot and lift will come around eventually, but I just don't expect him to be a good defensive player at this stage of his career. Yes.. in spots during games, or on a bit more consistent basis during the playoffs . The regular season tho? No..his stamina level isn't what it was anymore. I'm cool with that, I just want him to go to the franchise player more often when he's struggling a bit on offense. Hey..I kept pointing out (excessively in some folks opinion) that these guys have only played in 27 and 21 games together over the last two seasons. They have to rebuild some of their chemistry together too. Do you remember how it was in 19? Lebron went out of his way a lot to force feed AD the ball. If AD was out there floating around on the perimeter, Lebron would direct him to whatever spot he wanted him to be, and then made sure that he got him the ball. We haven't seen much of that lately. This should be an emphasis moving forward.
Well the stuff on LeBron chumping it on defense against Utah last night as highlighted graphically with video by Cranjis, was not about physicality which can be attributed to age. It was about brain fart type stuff not paying attention to his man without the ball.
Yeah. But just losing track of his man is brain fart territory which we all beat here on Russ about last year.
I was also beating on Lebron last year because he was just as bad on D. Vogel got so desperate he put Lebron in at center so he didn’t have to rotate.
yeah, i was all over lebron for doing the same stuff last year. you can't have a guy just not paying attention, not rotating, not boxing out, etc. even bad teams will take advantage.
We definitely were not engaged as a team defensively. These are great opportunities to see if Coach Ham is going to hold everyone to the same standard. I think that he will. Big moments for a first year coach. So far as Slick has pointed out he has handled some touchy situations quite well.
Ham is not playing lineups that complement each other on offense right now. Terrible lineup to finish the 3rd put the game out of reach when he had Russ and no other guys who could create. Almost would rather have Reaves try to create if you're going to do that Plus why so many minutes for Nunn and Walker he played too litt