2-0 vs. the Cavs, beating them at home w/o Andrew Bynum. 2-0 vs. the Celtics who are fighting injuries and seemingly dysfunctional without KG and the addition of Marbury and Mikki Moore. The Celtics will never admit that their penny pinching by not re-signing Posey is hurting their defense of their le.
All I want for the playoffs is health for every team. I know the Lakers can still turn it up a few notches. They still are not putting the kind of effort they were putting in at the beginning of the season when they were hustling and playing defense like never before. I believe they will turn that on as they have vs. the Celtics & Cavs, and even the Spurs when they had to. Give the Lakers health, and they will give you the championship.
On the other hand, did anyone catch the interview of Andrew Bynum? Sounds like he's getting ready to get back.
The Cavs don't matchup well with the Lakers at all. It might be a 'close' series if Cavs have homecourt but I'd expect a healthy Lakers team to win that series in 5 or 6 games.
Celtics, lol. They were lucky last year to have faced a Laker team that was missing their starting center and 2nd best perimeter defender in Ariza.
While I'll give you that Howard definately isn't as good, Terry is having probably the best year of his career. He's one of the league leaders in fourth quarter fg's, and scoring 20ppg off the bench. Dirk is still putting up the same numbers as always in another routine year for him. But you could also counter Howard's lack of production with the fact that Kidd > 2006 Devin, although not the 2007 and forward version. But we're talking about 2006, and our "big 4" is just as good as ever. The thing is, you're absolutely right in saying that our defense and rebounding suck worse than ever, but this isn't because of our 2 best players Dirk and JET. Dirk and JET were never the reason behind our rebounding and defense, at least not as much as the other guys. They were the scorers, while guys like Griffin, Diop at the time, Daniels, etc did alot of that dirty work, as well as Josh Howard. Let's not forget that Diop was very solid that year and started almost every game for us. If anything, I'd say that the sudden dropoff of Josh Howard combined with the loss of our role players is the reason we see this Mavs team how it is today. Quis and Stack left a 25ppg scoring gap on a team with only 2 real scorers, and our perimeter d has completely deteriorated.Times have changed. The West is much stronger and Dirk, Howard, and Terry aren't as good.
We'd have 4-5 more wins this year if we had a 90/50/40 Dirk or a JET shooting 42-43% from behind the arc, or Howard being healthy, drawing charges, playing D, grabbing rebounds, bringing energy instead of stagnation, and not settling for stepback jumpers. He also shot 40% from behind the arc in 2006 and 38% in 2007.
Ohhh it'd be nice if we didn't forget how to play defense and rebound as well. I don't see why if you still have 4 of your top 6 guys from 2 years ago you go from 5th in D to 15th.
And FYI, times can't really "change." For every declining player in the league, there is another rising star. For every Phoenix Sun and Dallas Maverick team, a Portland and New Orleans is born. If anything, what we're seeing is a shift of power back east to even things up a bit. It's all part of the natural cycle of professional sports, although the Gasol robbery created an unnatural gap between the 1 and 2 teams out west.
The key reason why the Mavs have declined so much is plain and simple os J-Ho...J-Ho has fallen off the face of the earth since 2007 playoffs. Say what you want about the bench play but when one of your top 3 players both offensively and defensively plays so poorly, you going to become a worse team
they need more than that. they need terry to make 10 3's every game to have a shot
As far as Howard, the moral lesson is... do not smoke crack!!!
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