Let's Be Positive

The past few days people have been telling me to be more positive, my girlfriend, coworkers, and friends.  I’m going to take a positive look at last night’s game with the Nets.

Here’s five great things from this game:

1.     Kyrie you’re a wizard.  Varejao you’re also a wizard.  It seems like they got the letter the same day last week because they have been playing magically individually and together.  Both of them being wizards is all that can account for the amazing pick and roll they run. 

Kyrie looks like he is playing in a pick up game.  He’s the kid you play with who always gets to the basket and you’re like, “yo, play defense hombre,” before you cover him only to get scorched every time he wants to drive. 

2.     Alonzo Gee not only played very good defense on Joe Johnson, but he had a lot better shot selection this game taking only seven shots.  Johnson scored his barrage of threes when Boobie was covering him.  Overall, the defense was actually pretty good with most of our guys making the right choices on rotations (aside from Thompson).

3.     Dion Waiters is finally taking more shots.  He isn’t going to shoot this bad in multiple games, 3-16.  I like that when he had a fast break during this game he took the extra effort to try and get a dunk or easy basket for himself; this shows he realized he needed to get himself going.  It didn’t work but he tried at least. 

4.     We could have won this game very easily: Dion Waiters usually will have more points, the bench doesn’t usually score only six points (even ours), rarely do we have a 12 point quarter, Thompson doesn’t always have his shots blocked upwards of four times, Jon Leuer will eventually learn to drain his 18 footer (it doesn’t matter though because once Zeller is back we know he can drain his).

5.     Our bench is the Voltron of Suck.  For those of you who doubt me about being positive, at least the bench is Voltron when it could just as easily be a bag of suck.  

Let’s get serious for a second about Tristan Thompson.  He has an athletic body and is very quick.  With that said, he doesn’t know how to use these skills for basketball.  He looks better on the floor with Varejao out there because I think Varejao directs him a little bit.  Otherwise he doesn’t know where he needs to be.  Andray Blatche lit him up just because he didn’t get in front of him at the right times on a rotation; he floated out a little bit too far to help out on the wing players.  Thompson also let himself get pushed too far under the basket on offense, which took him out of contention for offensive rebounds.  He did get some points off of coming inside for the dish off passes (from being by the baseline), which is nice but he needs to make sure he goes up quick to get the finish on those easy ones.  There’s a happy medium area for him to occupy on the baseline.

The Fuck Truck Driver of the night award is split between Varejao and Irving who both had their best scoring performances in their careers thus far.  They were both driving because they enabled each other with the pick and roll play.  Irving was unstoppable on his lay-ups while Varejao seemed to get every tip in/dish.  The wild thang even had a few nice takes off the dribble.