Pattycakes wrote:We’ve learned to love him despite his childish state at times. Def growing on Portland fans.
Yes, he's childish. If you can play free like you have been doing and let him play instinctual, he is 10x better. The more CP3 got into his ear, which helped him initially, the more he started to overthink things and freeze. At one point before all that he rated in the very high percentile in transition and fast paced offense.
He obviously has all his faults, sucks at screening, forgets he's playing sometimes, but he still is a guy you can rely on to get you points inside if you get him the ball. He more just has to shoot or finish and not create, but he is good at getting the ball in the hoop.
If he gets even close to where he was defensively in our finals run, that would be big. I am not saying it may happen, but at times last night he looked engaged and was all over the place, making it tough on people, contesting, blocking. He was ranked very high in contesting shots for a couple of years then he started fading when fans gave him all hell....lost all his confidence.
We really need a rim protector ourselves, but if we just had a big that could finish inside or hit that short jumper, we would have probably won 4 or 5 more games and be a few spots up.