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Nit picking, but THIRD.
Bill Ingram is a scrub who knows nothing about the NBA. Rocket fans don't even take him seriously.
Nit picking, but THIRD.
I agree that Oberto will improve- I just don't see him or any of the additions being able to address the shortcomings that needed to be addressed. The Spurs need rebounding and NONE of them are even good rebounders. None of those guys are going to be any more capable of guarding Dirk and preventing small ball. The Spurs needed to get younger and more athletic- but they swapped Rasho and Nazr for Oberto and Elson-- about the same average age. While Elson has speed for a big man- that is about it- he does not have the speed to cover a perimeter playing PF. Oberto has neither speed nor athleticism. And if your plans are for Bonner to handle Dirk, well then keep wishing.
I understand the decision to make a change, but I keep reading how people think these changes will help. I just dont. I see it more as change made for the sake of change but not going to produce improvement.
I see it as being possibly just as crappy a center rotation as before, but at half the price.
Butler and Oberto are both much better rebounders than Rasho. Elson is a bad rebounder for his size and he's even better at rebounding the ball than Rasho. If you are saying the Spurs will miss Nazr's rebounding, then you may have point.
The reason for the change was because Rasho and Nazr were both way overpaid. That's the number one reason. Rasho is going to make $7.3 million this year. That is outrageous. Basically the Spurs have Elson, Oberto and Butler for what Rasho would make this year.
I know you are a big Rasho fan but I don't think even you could justify Rasho on this team for over $7M.
^ Welp, that just about nets it out.
Let's stop right there. All but one of the Spurs played like in game 2 and the one guy who showed up got into foul trouble early. Pop decided that he was John Wooden and needed to try to beat an inferior team at their own game which put the Spurs in a position to try to win back a series on the road with a hand tied behind their back. To their credit, they almost pulled it off, but it was a stupid, stupid decision. Game 2 was an aberration and the Spurs turned their back on the success they'd had over the previous 90 games because of it?
If the Spurs are going to have their centers on the bench when the playoffs come around, I'd much rather have the less expensive Butler and Elson there so the Spurs can either pay the guys who will be logging the minutes or can decide to release certain useless players that have a guaranteed contract and no trade value or hope of backing up TP in meaningful games.
Amen.
At 30 years old, it's a long shot to think Elson will be able to raise his game. As far as Oberto is concerned, he's somewhat of a wild card. Since Butler will likely not play much this season, it is vital that the Spurs get steady production from Elson and Oberto. Nothing less than 8 pts and 7 rebs will be acceptable from whoever plays this position.
We'll never know how the series would have turned out if Pop has stayed with his traditional lineup. After all, Miami did and look how they fared against the Mavs. OF course, they had much better rebounding than the Spurs.
I think though that there is one aspect people have not considered--
the possible effects of a regular season in which I believe that Tim will be more worn down due to the players the Spurs have signed. Tim will be required- in my opinion- to take on more of the primary defensive assignments in the regular season in order for the Spurs to win. Also, Tim's best defense is his help defense and he gets alot of his blocks from the weak side- but what will happen when some big guy goes off on Oberto and Elson? Will Tim be forced to cover those players that he has never been called upon to cover? Pop has talked many times about the luxury of not having to use Tim in that way- for physical purposes and the avoidance of foul trouble- obviously first with David and then even with Rasho. And how does that impact his rebounding as well if he spends more time covering the shooting big man?
People keep acting as if Rasho and Nazr did nothing so getting rid of them somehow means nothing. But they did contribute to the winningest season in Spurs history. There are things they did during the regular season and even agianst Sacramento that contributed to the team's success. There are specific games in which they made important contributions and ways in which they set up the play-off run.
As for your points LJ, I said that I understand the Spurs choosing to make a change- but that does not mean that I have to think that the particular changes they made will make the team better. I simply do not. And I am not so sure that you do either.
Good points. No way Tim is going to guard traditional 5's like Yao, Dampier and Shaq. In fact, I don't know that the Spurs have anyone on their roster to guard guys these players on a consistent basis.
"but I think a bigger issue was that Rasho’s game is basically identical to Tim Duncan’s on the offensive end. He likes to operate in the same space, taking mid-range jumpers and playing the middle of the paint rather than the back-to-the-basket style of a traditional NBA center. We saw that he was quite effective when Duncan was out with injuries – less so when he was playing alongside Tim. Rasho was not asked to do very much in the Spurs’ offensive set, and he’s one of those players who needs a few touches to get himself involved in the game."
The logical implication of the above is that Tim makes the players around him at the center position worse--and that may be true.
there's no question that the team is built around Tim and his game. If another player has the same type of game, he has to defer to Tim and back off.
pop was smart enough to see that keeping rasho and nazr in there would get the spurs burned again and again, and made the necesssary moves to stay in the series. it would have been over in 5 or 6 forcing the issue and keeping them in there. i don't know why you can't understand that. as timvp said, evolve or die.
Evolve or die? I hate to inform you, but the Spurs died, and they died from getting burned again and again on the inside because there were no shot blockers. Pop wouldn't even put one of them in the game when Horry and Duncan were in foul trouble, which should tell you something. It would have been over in 4 if not for the heart of the players that were actually allowed to play. Smallball was stupid and it allowed an inferior team to squeak past the Spurs. I repeat: If the Mavericks were the better team, they would have been the higher seed, and benching the entire center rotation for the balance of the series made Dallas look like they could compete, which they barely did due to the Spurs' inability to stop layups and dunks.
If you are going to evolve, you are supposed to do it during the regular season so your team has a chance to get used to it. Making a fundamental change to a 63 win team just because you think you need to act like a coach is completely stupid. Besides, evolution implies small changes. What the Spurs did is closer to implosion.
Ploto, we most certainly havent improved, on paper, in the defense and rebounding department, and if we plan to stick to the same game plan it will put that load all on duncan. but we may have improved offensively. bonner may not be able to guard dirk, but he is able to shoot threes over josh howard. likewise, elson may not rotate as well as rasho, but he can beat the other team down for an easy two points. oberto is not going to rebound as much as nazr, but he will catch the ball on cuts to the basket, etc.
i think the spurs have realized that with the new rules the funnel to the baseline D is just going to send the other team to the line and that it will be more important to get offense from their frontcourt than defense. and personally, i would have rather the rules didnt change so we could stick to the roster and gameplan that worked so well for us. but it is obvious that the new rules undermine rasho's strengths the most (at least the ones highlighted in the spurs system), and in nazr's case it seems he just doesnt have the iq and coordination to contribute what pop wanted of him.
you can repeat it all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that rasho and nazr were not gonna produce and playing them gave the mavs more signifigant matchup advantages. the mavs were the better, more athletic team in that particular series and that is why they won. i do agree with your point in the second paragraph about getting used to that sort of change in the regular season but that simply did not happen. if rasho or nazr had shown anything production-wise in those first two games i'm sure pop wouldn't have gone small, but they stunk up the joint. nazr is not a shot blocker, and one of the big men would have had to been on the perimeter anyway, unless you want duncan fouling out in the first half trying to guard dirk or howard full time.
Now look at other teams : when they have a dominant big, it's almost always a PF and not a C. Rasho is a true C who is too slow to defend on PFs. I'm not sure that Elson will be a worse defender than Rasho against PFs.
Rasho did a much better than expected job on Bosh, Howard, and KG last season. I truly don't think Elson can guard them as well as Rasho did- nor can Oberto- so who?
In general I think there is a natural tendency to look at what a player is lacking and get all excited when a new player possesses that quality-- all the while forgetting the positives that the other player did have and admitting that the new one does not have them. When Nazr came people already hated that Rasho did not dunk. So, once Nazr threw down a couple of dunks, he was proclaimed as so much better than Rasho for this one aspect of his game. Nobody seemed to care that he could not understand the defense or learn the plays on offense- all they cared was that he dunk.
I see the same thing now. People got all excited because Elson actually got a ball under the basket- bobbled it- but did not turn it over. So he is proclaimed as so superior to Nazr because he has better hands than him. Well, even Malik had better hands than Nazr. People forget that Nazr's rebounding was good and that Elson's is not as good; they just focus on the one area of improvement.
Similarly, people get all excited because Elson is faster than Rasho. Well, if the criteria for excitement was finding someone faster than Rasho, then the Spurs chances of success this off-season were pretty much 100%- especially since the retirement of Greg Ostertag. But while Elson may be faster, he is not as good of a defender- or shot blocker- and from what I have seen his understanding of screen setting rivals that of Nazr.
My point- in the process of heralding all the improvements, don't forget what has been lost- and there are losses that go with changing players. It's not like the team found someone as smart and as good of a defender as Rasho AND fast.
Different does not necessarily equal better. Now you can debate that the differences will lead to more success in this system and this age of the NBA if that is your belief, and that argument has its merits, but it is not ridiculous for someone to believe that these changes could be simply different-- and not necessarily better.
Miami had personnel matchups who could defend Dallas, particularly Dirk, better. Haslem & Walker are physical, mobile bigs and Haslem, in particular, did a nice job in bodying-up on Dirk on the perimeter or wherever Dirk went.
The Spurs were a break, here or there, short of moving on in the playoffs, so I guess we will see how these new, "value" players mesh and match up.
I still think Oberto will have a more prominent role this year at the 4/5.
Using Miami as a basis to say that the Spurs should have stayed big is ridiculous.
The Spurs didn't have a center like Shaq or Alonzo Mourning last year. To the extent that they did, that guy was Tim Duncan. And when Duncan plays that role, the Spurs absolutely didn't have another big who could play the game as athletically as Udonis Haslem, which is why I believe Pop made the right decision to play the best group he could cobble together. Obstructed View and others can believe all they wish that Rasho and Nazr would have been shot-blocking forces for the Spurs at the rim and would have changed the game with rebounding. But the functional truth in the moment was that the only way those guys would have been playing at the rim like that was if they were assigned to defend Diop/Dampier with Timmy left to defend either Dirk or another Maverick wing. That would have been a horrendous state of affairs for the Spurs. It worked initially in Game 1, but only because AJ played Adrian Griffin -- a wing player that Tim could guard without risking foul trouble. Once AJ made the lineup change, Game 2 and the first half of Game 3 made it rather apparent that the Spurs had to rethink how they were going to matchup from a personnel standpoint. Pop did what he had to and it damned near worked. Maybe if he had done it earlier in Game 3, the Spurs would have survived.
I'm not going to say whether he knows basketball or not. He offered me the opportunity to write for a national site/magazine and I'm running with it.
Nobody really is an expert in this field. If that were the case, any one of us would be sitting in Bristol or in New Jersey on the NBA TV set.
Bill and I know the same people in Dallas and in other parts and those individuals I trust because they trust him.
Stay tuned for part two when it comes out.
gm
I used the fact that the Spurs lost as a basis to say that the Spurs should have stayed big. All I get in response is a prediction that Dirk would have scored fifty points a game on Timmy. Instead we had the guards scoring fifty points a game on Timmy, which he may have done once in his entire career. You don't have to be a dominant shot blocker to stop the layup line that the Mavericks enjoyed, you just have to be tall and in the middle. I'd have preferred Rasho and Nazr being put in there and told to use up all twelve of their fouls preventing three point opportunities. Fouling them out gives you plenty of time to play small ball, without having to spot the Mavericks a fifteen to twenty point lead because they can't miss a ing shot in the first half.
The only value the Miami series has is to show what happens when the Mavericks settle for jump shots instead of parading to the foul line for and-1 free throws.
As was stated earlier by someone, the Spurs were a horrendously bad rebounding team last year - even with the regular contributions of Duncan and occasional help from Rasho and Nazr.
The Spurs consistently were outrebounded by more physical teams during stretches. Anyone remember the 3 early season blowouts to Detroit (twice) and Dallas? Then there were last second regular season defeats to inferior teams like Phi and Mil. In addition to poor defense, the Spurs were absolutely killed in the rebounding department in each of those games.
Befiore the playoffs started, I warned everyone on this forum about the Spurs season-long rebounding deficiencies and how that should be of a primary concern. We saw it first against the Sac Kings (Bonzi Wells and Abdur-Rahim), then against a team like the Mavs (Dirk, Dampier, Diop) - who ranked in the top 3 or 4 teams in the league during the regular season.
It's tough to put a team away when you're constantly giving them second-chance basket opportunities. I worry that defense and rebounding will again be an "achilles heel" for this team during the season - especially being an older team and with Pop utilizing more of a smaller lineup. It's clear this team will go as far as Duncan can carry them, but I fear he will have little help in the rebounding and shot-blocking area.
I don't see how inserting either Oberto or Elson into the lineup changes that for this season. In short, the Spurs got cheaper, not necessarily better.
Last edited by SenorSpur; 10-11-2006 at 09:38 PM.
That's a load of crap, too. Dirk might have socred 50 in those games -- I doubt it -- but the bigger issue wasn't Dirk scoring points as much as it was Timmy getting rung up with fouls and: (1) ending up on the bench because of foul trouble; (2) ending up playing passively because of foul trouble; (3) ending up gassed from having to chase all over the floor; or (4) all of the above. Pop couldn't ask Tim to defend Dirk for 42-44 minutes every night --as great a defender as Timmy is, that's not his defensive game. Had Pop stayed big, it his choices were to run Timmy at Dirk, run one of Rasho/Nazr at Dirk, or put Bowen on Dirk and create a mismatch elsewhere on the floor. Given those options, how exactly was Pop supposed to keep Rasho or Nazr on the floor without seriously jeopardizing the Spurs' chances to win? Seriously.
If only it were that easy. If you put a tall guy in the rotation to just stnad there and be tall, again, you're sending your best rebounder out on the floor and asking him to take on a defensive mismatch while working him down to the point that he likely wouldn't have been as effective offensively. Do you really think that would have been a good idea?
Great. And where are you going to get offense when they're in foul trouble along with Tim Duncan?
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