SOUL wrote:MagicMatic wrote:The bigger issue with Orlando's shooting, and offense, is how it is being run in the half court. There is little to no shot creation with our playmakers. Paolo and Franz look to score primarily in isolation at the rim. They drafted Houstan and Howard with recent picks searching for shooters.
Dirty secret is that until Franz and Paolo diversify their offense, it will continue to be like this. You're right in that individual sets and plays can be tweaked to have more looks and wrinkles to throw at teams, but it's not addressing how these guys default to score because it feels the best to them. Franz loves the mismatch drives from switches in iso and his other skill is backdoor cutting. Paolo loves the mid-range and working from the elbow. Paolo isn't an instinctual cutter when someone else has the ball and he finishes weak. Franz has no desire to implement a mid-range game, and both of them do not feel comfortable stepping into open threes and pump-fake themselves all the time.
Their shot preferences are an issue.
Compound that with the fact that when they get to their spots, and we work the offense through them, the other team (who I think you need to give more credit to when discussing our offense) are wisely not going to play anybody else on our team super tight, because we can't even hit open shots at league average, so they'll just send doubles or stymie Franz drives at the right time and nobody can punish them for it.
You dislike when Paolo/Franz initiate the offense, but it's one of the few ways anybody else can get involved when Paolo/Franz are getting ignored off-ball outside of Franz cutting. It's a double-edged sword because on some plays it can get other people involved more easily, but when the other team doesn't bite, it ends in just an iso play. Nobody on our team has enough wiggle to create their own shots consistently outside of Cole (who is hot and cold), sometimes Suggs, and maybe Jett next year.
We're not going to run our shooters off of screens like JJ Redick or Ray Allen or Klay Thompson. Those are elite movement shooters and they've been doing it since college. That isn't something Gary Harris has ever shown to be good at, Houstan tries it but doesn't hit many of those, Ingles can't do that. Terrence Ross was great at it because he was a contested shot maker with a high release. Also hearing JJ Redick talk about it in his podcast with LeBron, teams just aren't really running these plays much at all anymore since defensive coverages have changed.
There's just tons of issues when you don't have proper offensive guards on the team and bigs that have selective strengths like ours do.
Phoenix has the best three point shooter in the league in Grayson Allen, as well as Beal, Durant and Booker, who are all better three level scorers than both Franz and Paolo, and even their offense gets bogged down from way too many iso plays because they're all still most comfortable playing that way. It's just who they are.
There's just an extremely limited ceiling of what we're able to do when you consider player tendencies and personnel. I think you can attribute a percentage to lack of creativity on the coaching staff, but I would assume that every team communicates to their staff where they feel most comfortable on the floor and what plays the team feels comfortable running.
The focus this offseason needs to be pushing up that ceiling. Eking out a flawed roster isn't good enough because it's not sustainable. There will never be enough "easy" offense unless it's a dunk, because setting up guys for open shots on more "creative" and them missing is just as bad as it coming off of broken plays/sloppy actions that still end up in open misses.
I basically agree with all of this.
This is why I do NOT for the life of me understand posters continually claiming that 1 elite volume shooter running off screens is what solves the entirety of this offense as it stands currently. It's just nonsense. It helps one dimension and makes defenses focus on 1 guy. Cool I guess.. Not really worth an enormous contract when the larger issue persists. The team isn't constructed to operate otherwise.
The obvious solution is for Franz and Paolo to become better shooters off a pass or in PnR set plays. This is only accomplished with a very good point guard that can speed up the offense to a point that neither Franz or Paolo are letting defenses adjust to load up against them.
That is the ONLY solution..outside of Paolo and Franz working their way to become ++ shooters from 3, which is just a far less likely outcome in a short timeframe.
The FO needs to build around what makes them effective, which is basically drawing mismatches toward the rim in isolation... OK if thats the case, then they need to find a guy that gets them into those situations more frequently without them having to initiate impossible shots while fighting against set defenses and the shot clock. Also, that guy has to be able to draw defenses out on him as a shooter. We can say "everyone needs to be better shooters". Im sure every team would want that though.
