skbucks1985 wrote:I watched it this morning and I was really paying attention to 4, kinda 5, people: Marjon, AJJ, Crowder, Beasley and RoLo. Because we know what we're getting with Brook, Bobby and Pat. With RoLo I was mostly just seeing if he was completely washed up and couldn't even fill in the Meyers Leonard role and he passed that low threshold. If Brook gets a minor injury or is in early foul trouble we can put RoLo in and it won't completely fall apart.
With Crowder I wanted to see if he got matched onto DeRozan or Lavine at all. He's obviously not going to be the starting SG but him being in the closing lineup against Boston defending Brown is not the craziest idea. Other than that he looked okay and didn't look out of shape or winded or anything like that.
I know Griffin's comments about Beasley's defense made some people's ears perk up. But I don't think it means much. Beasley has a shooting pedigree that the guys he's competing with can't touch and if he plays adequate defense there's probably a lot of minutes available to him. I thought defensively he was just that, adequate. Otherwise he looked like the player I'd seen and his reputation said he was.
I really liked what I saw out of AJJ. Yeah he doesn't have a 3-pt shot but DeRozan is still a really skilled offensive player and a young guy playing against him could easily get killed but AJJ stuck him to like glue and forced him into a couple bad shots and forced him to give it up once when he was looking to drive. There's lots of reasons to be skeptical about getting past his glaring weakness, but he showed a little bit of being able to make teams pay if they're going to completely cheat off him.
Marjon showed some bad and some good. He still doesn't look like the game has totally slowed down for him yet. Some of what happened with him I can shrug aside because he was having the offense run through him at points and that's not going to happen during the season in any real way. But I still think he made some rotational mistakes that I'd hoped he'd have worked through by now. His FT's at the end were huge though. If he does end up playing major minutes and find himself in closing lineups, in must-foul situations we'll probably see teams sell out to prevent Dame from getting the ball, Khris will be the second option and if they close him off then it might be Marjon taking those shots.
I did think it was difficult to judge Beasley on defense yesterday, he had Lavine for most of his minutes and Lavine really just seemed to be going through the motions on most possessions, just trying to get his legs under him. Beasley did seem to be in the right place most of the time, I think I saw a few instances where he got caught ball watching.
I think when AJJ came in and fouled DeRozan, it was almost a challenge to him to up his intensity, he wanted to guard him and did not want Demar to be taking plays off. AJ's intensity seemed to wake Crowder up a bit as well. I realize for most of these veterans these preseason games are more of a walk through but it was nice to see AJJ come in and want to really play. Also, I think Giannis finishes that alley oop attempt.
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