BigO wrote:emunney wrote:I don't mind talking about the defense and how to improve it, but there's too much of that talk that doesn't start from the acknowledgement that the defense was great and the bigger problem was that offensively, we 1) could not consistently enough win one-on-one matchups against a soft switching defense that allowed us, with some light action, to dictate whatever matchup we wanted, and 2) we were bad at hitting all kinds of shots -- if your name didn't rhyme with Bat Clonopin, you could not **** shoot at all.
There seems to be this idea, perhaps given momentum by StatMuse, that the Bucks were just missing open shots. Let's analyze that:
1) It's no coincidence that the top 4 defensive teams in the playoffs are also the four teams left. You cannot separate the poor showing of the Bucks offense from the fact that Boston is the top rated defense in the playoffs and in the regular season. It's why Miami is shooting poorly and why the Bucks shot poorly. This isn't a coincidence.
2) I used to use StatMuse until a couple of incidents where their stats differed from what I thought I saw. I just re-watched the last two Bucks/Celtics games and there is no way the Bucks had the number of open shots that StatMuse said they did. The amount of open threes the Celtics had vs. the Bucks is not even close. I encourage people to watch the games again.
The Celtics play a switching defense (I don't know why you would call it soft) and thus always have every shooter covered, unless they decide to double someone like Giannis. The Bucks don't have the same switchable roster the Celtics do, but still would have been better off switching than leaving guys wide open on the drop.
The Boston series was a testament to coaching malfeasance. And despite that it was a seven game series. Why? My re-watch of the last two games just reinforced how great Giannis is. This was a winnable series and despite the Bucks being short-handed, the coaching let them down.
The Bucks weren't just missing open shots. They were also being defended well. They were creating far fewer open shots than they typically do from Game 2 on as the Cs brought later help on Giannis. But they *were* missing open shots.
I definitely don't have to watch the games again to see that the Celtics were getting substantially more open 3pt shots than the Bucks, particularly Horford above the break and G. Williams in the corner with Brook on the court. I also don't have to watch the games again to know that paint was a no man's land for them and they could consistently neither score near the rim nor get to the FT line. We can debate whether this was the trade-off to make as the counterfactual could conceivably have produced a better result, but it's demonstrable that the Celtics had a harder time scoring on us than they did during the regular season or thus far against the Heat in spite of the considerable defensive talent on the Heat roster and their top notch coach.
I can't comment on the viability of StatMuse as I don't really understand how it works and the one time I tried to use it I couldn't get it to do what I wanted. I can say that it's got nothing to do with my opinions.