Weeeee’re back! With another podcast for your listening pleasure. John, Kevin, Colin, and I give our opinions on Kyrie’s ROY win, the playoffs, and some of your questions. I’ve pretty much given up on all other sites for now, so you can find us at:
http://soundcloud.com/cavstheblog/0006-playoffs-dont-talk-about
http://www.mediafire.com/?f1l3qr29u0ajduy
We ARE on iTunes, but apparently there’s an issue so I’m resubmitting the link to Apple. I’ll update you guys with the details once it’s finalized. Thanks to Ryan for the great podcast logo, too!!!!
Enjoy!
And it’s tied in OKC with under 9 minutes left. Things change really fast in this league.
Slight correction: we drafted Hickson two spots after Hibbert. My heart briefly stopped when I thought I heard you guys implied that we took Hickson first and was relieved to find out we hadn’t.
However, we still left Omer Asik, Nicolas Batum, DeAndre Jordan, Ryan Anderson, Courtney Lee, George Hill, and Serge Ibaka on the board. Who else misses Danny Ferry?
Hey! I sent Ryan a picture! I kind of enjoy being the man of mystery though.
A few thoughts that I didn’t express during the podcast:
Regarding the Spurs a favorites; a recent trend seems to be veteran teams winning it all: the Mavericks, Lakers, Celtics. Teams that have been their before and know all the tricks have been knocking off their younger counterparts. While I don’t think that will be enough for the Lakers against OKC, it will be enough for a very good Spurs team. OKC will give one home game away with turnovers (like they almost did last night), and San Antonio will pull out a win in a great series.
Ramon Sessions’ post-season PER is in the single digits. Last night, he was pretty much benched for Steve Blake, finishing with 2 points and 0 assists in 24 minutes. When the Cavs traded Sessions, many thought the Lakers had ripped the Cavs off. Are any of those people re-thinking that?
Regarding Irving’s ceiling compared to other ROY’s; I’d put him below Durant, mostly below pre-injury Rose, but I like Irving’s abilities better than Blake Griffin’s.
Last off-season, I was nervous the Pacers would sign David West for like 4 years, $35 million. The 2 year, $20 million deal was amazing though. West has really added another layer of toughness and playoff experience that has improved a relatively young team. This off-season, I hope the Cavs sign someone to a high-annual, short term contract, as opposed to signing 4 year contracts (or 5 in a sign and trade).
@Kevin
Completely agree with your thoughts about Vet teams. It’s about execution down the stretch. My love for basketball was almost sapped by watching the Heat and Pacers completely flounder in the half court at the end of that game. Meanwhile, teams like San Antonio conduct an orchestra out there in crunch time. (Can we talk about how 90% of NBA teams can’t figure out how to feed the post?!?!? Look how easily SA gets Timmy the ball in his spot compared to Indiana trying to get it to West and Hibbert).
When it comes down to SA vs OKC in the west: OKC is going to close the game out with pull up jump shots and 1×1 drives by 3 magnificent players, SA is going to continue to get the ball to their players in their efficient spots, feed Timmy and find wide open 3 point specialists. I think SA wins that series.
GoCAVS,
I was glad to see the Pacers win, but it was ugly.
Indiana is a horrible ball movement team. In both the regular season and playoffs, Darren Collison is leading the team while assisting on less than 5 shots per game. And he is the only player that averaged more than 3 assists a night. According to hoopdata.com, the Pacers were third to last in percentage of field goals that were assisted on.
Interestingly, Oklahoma City was last. Obviously that’s not a statistic that is highly indicative of team success, and probably just means they have players that can create their own shot. But it’s interesting. The Spurs were 13th. Boston was 1st.
GoCAVS, I higly recommend Kevin Arnovitz’s recent artcle on the Spurs’ offense on TrueHoop. Can’t provide link since I’m on my phone.
Thanks John.
The link to the Arnovitz article is:
http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/42873/the-san-antonio-spurs-arent-boring
An interesting aspect of the article that somewhat relates to our podcast and the discussion of Kyrie’s room to grow / reach his ceiling is the last two paragraphs:
“Parker recorded a career-high 28.4 assist rate this season, far and away the best mark of his career. How did he do that at age 29? By becoming fluent in situations like these. It takes years to master an intricate offense, even for the most instinctive players. There’s a reason we see veteran teams executing best in the playoffs. It’s because this stuff is tricky! Running a sophisticated offense requires tens of thousands of possessions in repetition over several seasons with the same guys.
There was a time when Parker couldn’t see or wouldn’t respond to all the options in the Spurs’ offense. He didn’t arrive in the league with the vision of Chris Paul or Steve Nash. It took several seasons and some tough love from Popovich, but Parker has arrived in full.”
Thanks John and Kevin, that just blew my mind. I think even your average “casual” basketball fan can will spout off that Pop is a coaching genius, but it is really, really cool to see it drawn out. Apparently the conducting an orchestra allusion was closer than I thought.
Back to the iso vs motion offense thing. I agree that it’s not indicative of team success in the regular season. Cavs fans know as well as anyone that great players in ISO situations can win you an awful lot of basketball games. I think the big question is: Can it win you a championship? I can’t help but remember watching Dirk, Kidd and Terry get efficient touch after efficient touch last year while Wade and Bron were taking tough shots. Or even closer to home yelling at my TV every time some bum named Big Baby Davis was dunking on our defense or KG was hitting wide open jumpers while Bron was trying the shoot over half Boston’s defense. I don’t know if perimeter based ISO offenses can win championships (even with great players)