eyriq wrote:I am accepting of all reasonable explanationsKnightro wrote:eyriq wrote:I really want to know what killed chemistry.
The answer is multi-layered, but one of the layers probably isn’t one you really want to hear.
For all intents and purposes, Suggs went out for the season on January 3 (I know he came back for 13 minutes of one additional game) and Paolo returned for the season on January 10. Pretty much right on top of each other.
You do the math.
For as talented as he can be individually on offense, Paolo is equally lazy and disinterested in giving any sort of consistent effort as a defender and as a rebounder.
And without Suggs’ maniacal effort and energy level on the floor as a counterbalance, the rest of the team has taken on the personality of who they consider to be their best player which is Paolo.
Even Franz, who is very obviously a better all-around player that Paolo, has on the record stated that Paolo is the alpha dog of the team. Everyone considers him to be the guy whether he actually is or not.
Now…
This isn’t to say things are *entirely* on Mosley or Paolo because they’re obviously not.
Weltman built a roster that is simply not good enough from a shooting and playmaking perspective - and included in that are Paolo and Franz’s own limitations as both shooters and facilitators - to overcome such an obvious downturn on defense, on the glass, and purely when it comes to energy and effort.
To summarize…
1. The roster construction overall combined with the decision to put all the scoring *and* playmaking into two forward’s hands almost assures a difficult to consistently succeed offense. Mosley’s own shortcomings and limitations as an offensive coach also play a factor here.
2. The defense, rebounding and effort have to be elite to overcome the first point. If you don’t have a good offense, but still want to win, you need to be a really high end team in other facets of the game. The Magic were that last year and over the first 30ish games of this year.
3. Paolo doesn’t provide consistently good enough effort on defense or on the glass. And I don’t think it’s unfair to say that he’s generally speaking a low effort player as well when it comes to anything that is not trying to score the basketball.
4. Without Suggs, the rest of the team has followed Paolo’s lead instead of Suggs’ lead on defense and from an energy perspective and we’ve seen a noticeable downtick in those areas. Combine those downticks with an already hard to succeed offense due to Weltman’s failures and that leads to the miserable play we’ve seen for pretty much the last two months.
