You know when people try to defend the Malone firing there is just a great intangible sitting out there that causes me to instantly just start waving my hands stop, just stop. And its this: leadership. As this is not high school I absolutely hate the idea of pulling jock rank in an argument, and often mock the very ball bouncers we are here to watch. And yet...I do wonder sometimes. Perhaps its something that you may only really understand if you've been there. But a coach, and a basketball coach at that, is not a play drawer, and not a substitution pattern maker. Years ago I used to grade coaches along with players, but I stopped, because it was just insipid. That is NOT the key factor to being an effective coach.
The key to coaching basketball is trust, is charisma, is leadership. An effective head basketball coach is almost a father figure. Its an emotional attachment, not an analytic one. You play, you fight, for that man (or woman in women's sports). You go to war with and for him. He's got your back, you've got his, and you are in the foxhole together. That's when you know you have a good coach who has reached his players. They'll buy in and go further for him than they will for anybody else, no matter how precise the squgglies an alternative coach might draw on the whiteboard. The team truly becomes that coach's team. And at that point, woe be he or she who interferes in that relationship. You don't just kill somebody's father and replace him with a new figure and say, this guy's your father now, follow him. And that's the problem here. And pulling jock rank, I wonder if its one that guys who probably never experienced that like Vivek or PDA truly understand. This was Michael Malone's team. They tore the heart out of it, and just cluelessly assumed they could throw somebody else out there in Malone's place and it would all just work. Except that isn't the way it works. I'm not even sure if it would for Karl, at least not instantly. But maybe his celebrity might allow things to smooth over. But Ty Corbin? Has had no chance. He's not the father, and even if he were a charismatic leader it would take him months to become the new one.
And hence you have so many nights like these. The effort, focus, leadership isn't there. The whole aura is off and with the spell broken, we look and feel just exactly like a lottery team again.
Boxscore
Stats: 38min 25pts (9-21, 1-3, 6-6) 9reb 5ast 2stl 0blk 1TO
Gay ( B- ) -- Rudy might have been our best player on the floor tonight. Not that he was perfect by any means, but on a night where the ball was going everywhere but to its intended receiver, he had only one turnover. Not bad for playing 38 minutes, and handling the ball a lot. He also had 5 assists and 9 rebounds to go along with 25 points. However, he only shot 42% overall from the floor. Most of his shots were vintage Gay. Early in the first quarter he got the ball about 20 feet from the basket, put the ball on the floor for three dribbles, spun, sidestepped, and hit a fade away 16 footer. A little later in the half, he scored on a put back of a Cousins miss. He also had a couple of 18 foot step back 18 footers. One of his highlights was near the start of the second half when he stole the ball, and went almost the length of the court and slammed it home. His best dunk of the night came when he split a double team and drove the right baseline, missed a little 6 foot floater, got the ball back in a crowd, and violently slammed it through the basket. Defensively is where I found fault with him. In the first quarter he completely lost track of Johnson on the left wing who hit a 3 pointer. Just a bit later, he was late getting back to Johnson who scored again. Johnson also took him off the dribble, turned the corner and laid it up over the outstretched hand of Gay. But his worse mistake came in the 4th quarter with both Gay and Casspi on the floor, and the Kings trying to make a comeback. Gay totally lost Teletovic, and left him wide open at the top of the circle, who of course hit a three. To make matters worse, he repeated the mistake. Overall the entire team struggled defensively and turned the ball over. At least Gay only contributed to one of those. --Baja
Stats: 13min 4pts (2-4, 0-0, 0-0) 1reb 0ast 0stl 0blk 1TO
Thompson ( D ) -- you know, I'm not sure JT has really given us anything to grade ever since the stuff hit the fan. He knows the score, and just watching these rotations, I'd bet a big part of the meddling has happened at PF, where JT is playing 15min a night, and Landry has been knocked out of the normal rotation so we can play Derrick Williams as a "power" forward off the bench. In any case, that's what we got out of JT again. 15min of nothing. Had virtually all of hsi numbers in the first seconds of the game as he caught a Collison airball, put it up once in clumsy fashion, got it back, and laid it in. I think he hit one jumper late in the half. Sandwiched around the early hit though were two long KG jumpers, and while there's not much you can do when the old man is hitting those things, JT never bothered him during his entire short night. And so 4pts and 1reb as what is likely the twilight of the JT era here goes out with a whimper, not a bang.--Brick
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Stats: 37min 24pts (9-12, 0-0, 6-9) 13reb 4ast 1stl 2blk 5TO
Cousins ( C ) -- "Now is the winter of our discontent..." Who knew Shakespeare had so much in common with Nostradamus and could look ahead to Boogie's 2014 frame of mind. The numbers in the statline above are all there of course. Note the low FGs though -- potentially another emergent problem as Vivek's "jazz" offense of course means chaos and your best player not touching the ball for long stretches so everybody else gets their own chance to solo. In fact in the early going it was Cuz himself making the decision not to force the issue on offense as he seemed to consciously be making an effort to pass it all around the court maybe in an attempt to wake up our sleeping cast of characters. But rather than waking anybody up, maybe either than Ben very early, it also had the curios effect of muting Cuz's own impact. He just wasn't that forceful early. There were several early defensive moments, several rim protects, took a charge. But his teammates were just awful defensively, and rather than Cuz dragging them all back into the mindset, as the geme went along it seemed he was getting pulled the other way himself in "why should I bust my ass if these losers won't" fashion. Which is...not good. There were several just impressively angry outbursts in the form of power drives dunking right through Nets bigs. But that's kind of what they were. Frustration moments of a great player. But that wasn't there consistently. In fact for all his frustration with teammates, Cuz himself again looked tired, and dangerously close to the slouchy behavior of years past. He kept on trying to make passes to set guys up, they not infrequently got picked off, and he got more and more frustrated. once he screamed at Nik for what I think was Cuz's own mistake, unless Nik wasn't coming to the ball, which is possible as Cuz yells at him at least once a game to just shoot the ball with confidence. Down the stretch Cuz stepped up with a late burst of gotta win this energy, capped by a monstrous dunk over Plumlee which I'm posting above. But it wasn't enough, and a few of those numbers above happened in the final seconds when we were through. That's fine though. At this point what salvation this season might offer may be in the form of a Cuz All Star bid, also giving him increased clout again. So however those numbers have to get put up works for me. To anybody not watching the game, this was another big night. To those watching however it was a frustrated and lax night where sometimes Cuz was as much part of the problem as the solution. And his comments after the game suggest something worse, that there may be no all for one and one for all spirit to allow the team to turn this thing around even after losing their coach. --Brick
Stats: 32min 11pts (4-9, 3-7, 0-0) 2reb 2ast 1stl 0blk 2TO
McLemore ( C- ) --in the early going of this one it looked like maybe we were going to get a big game out of Ben to help the rest of the team through the doldrums. Cuz in particular was working as a passing and screening post, and Ben hit a wide open angle three to start, a drive in the open court, and then another three from Cuz to finish the first quarter with 8 points. It would practically be the totality of his contributions. He added a solitary three as we came out firing in the third and quickly sliced 7 off the lead, but disappeared along with the rest of the team except to repeatedly look shaky with the ball and turn it over. Made a dumb mistake at the 45 sec mark fouling Jack before the ball was even inbounded, thus giving Jack a spare point and making the Nets lead 7. We were very likely dead anyway, but that made it a three possessions game and just sealed it. Be nice to see more effective help defense or boardwork again, without it this was just kind of an Anthony Morrow game. --Brick
Stats: 31min 16pts (5-7, 2-2, 4-5) 3reb 8ast 0stl 0blk 4TO
Collison ( C- ) -- Here is a partial list of NBA players that Darren Collison can't cover: Jarrett Jack, Deron Williams. I think we can really probably leave DC's defensive contribution for the game at that and move on. On the offensive end, Collison was much better. He got himself into bad foul trouble and only played 9 minutes in the first half, but when he was in he did a good job of both scoring (5-7 from the floor and 2-2 from deep) and distributing (8 assists, and at least 6 other shots set up. Still, he had too many turnovers - one of them really belonged to Ben on a fumbled pass, but two were unacceptable. He allowed Mason Plumlee to come up from behind and easily poke the ball away when he was dribbling at the top of the key for one, and he threw a nearly impossible outlet pass over Cousins' head for the other. It wasn't a great game but it wasn't a terrible game, and maybe I'm even grading him a bit harsh because the team was so bad. But it's hard to give out a solid grade in a game that looks like this one. --Capt.
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