Game Debrief: What Went Right And What Went Wrong?

Marhurin had 27 FT in 2 first games after All star game
are you f***ing kidding me..

 

Good start to the 2nd half of the reg. season run-up to the playoffs. Lakers beat Clippers 125-122 at the Crypt. It was a thrilling game, I thought. Am I glad we won it? Yea, I am. Understatement City.

Lakers shot 52% for the game, but Clips shot 55%. Clips D looked pretty good, too. They looked like a different team since we last saw 'em, with Mathurin being a standout. Clips are now grittier, and it felt good to beat them. Clips's makeover: they look a bit thuggish now. This kid Niederhaus is going to get punched in the face if he keeps playing like that.

Can't help it, gotta say it; Kris Dunn is a good defensive player, but he's also kind of a d-bag, and I'd give anything to hear what Luka was saying to him after he torched him. You know it was good.

The Don: 38/6/11 with 3 steals and only 2 turnovers. Made 8 3s.

I thought Ayton was pretty bad. Clearly he and our rim protection overall are our weak link going doing the stretch.

Play of the game (with an *): 3rd Q: Kawhi has the ball in the corner, he tries to go baseline and puts up a 12 footer, misses, AR jumps high to get the board, immediately fires a high outlet pass to a streaking 41 year old, who does a long touch-pass lob to Ayton, who dunks and gets the harm, crowd electrified: Lakers up 14, Ayton hits the FT: up 15. Showtime! BUT:

Right after that Clips say eff this: go on a 17-1 run that really stung, didn't it?

JJ takes a timeout with 9.7 left in the game, after Miller hits 2 FTs for them. Just gotta get it in, get fouled, make at least 1. Lebron throws it away and Batum missed the tying shot. I thought for sure it was going in for overtime. We had been up 16 at one point; this would have been a totally effed-up way to begin the 2nd half of the season. But he missed. We win. Oh, man. Kawhi was unreal until he got hurt.

 

Not a good game by Lebron. If he has many more games like this, I have a feeling he may just retire at the end of the year.

 

great start and finish from luka, in between he was off. missed some chippies, had a couple lebron-esque defensive lapses. but he played well on both ends down the stretch.

pretty bad game from lebron almost throughout. we did go to him in the post a bit with some success (should have done it a bit more) in parts of the second half, but he just looked like he was checked out. there were a few plays where he could have been investigated for point shaving. at one point, lue put brook lopez on lebron and didn't send help. it worked for them. not much more to say about that.

reaves was really good but like luka got flustered by the pretty atrocious officiating in the second half. i'll have more on this in a minute... i really liked reaves's effort on defense and the defensive boards (in a game where nobody seemed super interested there). that fake behind the back finish was nuts.

smart was typical up and down smart, but he hit some huge shots that probably swung the game and gave kawhi problems when nobody else bothered him in the least.

ayton was mostly bad ayton. missed those tough floaters, bobbled some catches and just played pretty soft. did have a couple big defensive rebounds that we wouldn't have had last year, though. wish he was a better shot blocker. he has the physical tools but just lacks the anticipation. he's just not really a basketball player. hayes was once again our better center.

rui and laravia barely registered for me. need to find ways to get rui a few more shots, but maybe the clips were loading up on that.

kennard made a couple good plays but had a couple bad ones where he hesitated and telegraphed leading to a turnover and a broken play/bad shot, iirc. lue's whole offense was finding kennard while he was in there.

vando did vando stuff on d (deflections, being annoying) and vando stuff on offense (inconsistent finishing).

in all, it was a weirdly frustrating game for me. i thought jj let lue get away with his iso scheming too much. the clips barely ran anything resembling offense. make anyone but leonard and mathurin make a play. anyone. the stretches of the game where we did that, we actually got a few stops. some of this is personnel issues--we have nobody to contain dribble penetration, and almost everyone on the team is actively bad at it, making an uncreative ty lue offense look like a juggernaut.

finally, i'm sorry but...the refs were terrible and very clearly trying to help the clippers win. luka was getting hacked all over the court, all game long. at the end, dunn slapped his shooting arm so hard on a stepback three attempt that the ball came loose, then fouled him two more times on the resulting drive before the refs were shamed into making a call. luka was rightfully just laughing at that point. it was ludicrous. meanwhile, you can't touch kawhi, and benedict mathurin is allowed to use his off arm to clear out defenders who are definitely going to block his shot on every single drive. by the 4th time the refs got that call exactly wrong, it could not have been an accident.

i think it was hilariously ironic that the game ended with the clippers complaining that the refs missed a foul call ON THEM. tell me about it.

 

Weird game but got the W which is what we need now

Amazing start. 16/19 FG on Q1 is insane. Then...we lost the remaining 3 quarters.

Our defense went a bit down and the offense always struggles when that happens
Luka had a great game, we can go places if he's playing at a MVP level for the rest of the season
AR was good too. No one else stood out particularly. Smart had a couple huge buckets at the end.
Could have won more comfortably. Clippers lost Collins and Kawhi during the game, we should have closed the game when we were up 15 in the 3rd.

But good signs, if we can do more of that we will win more games. 15 of the next 18 are at home so we need to capitalize on that and make a run to bring the team to another level overall

 

Glad we got the win as it had disaster written all over it. LeBron definitely looked bad. So much so that I tend to believe JJ saying he really wasn’t 100%. Honestly he should just go ahead and sit if he needs to IMO. Definitely want to see the team get some time together but forcing it could easily backfire and almost did last night. There is blame to go around last night but the team still feeds off LeBron most nights.

 

Luka was fire from behind the arc.
Austin had a superb “quiet” game and should have been at the line at least three other times.
LeBron looked his age.
Ayton looked like Kwame.
Our defense was awful, again.
All I’m going to say about the officiating is that it was bad for both sides, but worse for us.
I love it that The Cheating RoboticCornrows had to sit out because of injury. He epitomizes everything that’s wrong with Pro Sports today. I had to turn down my tv on two separate occasions because I couldn’t stand listening to Doris and Pasch slobbering all over him.
Now that big Zu is gone, it’s a layup free for all against them. Mathurin is a huge improvement over BeerdoMcFloppington because he also plays good D, but they really need a better mobile C. Lopez does his best, but was only effective about 20% of the time on D.