01-07-2020, 07:39 AM
(01-07-2020, 05:55 AM)omahen Wrote:(01-07-2020, 04:57 AM)donzingis38 Wrote: Man, if you look at the stats, mavs couldve easily lost this game.
3. Defense was more or less non-existing for large parts of the game. We allowed 110 points from offensively very limited team. This is my observation and perhaps someone else can look up the stats to see if it can confirm it, but it seemed to me that defense was especially bad with the line-up including both Wright and Maxi in the third quarter. I dare to say Powell was considerably better defender than Maxi yesterday.
4. We were too small for most of the game, as Maxi and Powell were rarely on the court together and we didn't see Boban. This lead to the fact that DFS and JJ were pushed to power forward and were too small to fight with stronger (Young) and much taller (Markannen) Chicago power forwards.
5. Curry-Brunson-Wright line-up just doesn't work for me. Looks to me that roles are not defined in this set up as they are all coming to the ball to facilitate, a lot of time at the same time.
It is hard to tell from the game flow which lineups were good and which were bad defensively. The Bulls shot 54% in the fourth quarter, but didn't hit their 3's. Quarter splits for Chicago were very consistent 27, 28, 27, 28.
The Curry-Brunson-Wright combo were -5 in the first half and +5 in the second half (start of 4th quarter). Wright was invisible in the first half, but his three buckets in the second half were all really big. I actually thought most of the ball handling clumsiness came with Barea in the lineup next to Luka. JJ had 3 TO's and it just seemed like they weren't on the same page in the 3rd quarter. BTW, I see comments asking why Carlisle is starting Barea and Jackson. He's basically trying to keep his bench rotation in tact while people are out. His theory is to not disturb both the starters and the bench rotation, so he draws from the third line to fill in holes in the first line.
If Powell is going to get crapped on incessantly, he should also get praised for good games. 16 (second highest points) and 7 (second highest rebounds) on a perfect 6/6 from the field is a nice night. Of course, some yahoo stat geek will probably point out that for all of that the team was only +2 while he was in and was +15 with Maxi. Therefore Maxi, even with a weaker than usual line for him, was the more valuable player. To your point, the team was +9 in the second quarter in the Powell/Maxi overlap minutes and +0 in the fourth quarter in the overlap minutes. The game was actually won late third and early 4th when a lineup with Maxi, Seth and Wright (and various others) went +11.