Wisedude wrote:The biggest need on this team is a legit backup Center. Articles say that Diop is ready to play now. Altman signed him so we will see. Atkinson said he is the only one he can speak French to since Kenny is fluent in French language. What an endorsement. The meltdown against the Sixers is what we have seen the last 4 years. I have seen 10-year old kids that are coached on how to break a press, they have a plan. The Cavs have no plan to do that and they panic. You call these players "professional NBA players". LOL. Kenny is a terrible HC. No plan to even break a press, PATHETIC. EMBARRASSING.
Rather than say "PATHETIC. EMBARRASSING.", I find it a lot more rewarding to try to understand the problem the team is having and why it exists. It's not good to have the problem of not keeping leads, but it's good to surface problems early in the season so they can be addressed rather than they lay dormant until the playoffs. Is it Kenny? Is it that Koby has traded all the PGs that can break a press on their own?
The NBA plan to break presses is that NBA PGs should be able to break a press by themselves, or with one screen. 10 year olds learn to pass the ball up the court because they can't dribble out of a press, the problem is that that's less successful in the NBA if the other team is jumping passing lanes and attacking handoffs. Harden doesn't have the top-end speed or the motor at his age to continually beat a press himself.
Over the years teams typically haven't pressed because most teams worth pressing would have a fast PG with a good handle. The press is coming back into style because most of those fast PGs are smaller guys who are now defensive liabilities, and so they don't see the court. It worked for the Pacers against us because our point guard with an injured toe lost his ability to run fast or be quick without pain. Well, we are finding out that not having a quick PG is an offensive liability in this scenario. We traded Garland, but Schroder was ALSO that role, and that's probably why Kenny played Harden + Schroder together more than you'd expect last year. It's why he has experimented with single bigs down the stretch.
Pressing is a liability of running James Harden at PG where you need footspeed along with a handle, and a reason we've run guard-heavy lineups is to mitigate that. Unfortunately Mitchell, Porter, and Merrill don't have the combination of handle/acceleration/speed/endurance to break presses on their own, either. They do it by committee. And then Kenny runs a lineup that's guard heavy with Harden as a nominal forward on offense/defense that has its own problems.
It's better to look at Harden as an SG or SF who initiates the offense rather than a true PG, whatever the positional designation says.
