JeremyB0001 wrote:RakimAbdulJabar wrote:I love Niko but his defense was not solid at all last night and he didn't look confident at all.
RakimAbdulJabar wrote:In shoot around Bobby may have had the most consistent and accurate 3 point shot of anyone on the team. Niko was missing everything, instead of continuing to work on it, he started trying to shoot trick shots really high
As far as last night went, I was more confident in Bobbys shot than Nikos. Long term I prefer Niko and I don't want to defend Fred but I think he made the right choice. Niko wasn't going to recover from his poor shooting he had his head down and zero belief in himself
As far as the defense, I couldn't disagree more. Mirotic has been good defensively this season and the numbers back it up. I watched the game closely last night and didn't see major deviations from his usual play on that end. He looked good on defense and I think it's part of the reason for his +8. The Clippers scored just 97.8 points per 100 possessions with him in the game.
As far as your prediction that Mirotic lacked the ability to shoot well, last night and would have missed more threes had he attempted him - my entire point is that I don't think you or Hoiberg or anyone else can predict that. People think they can predict whether a player will shoot well by assessing body language, mechanics, what happened on the last few shot attempts, etc. I believe it's a fools errand to try to read the tea leaves like that. If we sat in a room and we called out "make" or "miss" before each three Mirotic shoots, how many do you think we'd get right? I'm guessing not very many. We'd do better just looking at Mirotic's career three point average and predicting that he'll make about 35% of his threes. If Hoiberg did that last night, rather than worrying about Mirotic starting off 0-for-5, you gotta figure he would've played Mirotic over Portis down the stretch, which would have been a much better decision.
I have never cared nor will I ever care for these +/- stats on a game to game basis as they can be very misleading. Nor do I care for how many points the Clippers might have scored per 100 possessions with him in the game, those are meaningless stats as far as I'm concerned, just like you say we can't predict what would have happened with him out there neither can you
To your next point it really depends on when we call out make or miss. Before it leaves his hands obviously there's no way of knowing, however a split second after leaving his hands I'd say I could take a pretty good guess. Some people shoot the ball with a certain projection that you can immediately see which of their shots has no chance.
Like I said, I'm a big Mirotic fan, I don't even like Portis, I've disliked him since he was drafted, and I don't like Hoiberg HOWEVER I will strongly agree to disagree with you about Mirotics defense, effort and ability to recover and/or deserve more minutes last night.
I was literally right behind him, just 2 feet away and I've never seen someone mess with their own mind the way he did. You see guys miss, and they usually react in one of 2 ways, they can remain confident and just believe the next one is going in, or they can complain they were fouled constantly and get angry. Niko had neither approach, he goes to the bench, puts his head down, and just looks defeated. Defensively he made a number of poor decisions (as did others) and he looked slow compared to everyone else out there, whether he was tired, sick, poor foot speed, injured or it was a lack of effort he simply didn't move like the other guys out there in my opinion.
If it were up to me I would have had Felicio and Taj out there instead of Portis or Mirotic. Everyone is talking about Speights killing us but Griffin was getting to the basket at will and causing havoc as everyone was trying to rotate and help on him. He was doing the same thing almost every time and spinning, but the Bulls bigs couldn't guard him
