11/24 - POSTGAME | Detroit Pistons (99) - (98) Oklahoma City Thunder

[Old Man Game]

I'm not willing to write off Abrines. You don't just forget how to shoot over a summer. This is a product of not being comfortable in his role and his minutes being jerked around so much.

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Also, Kyle Singler forgot how to shoot mid season.

Singler is the exception that proves the rule. He went from a halfway decent role player over 2 plus seasons to D League jobber caliber practically overnight. You won't find a ton of examples of that steep a decline in production.

[bondom34]

I'm not willing to write off Abrines. You don't just forget how to shoot over a summer. This is a product of not being comfortable in his role and his minutes being jerked around so much.

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Also, Kyle Singler forgot how to shoot mid season.

Singler is the exception that proves the rule. He went from a halfway decent role player over 2 plus seasons to D League jobber caliber practically overnight. You won't find a ton of examples of that steep a decline in production.

Morrow

[ThunderBolt]

“It happens like that sometimes,” Westbrook said of the Thunder missing opportunities at second-chance shots in the fourth. “We know we put ourselves in the position to win the game. Sometimes the ball doesn't go in the basket.”

Here’s a thought-you put yourself in a better position to win the game when you move the ball and get guys open looks. Also, when your 1-9 from three and down one with five seconds left, maybe shoot a two or pass.

[Pillendreher]

It's not that difficult to figure out what happens. Let me lay it out so Billy 'I'm Sam Presti's friend' Donovan gets a chance to read it because it is still happening and I don't see any attempt to fix it.

We're up big in the 1st half. We're playing very good defense, we're making shots, we're moving, we're playing with pace. At some point, we're gonna start having defensive breakdowns - not protecting penetration, giving up open 3s, giving up offensive rebounds. And once that happens, our offense starts to get worse too. We stop moving, we play way slower, we take long jumpers, we don't attack the paint. And it's a trend we're not unable to reverse once it starts.

You could see it coming from miles away last night. Russ checked back in in the 2nd quarter at the 7:26 mark in the 2nd quarter. You could see the defensive breakdowns showing up more and more - Pistons finished with a 107 ORtG over the last 7.5 minutes of the 2nd quarter and we only managed a 89 ORtG. We still played fast at a 104 Pace.
Then 3rd quarter we still play fast at a 105 pace and actually do a decent job defending (88 DRtG), but we can't score at all (69 ORtG). And then queue the 4th, we still can't score (76 ORtG) and still can't defend (109 DRtG).

I knew in the 2nd quarter that we were playing with fire. I've already seen this too many times this season so I knew what was ahead. It's always the same:

Defense breaks down => Offense breaks down => Less attacking => Terrible shots.

This is not new. We've lost like 90 % of our games like this.

And let's not pretend like we should not have blown these **** out. The Pistons suck. They are not a good team. We kept them in the game by not defending their scrubs and - voilà - once our breakdown happened, they were right there.

[Pillendreher]

Let's also talk about how this **** idiot is still unable to read the game and adjust accordingly.

1) Once teams start to cover the PnR with Adams more and better, we have no backup plan. Consequently, we start settling for trash jumpers more and take ourselves out of the game by that even more.

2) It was painfully obvious that we had massive troubles defending without George in the 2nd quarter. And what is Donovan doing? He's running a Westbrook-Abrines-Roberson-Anthony-Adams lineup. How is that supposed to work? You're playing defense 2vs5 and since we're not actively creating good shot opportunities for Abrines, he isn't helping on offense there either.
He rode with that lineup for more than 7 minutes and it had a 107.5 DRtG while we scored 100 pp100p with it. You know what he should have done? He should have **** played Patterson!!! Westbrook-Roberson-Anthony-Patterson-Adams. You could have done way better at containing drives to the basket because Patterson is excellent at defending space and recovering. But no, we went with Abrines for no good reaseon.
What the **** is up with that?! 6 minutes while Huestis and Grant combine for 28?! Are you **** kidding me?!

I'm so sick of this nonsense. You just don't see any coaching out there. Donovan is in his 3rd season and he still doesn't understand what's working and what's not working. He still prefers playing worse players over better players because of some made up and imaginary reasons and I've had it. We signed Patterson to start and now he's 9th in minutes? The last two seasons with the Raptors Patterson came off the bench and his On/Off NetRtG was +10.3 Points per 100 poss. Lowry-Patterson had a +19.0 NetRtG last season!!! And what's happening with us? His On/Off NetRtG is at -12.3. Career lows in PER, worst career numbers in TS%, BPM, WS/48 since his 2nd season.
Leave it up to Billy Donovan to destroy role players.

I'm just so tired of this incompetence. These things are just so obvious and they are not getting addressed.

[Old Man Game]

Let's also talk about how this **** idiot is still unable to read the game and adjust accordingly.

1) Once teams start to cover the PnR with Adams more and better, we have no backup plan. Consequently, we start settling for trash jumpers more and take ourselves out of the game by that even more.

If you watched Detroit's offense last night even they had lots more going on off the ball than we did. We just aren't doing much to keep the defense from keying in on the ball handler regardless of whether its Russ, George or Melo. Dump the ball off. Stand around (mostly). It's really bad.

[ThunderBolt]

If the media were ever thinking of writing anything critical, it won’t happen now that we beat the warriors.

[Old Man Game]

Singler is the exception that proves the rule. He went from a halfway decent role player over 2 plus seasons to D League jobber caliber practically overnight. You won't find a ton of examples of that steep a decline in production.

Morrow

Even at his worst Morrow still looked like a guy that belonged on a roster. Kyle looks like he belongs behind the counter at DQ.

[Pillendreher]

Positive NetRtG in the 1st quarter: 6-7
Negative NetRtG int the 1st quarter: 2-3

Positive NetRtG in the 2nd quarter: 8-4
Negative NetRtG int the 2nd quarter: 0-6

Positive NetRtG in the 3rd quarter: 7-0
Negative NetRtG int the 3rd quarter: 1-10

Positive NetRtG in the 4th quarter: 5-2 (NYK is neutral; I'll include it here)
Negative NetRtG int the 4th quarter: 3-8

.

is always mentioning this constantly: 3rd quarters are key for us. Once we lose those them, we've been done so far. I would argue that the downfall starts even sooner tho. It's just that we're completely unable to stop it once it happens.

[Pillendreher]

Let's also talk about how this **** idiot is still unable to read the game and adjust accordingly.

1) Once teams start to cover the PnR with Adams more and better, we have no backup plan. Consequently, we start settling for trash jumpers more and take ourselves out of the game by that even more.

If you watched Detroit's offense last night even they had lots more going on off the ball than we did. We just aren't doing much to keep the defense from keying in on the ball handler regardless of whether its Russ, George or Melo. Dump the ball off. Stand around (mostly). It's really bad.

Yeah. They don't have a single really good offensive player, yet they were generating shots.

If only every other NBA team decided to just let talent win, we might be at 15-3 or so. Too bad they're actually playing and adjusting while also having a gameplan.

Darn it! Nobody told Donovan that would happen in the NBA!

[Old Man Game]

Let's also talk about how this **** idiot is still unable to read the game and adjust accordingly.

1) Once teams start to cover the PnR with Adams more and better, we have no backup plan. Consequently, we start settling for trash jumpers more and take ourselves out of the game by that even more.

If you watched Detroit's offense last night even they had lots more going on off the ball than we did. We just aren't doing much to keep the defense from keying in on the ball handler regardless of whether its Russ, George or Melo. Dump the ball off. Stand around (mostly). It's really bad.

Yeah. They don't have a single really good offensive player, yet they were generating shots.

If only every other NBA team decided to just let talent win, we might be at 15-3 or so. Too bad they're actually playing and adjusting while also having a gameplan.

Darn it! Nobody told Donovan that would happen in the NBA!

I feel like Donovan, practically ever since he got here and has looked more or less lost probably 95% of the time. Going all the way back to his first season where he didn't understand to use timeouts in a close game with less than a minute to go and coming forward to this season where he's playing Josh Huestis over Patterson. The only decent thing he's done was win a few games against the Warriors in the playoffs by figuring out how to play Roberson against them (and using him as a cutter isn't exactly rocket science).

Let's face it, Donovan is in over his head. He needs to go back to the college ranks where "coaching" is more about recruiting and practicing than it is about strategy and in game adjustments. The guy just isn't cut out for the NBA game.

[Pillendreher]

One thing to consider: Donovan is obviously not taking the Regular Season as seriously as he should be given what terrible lineups he plays and that the most important thing for him seems to be trying stuff out instead of maximizing talent.

Is this the first year the team has fully adjusted to that? The whole squad showed up against the Warriors and now it's back to winning the first quarter and then completely falling apart for the rest of the game.

Performance by quarter after ~20 % of the season played:

Q1: 106.4 ORtG | 85.3 DRtG (best overall by more than 10 pp100p) | 21.1 NetRtG (2nd overall only behind the Rockets)
Q2: 105.5 ORtG | 98.6 DRtG (3rd best overall)| 6.9 NetRtG (7th overall)
Q3: 98.6 ORtG (23rd overall) | 102.4 DRtG | -3.9 NetRtG (21st overall)
Q4: 102.6 ORtG | 108.8 DRtG | -6.2 NetRtG (26th overall)

1st Half: 105.9 ORtG (13th) | 91.8 DRtG (1st) | +14.1 NetRtG (2nd)
2nd Half: 100.5 ORtG (24th) | 105.5 DRtG (19th) | -5.0 NetRtG (24th)

I don't think it's far fetched that the team catches on to how a coach coaches. If he doesn't seem to give a ****, sooner or later so will they, even if we are a team with more veterans than young guys.

PS: One other thing that goes towards my "Once the defense goes, the offense goes too" theory - we force less TOVs as the game goes on:

Q1: 21.2 oppTOV%
Q2: 19.6 oppTOV%
Q3: 18.0 oppTOV%
Q4: 16.8 oppTOV%

Once the Spurs stopped turning the ball over, they just destroyed us. The Warriors only dropped once below 20 TOV%. The Spurs had a 13 TOV% in the 2nd quarter and 6.9 TOV% in the 2nd half.

[Pillendreher]

Very first possession. Melo open on the wing, Robes in position under the rim, George curling to the corner.



4th quarter. They're just sagging off and Russ is running into 3 guys.

[Moose10Fan]

It's not that difficult to figure out what happens. Let me lay it out so Billy 'I'm Sam Presti's friend' Donovan gets a chance to read it because it is still happening and I don't see any attempt to fix it.

We're up big in the 1st half. We're playing very good defense, we're making shots, we're moving, we're playing with pace. At some point, we're gonna start having defensive breakdowns - not protecting penetration, giving up open 3s, giving up offensive rebounds. And once that happens, our offense starts to get worse too. We stop moving, we play way slower, we take long jumpers, we don't attack the paint. And it's a trend we're not unable to reverse once it starts.

You could see it coming from miles away last night. Russ checked back in in the 2nd quarter at the 7:26 mark in the 2nd quarter. You could see the defensive breakdowns showing up more and more - Pistons finished with a 107 ORtG over the last 7.5 minutes of the 2nd quarter and we only managed a 89 ORtG. We still played fast at a 104 Pace.
Then 3rd quarter we still play fast at a 105 pace and actually do a decent job defending (88 DRtG), but we can't score at all (69 ORtG). And then queue the 4th, we still can't score (76 ORtG) and still can't defend (109 DRtG).

I knew in the 2nd quarter that we were playing with fire. I've already seen this too many times this season so I knew what was ahead. It's always the same:

Defense breaks down => Offense breaks down => Less attacking => Terrible shots.

This is not new. We've lost like 90 % of our games like this.

And let's not pretend like we should not have blown these **** out. The Pistons suck. They are not a good team. We kept them in the game by not defending their scrubs and - voilà - once our breakdown happened, they were right there.

A lurker and don’t normally chime in with other squads forums, but we do not suck, in fact we sucked last night and managed the win.


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[getrichordie]

It's not that difficult to figure out what happens. Let me lay it out so Billy 'I'm Sam Presti's friend' Donovan gets a chance to read it because it is still happening and I don't see any attempt to fix it.

We're up big in the 1st half. We're playing very good defense, we're making shots, we're moving, we're playing with pace. At some point, we're gonna start having defensive breakdowns - not protecting penetration, giving up open 3s, giving up offensive rebounds. And once that happens, our offense starts to get worse too. We stop moving, we play way slower, we take long jumpers, we don't attack the paint. And it's a trend we're not unable to reverse once it starts.

You could see it coming from miles away last night. Russ checked back in in the 2nd quarter at the 7:26 mark in the 2nd quarter. You could see the defensive breakdowns showing up more and more - Pistons finished with a 107 ORtG over the last 7.5 minutes of the 2nd quarter and we only managed a 89 ORtG. We still played fast at a 104 Pace.
Then 3rd quarter we still play fast at a 105 pace and actually do a decent job defending (88 DRtG), but we can't score at all (69 ORtG). And then queue the 4th, we still can't score (76 ORtG) and still can't defend (109 DRtG).

I knew in the 2nd quarter that we were playing with fire. I've already seen this too many times this season so I knew what was ahead. It's always the same:

Defense breaks down => Offense breaks down => Less attacking => Terrible shots.

This is not new. We've lost like 90 % of our games like this.

And let's not pretend like we should not have blown these **** out. The Pistons suck. They are not a good team. We kept them in the game by not defending their scrubs and - voilà - once our breakdown happened, they were right there.

A lurker and don’t normally chime in with other squads forums, but we do not suck, in fact we sucked last night and managed the win.


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I don’t think he’s watched Detroit play this year. They look like a completely different team with the addition of Bradley and Drummond 2.0...


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[Pillendreher]

It's not that difficult to figure out what happens. Let me lay it out so Billy 'I'm Sam Presti's friend' Donovan gets a chance to read it because it is still happening and I don't see any attempt to fix it.

We're up big in the 1st half. We're playing very good defense, we're making shots, we're moving, we're playing with pace. At some point, we're gonna start having defensive breakdowns - not protecting penetration, giving up open 3s, giving up offensive rebounds. And once that happens, our offense starts to get worse too. We stop moving, we play way slower, we take long jumpers, we don't attack the paint. And it's a trend we're not unable to reverse once it starts.

You could see it coming from miles away last night. Russ checked back in in the 2nd quarter at the 7:26 mark in the 2nd quarter. You could see the defensive breakdowns showing up more and more - Pistons finished with a 107 ORtG over the last 7.5 minutes of the 2nd quarter and we only managed a 89 ORtG. We still played fast at a 104 Pace.
Then 3rd quarter we still play fast at a 105 pace and actually do a decent job defending (88 DRtG), but we can't score at all (69 ORtG). And then queue the 4th, we still can't score (76 ORtG) and still can't defend (109 DRtG).

I knew in the 2nd quarter that we were playing with fire. I've already seen this too many times this season so I knew what was ahead. It's always the same:

Defense breaks down => Offense breaks down => Less attacking => Terrible shots.

This is not new. We've lost like 90 % of our games like this.

And let's not pretend like we should not have blown these **** out. The Pistons suck. They are not a good team. We kept them in the game by not defending their scrubs and - voilà - once our breakdown happened, they were right there.

A lurker and don’t normally chime in with other squads forums, but we do not suck, in fact we sucked last night and managed the win.


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I don’t think he’s watched Detroit play this year. They look like a completely different team with the addition of Bradley and Drummond 2.0...


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They have a +2 SRS. Better than expected, but still not good enough to beat us like this. Give me a **** break.

When you're up 15 in the 3rd quarter at home against a ~44 win team, you close the game and bring it home, period.

[Moose10Fan]

A lurker and don’t normally chime in with other squads forums, but we do not suck, in fact we sucked last night and managed the win.


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I don’t think he’s watched Detroit play this year. They look like a completely different team with the addition of Bradley and Drummond 2.0...


Sent from my iPhone using RealGM mobile app

They have a +2 SRS. Better than expected, but still not good enough to beat us like this. Give me a **** break.

When you're up 15 in the 3rd quarter at home against a ~44 win team, you close the game and bring it home, period.

That’s our thing now, we’ve won 7 games when trailing 10.


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[slick_watts]

it's not on donovan only. donovan has an authority problem. and it's because his star player is uncoachable.

[Pillendreher]

I don’t think he’s watched Detroit play this year. They look like a completely different team with the addition of Bradley and Drummond 2.0...


Sent from my iPhone using RealGM mobile app

They have a +2 SRS. Better than expected, but still not good enough to beat us like this. Give me a **** break.

When you're up 15 in the 3rd quarter at home against a ~44 win team, you close the game and bring it home, period.

That’s our thing now, we’ve won 7 games when trailing 10.


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And in the end it'll even itself out. You're not gonna be able to keep winning coming from behind all season long. Career 34 - 36 % 3p shooters Galloway, Bradley and Harris won't continue shooting 40+ % from 3 all season long. Just like Jerami Grant is back to being a trash 3pt shooter and just like Aaron Gordon's shooting has come back down to earth hard.

Either way, It doesn't really matter. We have lost like this to trash teams and we have lost like this to good teams. It's on us playing better.

[Moose10Fan]

They have a +2 SRS. Better than expected, but still not good enough to beat us like this. Give me a **** break.

When you're up 15 in the 3rd quarter at home against a ~44 win team, you close the game and bring it home, period.

That’s our thing now, we’ve won 7 games when trailing 10.


Sent from my iPhone using RealGM mobile app

And in the end it'll even itself out. You're not gonna be able to keep winning coming from behind all season long. Career 34 - 36 % 3p shooters Galloway, Bradley and Harris won't continue shooting 40+ % from 3 all season long. Just like Jerami Grant is back to being a trash 3pt shooter and just like Aaron Gordon's shooting has come back down to earth hard.

Either way, It doesn't really matter. We have lost like this to trash teams and we have lost like this to good teams. It's on us playing better.

Alrighty lol, I guess we’re trash, I’ll take the 12-6 trash, we prefer being under the radar.


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