jbk1234 wrote:Well, that one hurt. Jerome picked a heck of a time to regress. We didn't miss Mobley nearly as much as I thought we would. Mitchell made a lot of fatigue induced mistakes at the end. I don't understand how Haliburton gets that call with seconds left in Cleveland, especially with how the game was called.
On the radio they said Mitchell was cramping, so yeah, very much like some of our early LeBron games where we tried to squeeze everything we could out of one player.
So, maybe it's for the best we didn't foul or trap Haliburton to prevent him from shooting a 3pter, but I didn't much like seeing him ISO'd and sizing up Jerome at the end there.
As for Hali's lane violation, it wasn't too egregious considering a) he didn't get the rebound because of it and b) Jerome had him boxed out but backed off at the exact wrong moment. Kenny could be criticized for not putting another big on the line but the ball bounced to Allen's side and he and Mitchell boxed out Turner well.
There was likely a loose ball foul on Turner, though, that everyone missed because there's no reason Allen shouldn't have grabbed that rebound unless he was being held down by Turner or he thought he could just get that board without jumping.
Crazy stuff, but clearly we still have some end of game execution stuff to still work on with different combinations of players. We'd improved greatly this season, but that's with Garland and Mobley.
And next season, we'd better unveil our own full court pressure defense. It's a lot easier to come back on a team like the Pacers did to us when you can just take the ball away from the other team.
