3rd Quarter Collapse

It feels like every time MCW gets injured, the refs miss the call that leads to it

And just like that, we’re back in it. Even with our stretches of god awful basketball, we can play a brand of basketball that’s equally as good. Jekyll and Hyde.

From what I’ve seen, he’s getting separation on his isolation jumpers, his shot is just complete garbage right now. Pull up jumpers make up 31% of his shot attempts, but he’s only shooting 32.6% on those shots. (https://stats.nba.com/player/203932/shots-dash/) The easy thing would be for him to stop shooting those shots and just shoot open threes or shots close to the basket, but we desperately need his offense in the 2nd unit. There’s going to be stretches of play where neither DJ or Ross aren’t hot, and we need someone to be a steady hand offensively when that happens; that’s not going to be Bamba or MCW, so it has to be Gordon. Taking shot attempts away from AG in those bench lineups isn’t the solution imo. We just have to wait it out imo and hope that he reverts back to his old percentages, since he shot 36.2% on pull up jumpers last year and has regressed by 4% with his 3 point shot compared to last year.

Welp, at least we can rely on Fultz to bring some excitement

It’s definitely the rims

It’s only one half and we have to play a complete game, but doing this against the 2nd best defense in the NBA is pretty impressive

Great start by the bench and T-Ross. Can’t let up, though

We should try to stop Denver from just killing us with back cuts. Really need Gordon to snap out of this regression. Worst eFG% of his career.

I’m not talking specifically about this game, this game came down to Fournier missing a crucial wide open 3. I just feel like that there’s a trend of the offense becoming static in crunch time under Clifford over the entirety of the season.

Clifford needs to figure out his offense in the last four minutes. To my eye, it becomes very static and predictable, and it just doesn’t have any sort of flow. This game came down to missed shots, but it seems like our offense consistently loses momentum when the game is under 4 minutes whenever we’re in a close game

When our bench plays like it’s capable of, we’re hard to beat. Also, bad Vuc game. It’s not a Gasol, physically dominated bad Vuc game but he’s missed like 8 open shots

I’m sure that’s part of it, especially when we play title contenders, but our starting line up is usually able to compete with these mid tier NBA teams. It’s when the bench comes in that we collapse and let the game get away from us. It was the difference vs Indy and it’s the difference right now vs Utah

When the starters left the game, we were down by 2. When the starters came back into the game, we were down by 11. If you were wondering why the team has trouble competing against good teams, that’s it. Bench can’t compete against a team of any decent caliber

The lack of offensive production from our bench is going to continue to kill us until Ross gets back to his form from last year or we make a trade. Our starting 5 can compete with teams, but once the bench unit comes in, the stagnant offense puts us in a giant hole

So far this season, Lavine averages just 3.2 points more than Fournier per game while also averaging 1.3 more turnovers per game and shooting at a much more inefficient clip: 58.2% eFG for Fournier vs 52.4% eFG for Lavine. Lavine also takes an extra 3.6 shots a game to get him those extra 3.2 points. I’m for upgrading the SG spot, but it has to be more than a marginal or lateral move to justify trading Fournier. You’re trading a more efficient scorer with less volume for a less efficient scorer with more volume, and that’s not a trade I want to pursue, especially when Lavine’s shot volume would decrease if traded to us. We should aim for something better.

This is a bad take

You said that the Clippers beat the Lakers in your original post, implying that since the Lakers lost to the Clips, that meant they aren’t a great team (“The Lakers are good not great and got beat by the Clippers”). If I misinterpreted you then my apologies, but a team getting beat by the Clippers isn’t a sign of them not being great. My point was that using the Bucks and Lakers as benchmarks to judge our performance is unfair to this team due to the gap in experience and ability. A better benchmark will be our upcoming test against the Jazz since they’re a good team in the west that isn’t a title contender— it’s in those types of games that we can really gauge progress, rather than games where Giannis and LeBron dominate a Vuc-less Magic team, and in LeBron’s case, a Fultz-less team.

His shot also isn’t all the way there yet. Went 0/6 in the first half I believe. He shows flashes of offensive potential, but he can’t really be consistent with his jumpers, and like you said, he’s passive in terms of asserting himself and scoring in the paint.

You know the Clippers are title contenders, right? The Clippers being able to beat them isn’t some slight against us lol. I believe LA is the 1 seed in the west— early goings, but they most likely will be title contenders as well. We’re not at that level yet, and we don’t have to be at that level with our timeline. I think the Jazz will be a good litmus test for us to see where we’re at. A good but not great team in the west, and Vucevic will most likely be back by then.

Needed Ross to have a good game off the bench with Fultz and Vuc out, but didn’t get anywhere close to what we needed. Hard to win with the offense generated from our bench minus Bamba

Good job Iwundu, now Dudley can’t kill us lol

Yeah. He just has to know to pass that ball to Iwundu earlier or to just throw up a shot. He dribbled in the paint for two seconds too long and cost us an open 3.

Ross is good and all, but damn, he is really selfish sometimes

He’s on a minute restriction due to his leg injury from last year

Holy crap MCW... 0/4 free throws