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Mills' offense is as bad, but he does bring energy to the court, both on defense and intangibles. We fans, and I believe teammates as well, will be affected by his never-give up playing. While Marco's body language is just baaaaddd.
You bailed on our team after 3 games in a first round series. You're a fan and you know nothing about the game of basketball. No one who knows a ing thing about this sport would declare a 2-1 series over unless there were a couple of severe blowouts or a serious injury.
You. Don't. Know. . About. This. Game. There isn't a way to be MORE WRONG about basketball than to make such a ty call like that, and then come back and try to talk like you can analyse individual players and make better personnel decisions than the best front office in this league.
"I've been right more." Says the fairweather fan who bails when his team has an off game. Your fandom isn't worth the words to type this discussion.
Mills' offense is as bad, but he does bring energy to the court, both on defense and intangibles. We fans, and I believe teammates as well, will be affected by his never-give up playing. While Marco's body language is just baaaaddd.
Cry Havoc is the winner of this thread, so far. If you want to jump off a cliff after the Spurs just won a crucial game 5 in a playoff series, go have fun being a fan of another NBA team. In general, you'll find it doesn't end well.
After Marco Belinelli killed it most of the regular season, you'd think he would have earned at least a little bit of a leash from fans. Admittedly, he hasn't been very good this series, but assuming the Spurs can finish off the Mavs, I'll be looking for all the Beli haters when he's raining threes later in the playoffs.
Lol
He had some today and he missed them, wide open... I watched the same game you did...
That said, your point is well taken, and that's why I said I hope we move on and his game can come back to him against a different defense.
I'm rooting for him to do well, because he's important to this team success, but we're 5 games into this, and so far he's been extremely underwhelming. He posted the best scoring number of his career in the RS, and right now he's posting the very worst playoffs numbers of his career. Hopefully he can turn things around.
And I'll be looking for Beli to expose his balls in the playoffs for all to see again.
I guarantee the majority of Beli's shots have been open looks. I'm fine if he's not knocking them down at a crazy clip but not when he's getting abused by whoever he's guarding and getting Danny's minutes tbh.
He is not the only guard that left.
Do you not recall the 5-10 games he led us in scoring and basically won the game for us? Most notably against Golden State when we weren't running our starters.
As a side note, I'd much rather be playing Memphis right now tbh.Yeah. Clearly you know a lot about basketball.If we didn't have Marco, we'd be playing Memphis right now. Would you enjoy that prospect given how they've been with OKC? No? Ok then. We have had the best bench in the NBA to this point, but nevermind that. That's why you're making all that dough recruiting for NBA teams, right chief?
Eh, Neal had those type of games too. Mason as well. Doesn't make either of them good players though. Not to mention, Marco cost us a few games with his horrible defense. IIRC, Shumpert had a season high against Marco during that stint when Danny was injured.
I don't have a problem with Belinelli's offense, tonight was the first game in the series where he got multiple open looks IIRC..
My problem is that Danny Green went from playing 32 MPG in last year's playoffs to 18 this year..
The Spurs of the past 2 years are a defensive-oriented team, Green is a huge part of the defensive greatness..Belinelli's defensive on/off is by far the worst of any Spurs player in this series, yet he continues to split minutes with Green in a series where opposing wings have killed the Spurs..
Marco is one of the most useless players in the league when he isn't scoring..he doesn't rebound at a high rate, he doesn't create pressure on defense, he constantly loses his man and he doesn't have the athleticism to contest shots..
Marco can hit threes, so did Neal. Gloating when he does exactly what the guy he replaced did who could have been kept misses the point.
Everything from my post from after the loss remains. The spurs losing a series doesn't make me leave the forum after posting about how much things hurt. And I don't want to see Ayres (had pop kept playing him, this series would be over in a bad way).
If anyone wants to ignore me because of that, good for you. Better than pretending I was mad that the spurs didn't sign lebron
I don't have a problem with this view. I think Pop for some reason thinks he needs more offense instead of defense in this series due to the Mavs switching everything and so playing Beli (based on what he did in the RS) doesn't look like the wrong choice.
But it isn't working, and we're far too deep in this series right now to attribute it to just a bad game or two. That's why I wouldn't mind Danny getting his minutes in the 2nd half if Marco still can figure things out.
There's plenty of room to question the decisions the FO made last off-season. The team had more flexibility to add new players than it had in a long time, and instead of using it on one or two firm rotation players, they signed replacements for Neal and Blair. Those replacements didn't even turn out to be markedly better. Beli was arguably a negative signing, as his presence seems to constantly erode Pop's trust in Green. We saw it this season in that interlude in which Beli started and the defense collapsed. We're seeing it now that Pop keeps splitting the minutes that should go to Green. Neal may have sucked as a backup PG, but at least him getting minutes there would have allowed for Green and Leonard to play as much as they need to. I don't actually think Ayres was all that bad of a signing. The team had no other options after they wasted the majority of the MLE on Beli. I think Jeff has a chance to be a good rotation player next year.
Where the team really messed up is in mismanaging their other assets. They let Neal and Blair walk for nothing when they probably could have gotten something for them (or just kept Neal and preserved the MLE). They failed to trade Bonner last off-season and Jack the season before. They used their pick on a draft-and-stash who won't come over until Duncan retires. I got the impression that the FO was caught between two conflicting strategies for the off-season: using cap space or using exceptions. They either should have gone for cap space and brought in an impact player (not my first choice, but it was a lot of people's preference) or traded Bonner and maybe their first for a rotation big and used the MLE to bring over a wing while keeping Neal and Mills to put next to Ginobili. They ended up doing neither, which led to them botching the AK pursuit and only bringing over fringe playoff players.
That's not to say the FO is not a good one. It's a great one. But they did little to make the roster better this year. When you look at what they could have done, that's a damned shame.
just like your basketball takes
I have no idea why Pop underestimates Green. It's almost disturbing to see the gap between what the stats say about Danny's impact and how Pop seems to view his impact. I thought Pop understood that Green needed to play more when he decided to bring Green back instead of inserting Beli in the third. But then he ran with Mills as the two down the stretch, which made little sense even if it worked out. It was one thing to bench Green in previous games, but he played way too well tonight for Pop to only play him half of what the other starters played.
Seriously? We haven't won . go ahead and post this thread if we win the le in June.
Only Pop knows what goes through his mind.
What I did notice and pointed out after the 1st game, is that it's obvious Rick selected Danny to be the guy they use to hide a bad defensive player on (mostly Calderon when it's starters vs starters). Danny generally won't cut or drive, he's basically spacing the floor on offense, so he doesn't really enter the switching defense they play and they can comfortably put a guy there. It's speculation from my part, but if you're looking for a reason specifically in this series, that might be one.
In my opinion, Pop should be fine with letting Green draw his man and the rest of the players to play 4-on-4. If he wants Green to score more, he needs to call plays for him like he did in last year's WCSF when the Warriors were hiding Curry on him. I know Beli is supposed to be a more dynamic offensive player, and thusly a harder guard than Green is, but Danny can put a ton of pressure on a defense when the team needs him to. Pop just has to decide that he wants to make Green an explicit part of the offense. If Pop wants him to be a mere spot-up shooter, he's not going to do much in this series offensively. But , it's not like Beli's expanded offensive repertoire has manifested itself much this whole season.
tbh, tbh.
I'd still prefer Dallas. Memphis is running a train on OKC right now... their offense is really streaky, but they have some clutch defense, beating OKC in 3 overtime games. The OT wins will help Memphis in the second round against the Clippers as well.
I can certainly sympathize with the argument that Belinelli taking too many minutes away from Green is a bad thing. When both players are on, Green is superior because of his defensive presence. However, neither of them has been particularly good against the Mavs in this series, which I think is why Pop has been trying to push any and every button he can find to try and get the offense back on track. It's kind of what you have to do when the Mavs of all teams are taking you out of your rhythm on that end of the court.
Green was clearly the superior player tonight, and I think that will push Pop to give him twice the minutes of Beli in game 6, and let Marco try to work back into a better role in (fingers crossed) a potential second round series.
Errors was a terrible signing tbh, still have hope for Beli tho. IMO, the FO did go after a back-up 3/another impact player but struck out on all their targets. Having to play Manu as the 3 off the bench actually isn't terrible either; at his age it's the position he's best built to defend.
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