Overview: Brandon Jennings and Earl Boykins combined for 36 points in a 110-90 rout of the Cleveland Cavaliers. Samardo Samuels led the Cavs with 15 points on 11 shots.
This was horrible, let’s move on bullets:
Wow. Setback game. Ramon and Hickson combined to go 7-22. They are both in a tailspin. And they didn’t make up for it on defense, to say the least. I don’t miss Jamison. He was the player most responsible for the 26-game streak. Watching the Cavs play defense was genuinely painful. But he had skills that Samardo Samuels does not have. This is not surprising, as Jamison is a former All-Star and Samuels is an undrafted rookie. Still, the Cavs could really use a forward who could knock down an open jumper and pretend to care about defense. They’re not impossible to find, but the Cavs don’t have one.
Boobie’s back! Some threes, some nice playmaking. It would be great if he could return to his pre-injury form.
Honestly, I don’t want to spend much more time on this game. The team needs Baron offensively at this point, and there was no backcourt defense either. My apologies for the recap — think of this as an open thread. Onward and upward, hopefully.
Krolik, my friend, I know you don’t want to admit it, but this team’s defense has not improved AT ALL since Jamison went down. 4 out of 5 games they’ve given up 52% or better from the field. They just gave up 110 points to the BUCKS.
I watch this team play defense w/o Jamison and I say to myself “wow, this looks just like the defense with Jamison in the line-up. Still terrible.”
I have read this blog for quite some time and it is time to stop the Jamison bashing. He’s not even playing and you are writing about how horrible he is. I have lost some respect for your work over the past few weeks, simply due to the fact that every post you put up while he played pointed out how horrible he was on defense. I am not defending him, he’s not a great defender at all and got lit by KG last year, but seriously, put it to rest. There are so many other horrible things players are actually doing right now. And, Jamison did not account for the 26 game streak himself.
On 82games.com, guess which player is the one of two who has a + “simple rating +/-” who has played in more than 1% of our total minutes and who is not named Varajeo. We have an older guy playing 64% of our minutes, where the next closest are youngens Hickson and Sessions, who both look slightly apathetic at times when they get tired. It is ridiculous that the Cavs have had to rely on him so heavily for minutes. We can only hope that some of our new bigs and the return of Varajeo will minimize some of that next year.
Give the guy a break.
Jamison is in pretty good shape for his age, though he does substantially lack quickness. I’d like to see him on a better team with a chance to win.
That game was embarrassing. I’ve sat through a lot of bad losses this year, as we all have, but this one ranks up there with the Lakers loss, and might even be worse; it was just sickening how little the entire team cared.
At least Samardo Samuels can draw charges, right?
This was a painful game to watch. Sessions went back to his old ways of attacking the basket, with no idea of what to do once in the paint. Hickson was completely lost and nobody had a clue on how to stop the pick and roll.
On top you had multiple turnovers by the whole team, stupid fouls and 3second violations. Wow, it was horrendous.
I’m probably one of the few people whoe DOES miss Jamison. Yes he is a horrible defensive player, but imho it looked like he tried. He seems generally to slow to close out on his man for a 3/jumper and doesn’t have the quickness or hops to really defend well in the post area either. However even if late or unable to do anything about it, he would put a hand up and actually be ‘on his way’ to the right spot on the floor. Plus he was the only realy offensive weapon we had – took some bad shots, but was willing to shoot when nobody else was.
Now the team without Jamison has no offensive weapon (except Baron). The way he spaced the floor really helped JJ and Ramon. and it seems odd to say, but I believe he really made the other guys better on the court. I know he isn’t part of the teams future and like many others I was looking forward to trading him away. Honestly I don’t want him back because I know it’s good for the team in the longrun for Samardo, Gee and hopefully Manny to get some more burn time.
To a degree I agree with Dan that we need to stop bashing him, but at the same time I totally understand why he’s such an easy target to bash. It is time to move on from Jamison and maybe even ‘credit’ him for not really being THE defensive liability and just say he was one of many – because NOBODY is defending on a regular basis. Boobie has his moment and Samardo even shows up for charges and Eyenga will try to block just about everything, but none of them are playing great or even good defense.
****Idea: maybe we should have a one-month rule. Where after a player goes down with injury, leaves as an FA or get’s traded that he’s not mentioned anymore unless it’s directly impacting the news of the day on the team. Like with LeBron, when he plays the Cavs it’s o.k. to talk about him or his tweets/comments on the team. But outside of that he doesn’t really need to be brought up on a Cavs blog. However it seemed like he was a constant topic of conversation for no reason even months after he left. Just a thougth, that way we can agree to not talk about Jamison or Andy unless were talking about next years team and draft picks etc. But they don’t need to be a topic of debate/discussion when talking about last nights game.
Why is Anthony Parker playing? He’s not going to be on the team next year. They should just buy him out and move on.
I like the Nupe’s rule. Jamison could hit 30+ points and still get flamed for missing a few defensive assignments when our entire team couldn’t defend an NCAA All Star team. Players will miss some assignments, but Hickson is a liability under the basket and if Varajeo was there to help Jamison when he got beat, it wouldn’t look as bad as it has.
lol maybe if we still had MO WILLIAMS we’d still win
well only against the bucks of course