Blazer’s Edge: “The episode does reveal part of Greg’s personality. He’s not on solid ground right now–again, for perfectly understandable reasons–and when he’s not on solid ground his performance suffers. He’s not shown himself to be a person who relishes the challenge of the unknown. He’ll be the biggest, and perhaps the most effective, guy in the charge but he won’t be the one out front…at least not at this point. I was trying to think of a way to describe the characteristic that Greg is missing right now and the closest word I came up with is ‘unflappable’. Certain guys will simply go out there and perform no matter what happens. Everybody goes up and down, of course, but these guys make down look good and up look great. You can’t shake them or intimidate them. They rise to the occasion.”
Broderick Turner of the Los Angeles Times: “This was supposed to be the start of an easy stretch for the Lakers, the first of several matchups against teams with losing records, a time for the Lakers to run by those subpar opponents. Instead, the defense the Lakers paid so much attention to during training camp, the defense they all claimed would be the difference this season, was torched by a Sacramento Kings team that entered the game with the seventh-worst record in the NBA. The Lakers won this game with their offense, their defense getting sliced apart during a 118-108 victory over the Kings on Sunday night at Staples Center. The Lakers now have given up more than 100 points in three of their last five games. That they won four of them doesn’t solve the problem. Their defense is leaking, and the Kings found plenty of holes to exploit, their 53.4% shooting a sign of how poor the Lakers were on defense.”
Ryan McNeill of Hoops Addict: “Toronto hasn’t struggled because of a front office trying to cut costs, they’ve struggled because the team has been rocked by injuries. It would be hard for any team to gain momentum when their starting point guard is hobbled with a sore hamstring and a new focal part of the offense has seen limited minutes. Fans knew the team would be in trouble if any of the big three – Bosh, Calderon and O’Neal – were to miss games this season. When you factor in that two of those players have missed time it’s easy to see why the team has struggled out of the gate. Not only that, but most of the teams struggles come on the defensive end. They are near the top of the league in points scored, the problem is they haven’t been getting key defensive stops when they need them. With shot blockers like Bosh and O’Neal in the paint it’s meant some players have let up mentally assuming those two players can erase their mistakes.”
Holly MacKenzie of SLAM: “A reporter approaches Garnett, notepad in hand, asking, ‘K.G.?’ There is no response. He tries again, ‘Kevin, you have a minute?’ Again, nothing. Once more with, ‘Kevin Garnett?’ This time, Garnett turns and walks into the shower area, no flinch, no glance, no movement in the direction of the person requesting his time. He didn’t see him. Rondo then appears on the scene, notifying the reporter that, ‘Yeah, he doesn’t talk pregame.’ As though it is normal to be dismissed in this fashion. When the topic turns to Rondo himself and whether he can give a moment or two, he quickly says that he has to go shower. Another routine. This one started by Ray Allen. One by one, as the players finish getting dressed, each have a reason for why they are unable to talk. A star like K.G., it is almost expected. On this team, every player is as much of a star as the stars surrounding them. At least in their minds. Ubuntu, at its finest.”
Bill Ingram of HOOPSWORLD: “The new Big Three of Yao Ming, Tracy McGrady, and Artest provides head coach Rick Adelman with plenty of firepower. ‘This is probably the best-shooting team I’ve been on. From front to back everybody can score. That’s why I was worried early on when we lost a couple of those games that we should have won, but I think we’re going to turn it around.’ Part of the problem for Artest, who is shooting a dismal 35% from the field in November, is that he’s not accustomed to being free to take open jumpers.‘I’ve never been as wide open as I am playing with Yao and Tracy. That was my problem earlier in the season. I was just so wide open I didn’t know what to do. There was too much space, but I’m figuring that out.’ He certainly is. Over the last four games he’s improved his shooting percentage to 44%, and it’s 65% if you throw out the game Yao missed. Thanks in part to the rest of the Southwest Division’s struggles, the Rockets are currently sitting in first place in the division. It’s exactly where Artest was hoping he’d be able to get the Rockets, who have invited everyone to leave the past on the doorstep and start fresh as a unified team.”
Mike Wells of the Indianapolis Star: “The victories weren’t there early on, but the Indiana Pacers managed to get through the tough part of their early schedule by staying competitive and not self-destructing against some of the top teams in the league. They eventually won three straight games and moved a game above .500 for the first time in nearly a year. But things haven’t gone their way since, and the upcoming schedule isn’t in their favor. The Pacers, now 5-7, have dropped four of their past five games and are in the midst of a stretch where they play 10 of 13 games on the road. Their road schedule includes games at Dallas, Houston, Orlando, Boston, Cleveland, Toronto and Detroit, all teams expected to be in the playoffs.”
Britt Robson of The Rake: “If you had to pick just one reason for the lousy start of the 2008-09 season for the Minnesota Timberwolves, a curiously tentative and insecure Randy Foye at the point guard position gets the nod, against stiff competition (Wittman ineptitude, Shaddy agonistes, McHale redundance, etc.). Despite his transparent bravado, Foye is never going to be a classic point, the sort of natural floor general who can’t help but get others involved in the offense. But during his season and a half of NBA experience before this year, the Wolves’ plum from the 2006 draft (perpetually cursed by being swapped for the superior Brandon Roy) had demonstrated a desire to take the big shot, or otherwise trigger momentum. It was hard not to notice how substantially the Wolves improved once he came back from injury and readjusted to pro ball last winter, and reasonable to expect that with another off-season of prep work on point guard duties and the presence of Mike Miller to help spread the floor, he’d make another step forward this year. Instead, the Foye we saw the first 11 games of the season was almost shockingly incapable of demonstrating, let alone inspiring, confidence.”
Sam Amick of the Sacramento Bee: “The list of qualifiers was already long, with the Kings not sure what to make of their own play this month because of so many uncertainties. The injuries to Kevin Martin and Francisco García; the Brad Miller suspension; the Beno Udrih rustiness factor when he hobbled into the regular season after suffering a hip injury. The schedule would have been a challenge even if the Kings were fully healthy. By the time November is done, the Kings will have played a league-high 17 games during the month. Utah, Milwaukee and Oklahoma City will share the distinction, with the Kings and Jazz the only two that will go the entire month without more than one day between any of their games. The Kings have four sets of back-to-back games in all, with two this week (at the Lakers on Sunday and at Portland today; at Utah on Friday and home against Dallas on Saturday). The combination of the two major factors to the season’s start was, quite obviously, far from ideal.”
Adam Lauridsen of the San Jose Mercury News: “Corey Maggette gums up the offense. That’s not to say that I don’t appreciate some of what Maggette does. He’s great at getting to the line and he’s had some nice shooting and tough defensive nights lately. When Maggette left the game in the second half, however, our offense suddenly opened up. Jackson was making fewer bad passes because guys were moving without the ball. The fast break started up again in earnest because we had more than Andris clearing the boards. The pick-and-roll even returned, with Wright making a series of nice plays facing the basket after getting the ball from Jackson. I’m still optimistic Maggette can have a place on this team, but it’s not going to be as the power forward or the first offensive option. He’s an efficient scorer — Nelson just needs to find ways to work him into the flow of the game. I worry that we may be seeing the first days of Maggette slowly growing into Harrington Part Deux.”
Lisa Dillman of the Los Angeles Times: “The mind can be a wildly unpredictable thing. Kaman’s unpredictability is . . . well, almost predictable. He is averaging 17.6 points in his last five games, which included a 25-point performance at Oklahoma City in the opener of the Clippers’ three-game trip. In 13 games, he is averaging 14.5 points and 10.2 rebounds. His field-goal shooting percentage is a team-leading 58%. A coach ordering someone to shoot more often is not exactly something you hear with great frequency in the NBA. Listen closely because you may not hear it again. ‘You just never know when something is going to kick in,’ Clippers Coach Mike Dunleavy said after the game in Oklahoma City. ‘We’ve been pounding it into his head, or trying to, the last year-plus. We’ve worked on him in the pick-and-roll game. He’s a great free-throw shooter — 78% last year. But we couldn’t get him to shoot it. How many guys do you have a hard time trying to get them to shoot the ball?’”
Brian Windhorst of The Plain Dealer: “The Committee is made up of James, Wallace, Zydrunas Ilgauskas and Mo Williams. They have semi-regular meetings with the head coach in his office and cover everything from disciplinary matters to travel plans to key strategy decisions. It is a cog in Brown’s style of being a player-oriented coach. It’s not a democracy, but the group of leaders act as a buffer and a sounding board for issues, big and small. ‘That’s a recipe for a good team,’ said Williams, who was invited into the circle despite being in his first year with the team. ‘Players are players and coaches are coaches. Over the course of the year, things are going to happen and you need the players to keep the team together.’”
Ivan Carter of the Washington Post: “The Wizards are averaging only 94.6 points per game and giving up 103.5. That’s a differential ranked 28th in the league entering yesterday’s games. Washington also is shooting only 43.5 percent as a team and has the league’s worst three-point shooting percentage (28.2 percent). Defensively, the Wizards are giving up wide-open three-pointers in bunches (opponents are making 36.3 percent of them), and the Knicks have particularly benefited. In two wins over Washington, the Knicks connected on 29 three-pointers. Jordan has changed the starting lineup, utilizing Dixon, Antonio Daniels and Dee Brown at point guard on different nights, he’s started rookie JaVale McGee at center, he’s gone with big lineups and small and he even challenged a returning all-star in Caron Butler by sitting Butler for the second quarter Saturday night after being displeased with Butler’s defense. Nothing has worked well enough to produce more than one win.”
Dave Waldstein of The Star-Ledger: “A .500 record is the very essence of mediocrity, but at 6-6, the Nets can assume a real sense of accomplishment, even if only about 15 percent of the schedule has been played. The reason is that few people expected even this level of competence from a completely remade roster with eight new players, including two rookies in the regular rotation. Picked by many in the preseason to finish last in the Eastern Conference, the Nets have been a bit of a surprise with their recent results, including four victories in their last five games. Along the way they have beaten the Pistons, the Raptors in Toronto, and swept a home-and-home sequence over the Hawks.”
3 Shades of Blue: “Most coaches are either ‘turn around’ guys or ‘take them to the next level’ guys. Hubie Brown was a turn around guy. He was great at teaching how to win but lousy at taking teams to the next level. Which type is Marc? Iavaroni appears to be more of a ‘take them to the next level’ guy. This is just a perception however. He has been a teacher most of his coaching career. He coached big men at the late Pete Newell’s Big Man camp. He coached turnarounds in Cleveland and Miami as well. He coached Amare Stoudamire from being a raw rookie to one of the most dominant big men in the game. As a former player Iavaroni should know how to communicate with today’s NBA players. He doesn’t appear to be a Hubie type of coach who wants players to be in exact spots on the floor. He trusts his players and allows them to play through mistakes without humiliating them by yanking them out of the game or screaming at them off the bench. He encourages far more than disciplines his players. In that respect he is a very modern coach. The problem is that Memphis needs to capture the local fans imagination and right now that isn’t happening.”
Tom Moore of PhillyBurbs.com: “Sean May started the season opener for the Charlotte Bobcats this season, only to be deactivated for the next five games for being out of shape. He started three more games and is now coming off the bench. Hatboro-Horsham graduate Matt Carroll played in the opener, didn’t appear at all for two games and then started three times. He’s also a reserve these days. The Bobcats already had four different starting lineups involving nine players through 11 games. Gerald Wallace, Adam Morrison, Carroll and others could be available in a trade. All of this can only mean one thing — Larry Brown is coaching again. The mercurial Brown, who falls in and out of love with players the way Elizabeth Taylor went through husbands, is supposedly trying to deal for everybody from Chris Kaman to Sean Williams to Eddy Curry.”
Keith Langlois of Pistons.com: “In their first home game since scoring 58 points in the second half to beat one of the league’s most rugged defensive teams, Cleveland, the Pistons scored 34 points in the first half against one of the league’s flimsier defenses, Minnesota’s. The offense was bad Sunday and the defense might have been worse. And the tendency will be to blame a letdown, the bugaboo that marked the Flip Saunders era, the whole “flip the switch” conversation that drove him crazy. But you know what it really is? Disorientation. A team that could find its way around with the lights off before has suddenly been plunked down in a new house, blindfolded, and is groping to find its way from the bedroom to the kitchen for something as simple as pouring a glass of water.”
