Preface:
I spent an hour trying to figure out how to get this game in Ohio. Watched the Pistons play the Raptors on NBA Network while I was searching, and checked out a bevy of would be Cavs draft picks. Impressions: Valanciunas is is a foul machine, but he is agressive, and has broad shoulders, a nice upper body and is aggressive on both ends of the floor. Brandon Knight is much more comfortable at the point than he was last year. Greg Monroe is going to be a star. I want Tristan to develop into this type of player. Andre Drummond is incredibly nimble for a 270 pound man.
Eventually, I pay $7 to upgrade my cable package to get NBC Comcast. While waiting for my cable package to upgrade I start browsing box scores. Harrison Barnes’ 20 point 8-11 outing the night leaves me with a knot in my stomach. Festus Ezili all over the highlights for Golden State. Dion Waiters scares the crap out of me.
and… the game is blacked out in by “viewing area.” Grrr… Scramble mode.
1st Half Notes:
I’m watching the Chicago feed on a questionable website off of a stream from Al Jazeera. The world is an amazing place.
Champagna? Oh sorry, that’s Champaign, IL. We’re in the home of the fighting Illini.
Weird dichotomy here: Boozer much thinner, Tristan much thicker.
Starting out, some nice defense by Kyrie: active hands, playing out to half court.
Miles: two nice possessions in a row showing off a decent slashing game and a nice pullup
Tristan! Running right hand hook with the clock going down, and then a stepback J plus a freethrow (hit the J, missed the freethrow), from opposite blocks no less.
Kirk Heinrich looks like he never left the Bulls: completely comfortable running the point and his jumper is sharp.
Waiters in at 5:00 left in the 1st. Looks like he’s the backup point guard.
Zeller with no hesitation draining a faceup 18 footer from the left wing. Splash.
A couple of very nice pick and rolls initiated by Waiters… to Andy… to Zeller cutting… soft slam.
Cavs running lots of dribble handoffs and downscreens on the wings. Much more active and disciplined tonight running the offense.
Harangody in… Matched up with Taj Gibson. This can’t end well.
- Taj Jumps foot higher than Harangody to grab a board. ‘Gody flails hoping for a bailout call – no go.
- Taj outworks Zeller and ‘Gody for an o-board and putback — the third o-board of the possession.
- Taj forces a jumpball agaisnt Luke with some relentless dive on the floor defense. We know what happens next.
- ‘Gody! No hesitation 3 from the left wing. This is what he has to do to stay in the league.
- Another Jumper! Luke ends up with a +14 on a 9 point first half with 3-3 shooting 2-2 from the line with no boards. We’ll call this a draw. I owe Hentrick $5.
Casspi sighting. I forgot we had a small forward on this team. He comes in agressive, cutting, looking for his shot: hits a nice three.
Taj with a wicked baseline spin on Lil’ Z (we’re taking nicknames for a test drive tonight). “He just left him standing alone in a world so cold,” Stacey King of Bulls lore with the call for NBC Comcast Sports Chicago.
5 Minutes left in the half. Starters back in. TT makes a nice play to get a jump ball on an O-Board, but is bent over so far that he doesn’t even get off the ground. Someone needs to do some calf work.
21 point lead going into the half. The Cavs played great, and the Bulls could not have played worse.
2nd Half Notes:
Gee cannot pass the ball fast enough.
14-0 run to start the half for the bad guys. Scott content to let the Cavs work through this. Kyrie finally makes a layup at 6:50 left in the quarter. Cavs came out so flat that paper is jealous (groan).
Gee with an horrific foray into the lane leading to a turnover. The Bulls are playing five feet off him and he won’t shoot. Stacey King notes that Chicago’s run is due to the fact that TT and Gee don’t have to be “accounted for on offense,” and that the Bulls are playing “5 on 3″ on defense. He’s not wrong.
C.J. Miles with 5 straight points on a nice bank layup and then 3 pointer from the right wing.
Kyrie misses a 25 footer leading to this exchange between King and Funk: “Can Kyrie shoot a perimeter shot?” “That’s definitely a part of his game that he needs to work on.” They’re either ignorant or prescient. For this game it’s the latter.
Late in the third Kyrie and Waiters are on the floor together, and it’s ugly. Neither seems to know what to do off the ball. But having two guys who can push seems deadly until they screw it up. Let’s hope the figure it out.
Kirk Heinrich scores 5 points in 13 seconds with a Jimmy Butler steal in the interim. Is Kyrie guarding him? I read a link today that said that KI was the worst defender in the league last year. Well, there’s no where to go but up.
Zeller looks like a rookie and is consistently getting out muscled on the boards. A senior should not be this thin. Someone get this kid some Mass Gainer. Mercifully, this quarter is over.
4th Quarter:
Play is ragged on both sides. The bulls just tied the game. I’m officially sick of preseason.
Bulls are a mess when Heinrich is not on the floor. And winning the battle for backup is Nate Robinson. Whoa.
Fast forward to 3 minutes left. Waiters has scored or assisted on 5 out of 6 field goals in the 4th, showing a nice array of step back one legged jumpers, corner threes, and pick and roll kick outs to the perimeter. Even though he’s had some sloppy passes, I’m breathing a sigh of relief. The kid seems fearless.
Casspi has also hit 2 straight 3s. Gee is officially on notice. The starting gig is up for grabs.
Smardo! Bailout jumper from the left elbow with the shot clock running down. Boobie! From the left corner. He was due.
Cavs up 10 with 1:30 left.
Ugh. The Cavs cannot get the ball over half court. And this is the most visibly pissed I’ve seen B. Scott. We’ll call this a learning experience for Waiters.
Marco Belinelli gets the Bulls 6 points in less than 30 seconds. The lead is 2 with 21 seconds left
Four turnovers in the last 45 seconds, 2 of them by Boobie. This is a teaching moment.
Zeller with an O-Board! Goes to the line and hits 1 of 2 with very nice form.
Jimmy Butler misses a 27 footer that he may or may not have been fouled on. It’s official: Rodney Mott and Gary Zielinski do not want to spend any more time in Champaign. Cavs Win!
Conclusions:
Not worried about Kyrie at all. It was just an ugly game, but he was trying to play off the ball more. Not worried about Andy either. Gee has regressed. I’m wondering if he worked at all this summer. There needs to be a concerted effort to get him some easy buckets at the beginning of Saturday’s game, or this thing could snowball. Casspi should be starting and Azibuike should be backing him up at this point.
Oh, and CJ miles was a steal. Pencil him in for 35 minutes a night easy.
For all the talk of Smardo’s offseason, he’s still a player with limited upside. I’d rather take my lumps with Zeller.
The Bulls are going to be a mess some nights this year, but their defense will always keep them in games. If Heinrich goes down though, they’re screwed.
Saint Weirdo is a rookie with a lot of upside.
Preseason sucks.
I always find it odd how people at this blog are so optimistic abput other team’s prospects and so critical of our own. Greg Monroe is a beast. Everyone else you mention is no different than TT – scouts drool over the potential of some aspect of their game, but as of now none of them have produced meaningful results. Why do you worry about these players so much? Drummond, JV, Barnes? Who cares? Call me when the actually do something,
Meanwhile, for the CAVS, Waiters plays the most impressive game of any rookie so far, and you write like 3 sentences about him. Dude, I watched the game. The offense was running through Waiters and we won the game because of it. That was a great and promising thing to see. Yes, he has a long way to go. But he has a unique ability to facilitate and score. Much more than anyone else in the draft taken behind him.
Felt the same way. A game write-up that barely mentions a guy who scores 18 points on 10 shots along with 8 assists?? WTF??
And by the way, Jonas looked awful in that game. What the hell was Nate Smith watching? A scout told Amico that Jonas looked “scared and soft.” I couldn’t agree more…
I actually watched the game too. God bless international league pass.
A couple notes on the broadcast.
I realize many broadcasting teams aren’t complete basketball junkies and cannot be expected to know as much about players on our team as some of us do(note: I don’t really believe that caveat. it is their damn job). But for the love of god, Kyrie was the frickin ROY and they should have the obligation of knowing a singular thing about his game. They should be immediately fired for comparing his jumper to Rose’s and saying that Dion is a better shooter. There were many times that their ignorance was beyond comical. And for the record, they said the Bulls were playing off Andy and Gee, not TT and Gee.
About us.
Kyrie looked horrifically bad. His handle was loose, his balance was off and he gave little effort on multiple defensive sets. Minus a few good defensive stretches in the first half which Nate mentioned, he got torched by Heinrich. Lit up. Destroyed. To be fair, he played like garbage last preseason too, but I was surprised by just how off he was in this game. If he were any other player on the team, he would be worried about getting benched after that performance. That all said, yeah, I’m not really worried either. He was trying some new positions on the floor, postups, predominantly. He will likely be fine.
TT was destroyed by Boozer as well. He routinely gave up early low position that led to easy buckets. All that extra weight certainly didn’t go to his brain. And sorry Nate, if you think that TT will EVER play anything like Greg Monroe, you need to prepare yourself for the hangover you will have after you come down from your high. They are nothing alike. Monroe can’t jump, but really understands how to use his body for positioning and has an incredibly soft touch. Ya know, like the total opposite of Tristan. I have said it before, but I think what we should hope to get out of TT at this point is a Taj Gibson type player. And in reality, that isn’t so bad. (sidenote: so far Jonas has looked pretty weak in Toronto as well. regardless, considering he said he wouldn’t play in Cleveland, perhaps we should give Grant a break.)
Dion showed exactly the kind of game that people who are high on him would like to see on a regular basis. Great pace in the pick and roll, solid 3 point stroke off the catch, and a deadly stepback from around 20. He will have games like this, and games when his step back and 3ball don’t drop, but as I wrote in a previous thread, he has been expected to be our secondary ball handler and basically backup point since we drafted him. He did that very well last night, and his defense was generally quite strong.
Casspi!!!!! He was very confident with his shot. No hesitation and the ball had great arch. Each time it left his hand, I felt good about it. It was new experience for all of us, I’m sure. He does look much quicker than last year, so maybe there is something to his “playing through injury” talk.
Gee was atrocious yet again. To be honest, I think I was one of the few who didn’t really want to bring Gee back unless it was for bargain basement price. At least he didn’t take more than 2 dribbles most of the night on any given possession.
Miles is doing what I figured he would. He will have streaky moments when he is great, and will look exactly the same only his shots won’t go in at other times. Sometimes this is a game by game phenomenon, sometimes it is quarter by quarter. Either way, he is a huge upgrade over AP and can play the 2 or 3 which is very helpful.
Zeller was strong in the beginning but let himself get pushed around a bit. But actually, many of the offensive rebounds it looked like he gave up were really just fortuitous bounces for the Bulls. He didn’t totally pansy out or anything.
Samardo did though. He could be on the verge of getting cut. Scary bad performance for a guy trying to make a squad. If the entire game wasn’t bad enough, he was huge culprit in the complete meltdown of stupidity in the last minute of the game.
Luke did Luke things. When he hits his shots, the Luke things are bearable. When he doesn’t, his undersized, slow footed game is hard to watch. Yesterday, he hit shots.
In general, I was very pleased by our offensive sets. We were actually running a system, people were moving to the proper places and it was giving us some great looks at the rim. Andy made some fantastic passes from big to big and there seemed to be a crispness that we have lacked. The two negatives to the system we were running are that Kryie doesn’t handle in his comfort spots as frequently, and the wide open J that every defense will give Andy at the top of the circle could hurt our overall productivity. Clearly we were practicing that offensive set in this game, so I have no problem with our occasional sacrifice of efficiency as it is a preseason game after all.
Defensively, our second unit had the good fortune of going against Nate Robinson at the point. Not a huge task.(pun semi-intended) Our first unit did a pretty good job of contesting and clogging the lane. There wasn’t so much dribble penetration against us, but we got beat by good passes to low positioned men on far too many occasions. (yep, still looking at you, Tristan)
The Bulls will be in the playoffs without much problem. That defense which has been among the best in the NBA will feature a starting lineup that will be far superior defensively than any featuring Rose. Kirk is a top flight defensive point and though their second unit may struggle at times, I don’t see them dropping any lower than the 5 spot in the East. I don’t think they will do much in the playoffs, but defenses like that dominate the regular season.
I only saw the first half, but Dion looked good running the p-n-r. I thought Zeller looked good in that half, rolling to the basket, hitting jumpers, etc, but he does need to play stronger. The Zeller – Gody – Casspi front court got man-handled for a while.
Other comments are that it is great to see Andy back…him and Joakim should play against each other 40 times a season. Also, obviously I am glad that Sloan and Pargo did not play and that indeed, Waiters handled back-up PG duties. I was a little nervous about that on THursday.
Finally, I agree with Nate. I am ready for pre-season to be over, and ready for Leuer to re-take his rightful place as 4th big man tonight (over Gody and Samuels)
Can we please run an all white line-up in tonight’s game against the wizards
PG – Harangody
SG – Walton
SF – Casspi
PF – Leuer
C – Zeller
Gotta ride gody’s hot streak
cavs need more rebounds more assist more steals less turnovers and lots of blocks
lets go cavs cleveland rocks