ecuhus1981 wrote:Yeah, a mixture of repetitive stress injury and increased defensive attention is my uneducated guess on Griffin. Nagging injuries are bound to crop up when you physically bang with bigger, stronger players for 28 minutes every game. And Blake was never a paragon of health. Without Kyrie or anyone with his skill set to really carve a set defense and force weakside help, Blake is hoisting more contested shots, and he's either hurrying his release or slowing his pump fake for waaaay too long. He had always had a late release (on the way down from the apex of his jump), but now he's adding a bunch of unnecessary hiccups. Basically, he's lost confidence, and opponents know his tendencies.
Give him a week of rest (no games, all DNP-CD) to restore his body, then have him train with Korver. He'll be fine in time.
Love the analysis and optimism, and it also makes a lot of sense to me. I'll have to take a closer look at his shot mechanics on YT.
Hah! Just accidentally found this one. Lordy-Lord, that's some sweetness:
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ecuhus1981 wrote:I've been waiting for over a week, for national media critics to change course on their Nets hot takes. They haven't. They want so BADLY for us to fall on our faces, they want our improved defense to be smoke and mirrors, they want KD to be brittle and JH to be out of shape, despite being among the league leaders in minutes played. They want the new officiating to take us out, none of it has.
If they never come around, I'll be fine. But it'll be so sweet when they run out of excuses, and have no response except to give Brooklyn its due praise. 1st place, baby!!!
Other than pandering to various mobs, at this point I'd be ashamed to be a national-level talking head dogging the Nets.
It's like years and years of enduring the Nets running out terrible teams with little hope for the future means nothing to these people. Years of Sean Marks carefully resurrecting the Nets future like some kind of dang ol' miracle worker, wonderfully setting the table for top free agents to sign up, means nothing. The heartbreak of the Nets arguably being the best team last season, only to be brought down by Beard's injury and Giannis (arguably deliberately) taking out Kyrie, leaving KD to try to drag to the team forward by himself... that also means nothing.
It's the ESPN principle, I guess. All character, no soul.
* With "character" probably deserving a hefty share of quotation marks.