June 15, 2024 • 52 mins
Jason Timpf gives his overall thoughts on a blowout win for Luka Doncic, Kyrie Irving and the Dallas Mavericks in a must-win game 4 in Dallas. He provides his assessment of Luka’s huge game, what the path to victory looks like for Dallas, and what Boston needs to change going forward.
3:00 - Game 4 assessment
7:45 - Luka’s performance in game 4
16:15 - Derrick Lively was clutch for Dallas
18:15 - What Boston needs to change going forward
MAILBAG
25:00 - Is Derrick White the best role player in the league?
28:00 - Should Porzingis play in game 5?
31:00 - How do the Warriors become contenders next year?
40:00 - Who would you favor in a hypothetical game 6 in Dallas?
46:00 - Is Luka a younger James Harden?
48:00 - Thoughts on Luka/Carmelo comp made by Colin Cowherd?
52:00 - 2020 Lakers or 2024 Celtics?
55:00 - Did Joe Mazulla crack the code for stopping Luka?
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
The volume. All right, welcome to Hoops Tonight. You're at
the volume. Happy Friday, everybody. This NBA Finals Game four
Instant Reaction is brought to you by Chase Freedom Unlimited.
(00:21):
How do you cash back? Well, you can't fake desperation.
The Boston Celtics run into an absolute buzz saw in
Game four against the Dallas Mavericks. Here's the plan for tonight.
I got about ten to fifteen minutes off the top,
not too much to get into into a game like
this that goes off the rails so quickly. So what
we're gonna do at the tail end is just do
a mailbag. So drop questions in the chat. Paul, our producer,
(00:46):
is going to text them to me so we can
hit them at the tail end of the show. Drop
questions in the chat. We'll go for about ten minutes
on the game, and then we'll get into the mailbag.
You guys are the drop before we get started. Subscribed
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Hoops tonight and then keep dropping mail back questions in
(01:08):
those YouTube comments so that can keep hitting them over
the course of the rest of the summer. All right,
let's talk some basketball, so storry. This game was obviously
Dallas's improved defensive effort. Now, Dallas is defended pretty well
in this series, not as well as they're capable of,
not as well as the numbers would show. Either. There's
(01:28):
a couple of pretty bad, like specifically inept Boston stretches,
particularly spamming the second and third quarters of Game one,
and then obviously that bad run in the middle of
the fourth quarter in Game three, and then there's also
some shooting variants there. But Dallas has done a decent job.
But we all can agree that they are capable of
doing a much much better job. And there's been a
(01:51):
lot of focus on the dribble penetration element in containing
the basketball, a lot of that on this show as well,
and I want to make sure we call attention to that.
But I thought that Dallas did an amazing job in
all four phases of half court defense in this game.
I would kind of delineate the roles of a defense
or the four parts of the defensive job down to
(02:13):
these things. First, containing the ball. Second, what you do
in rotation, meaning like when you suffer some sort of
defensive breakdown, whether it's a coverage related thing or some
dribble penetration, how do you kind of, like on the fly,
go from the next matchup to the next matchup in
your rotation to try to regain control of the situation.
(02:35):
It's like with the fire extinguisher, trying to put out
whatever the problem is. Right, the third piece of it
is contesting without fouling, and the fourth piece of it
is the defensive rebound, and all of them are actually
connected to each other. But that ball contained piece is
what we're going to start with, because all of those
other three become easier when you do a better job
containing the basketball. So to put it simply, I talk
(02:58):
a lot about on this show the concept of flattening
out drives. What that means is there's gonna be a
certain amount of dribble penetration that you can't control, whether
it's pushing the pace in transition, whether it's you're just
dealing with freaky athletes, Like you don't go into a
series against Anthony Edwards thinking like, we're just gonna completely
stop him from beating anybody off the dribble. It's like, no,
that's not how it works, right. So at a certain point,
(03:20):
what you're trying to do is turn a straight line
drive into a rounded off drive. You're trying to turn
a straight line drive into something where there's contact that
he has to fight through or he has to make
a counter move, so it's easier for that next help
defender to get into place. And when you do a
better job of that, when you flatten out drives, suddenly
what could be a hard help turns into maybe a
(03:42):
dig down. So for instance, like let's imagine that a
guy is dribbling on the left wing and he makes
an aggressive move towards the let's just say towards the
left side, towards the sideline because the defender's kind of
funneling him that way, and he gets just absolutely toasted
off the dribble. Then the next guy, the low man
out of that weakside corner, has to come all the
way over in hard help and it turns into like
(04:06):
a super easy kickout pass to the corner, or if
they rotate, it's an easy kickout pass to the wing. Right,
But if you flatten out the drive, then instead of
that guy having to hard help, maybe he sinks in
a little bit, maybe he stunts, but he's in a
better position to rotate. All of a sudden, that closeout
is a little bit easier, right, Or the next guy
(04:26):
who's up on the wing doesn't have to sink all
the way down to the corner, and maybe he's just
kind of stunting down, right, Like, that job gets easier
the contesting without fouling piece when you actually contain the
ball and then do a good job in rotation. The
last piece of it is eventually someone's gonna be looking
up at the clock and it's like we just tried
this drive and this drive and this drive and this drive,
(04:48):
and oh shit, there's four seconds on the shot clock.
One of us has to shoot. From there. You're gonna
be in a position where that guy's probably gonna have
to take a tough contested either shot at the rim,
shot in mid raine, or catch and shoot three. Right,
That contesting without fouling piece is easier when you do
a better job containing the ball throughout the possession and
(05:10):
then finally the defensive rebound. I was looking at the
stats at the end of the third quarter when we
started getting ready for the show. When I checked, I
think Boston only had two offensive rebounds. They only had
like eleven free throw attempts. So that's a clear sign
of you contesting without fouling and getting the defensive rebound. Now,
think of it like this. If you get toasted off
(05:31):
the dribble and somebody has to hard help, and now
everyone's in rotation, nobody's matched up. If nobody's matched up,
then when the shot goes up, it gets that much
harder to box out because now everyone's caught in that
blender and no one has a clear matchup to box out.
But if you flatten out the drive and you make
your rotations easier, and you do a good job in
(05:52):
those rotations, and you work deep into the clock and
the guy has to settle for some tougher contested jump shot,
everyone is now all of a sudden, there aren't these
like free runs to the rim from a wide open
guy because his defender got pulled into rotation. Elsewhere, everything
waterfalls down from containing the basketball. But I want to
(06:14):
be clear, they did an amazing job in all four
of those areas. I want to turn my attention to
Luca for just a minute, because I want to be clear,
because like, there's been a lot of criticism directed towards
Luca in this series, including from myself, and I believe
it's fair. I believe the criticism of some of the
whining at the officials, the stuff with his effort, focus
(06:34):
and energy on the defensive end is completely fair criticism.
And by the way, you want to know why, ask
a Dallas Mavericks fan what do you think of Luca?
Ninety nine percent of them are going to tell you
he's the best player in the world. Ninety nine percent
of them are going to tell you he's an all
time great in the making. Ninety nine percent of them
are going to tell you he's better than this guy,
that guy, and this guy and that guy at that
(06:55):
phase of their careers. What that means is he's held
to a different standards, not held to the standard of
you know, let's say forty year old Lebron James, who's
on the tail end of his prime, and it's like
he's not being held to that best player in the
world standard. You understand, when forty year old Lebron takes
a random possession off here or there. You understand when
(07:18):
you see a player that's not considered one of the
top tier apex predators in the league, making him a
lackadaisical effort or something like that, you just kind of
just allow it, right, You don't even think that much
about it. Luca has put himself through the by virtue
of his greatness under a microscope. That's just that's the
it's the it's at all. It's that old expression. Right,
(07:40):
heavy looks like heavy is the head that wears the crown,
right Like there is a there is a pressure and
an expectation that comes from his individual greatness. I want
to be clear, He's not why they're down for one
in this series. He is the reason why they're here,
as so many have been saying. That is that that
I want to be clear. He his indomitable offensive greatness,
(08:03):
got them to this point. However, it is unquestionable that
this series had a better chance to be competitive had
Luca given a better effort to this point. And again,
as I talked about, like there was so much focus
on the blowbys, and he still got beat off the
dribble a couple of times tonight. But as I said,
like that is nowhere near as damaging as not doing
(08:24):
your job. When the highlight clip was going around, If
you guys remember after I think it was after Game two,
the highlight clip that was going around of Luca getting
blown by and it was like the most blowbys in
over ten years of NBA Finals history, right, If you
guys remember that video, a lot of Mavericks fans were
saying things like, this is by design, this is what
we do. We funnel with Luca's job is to funnel
(08:46):
guys into the paint. Now, that's obviously ridiculous. However, I
guarantee you that Jason Kidd is prepared for that. Luca's
job is to do a better job containing the basketball.
He needs to compete better on the perimeter. That goes
without saying, but there is some truth to the fact
that when Jason Kidd is sitting down with his assistant
coaching staff and they're coming up with the game plan,
(09:08):
they're sitting there like, Luca's gonna give up a certain
amount of dribble penetration. How do we deal with this? Well,
there's obviously the back line element that's the other four players,
but they've crafted a job for Luca. His job after
he gets beat off the dribble is to make the
next rotation. That was something that was missing in the
first three games of this series. There was a specific
(09:30):
play tonight that I thought encapsulated Luca doing that job
a much better in a much better way. Luca gets
beat off the dribble by Jason Tatum in the left corner,
and in the sequence the ball gets worked, driven and
kicked over to the right corner. There's another drive. There's
a drop off to Jason Tatum in the dunker spot
in the right side. Luca had gotten thrown into the
(09:52):
blender with everybody else, but he made an extra rotation.
He came across the lane at the last second, jumped
up with verticality, contested Tatum at the rim, enforced to miss.
That is the important part of the defense. As I
said in the mailbag episode yesterday, the blowbys are the
least concerning thing with Luca. You want him to do better,
(10:13):
and he did a much better job of containing the
basketball tonight, forced a bunch of turnovers by just applying
some physical ball pressure. Luca was much better on the ball.
But the more important piece is making sure he's back
in transition defense. After giving up any sort of dribble penetration,
or if a teammate gives up dribble penetration, being in
(10:33):
the right spot in the rotation, and then making those
efforts on the defensive glass. That is what it takes
to run a functional defense. Every single offensively limited star
or excuse me, I should say defensively limited star, whether
it's Steph Curry in the mid twenty tens or it's
Luka Doncic and Nikola Jokic in this era, they are
(10:53):
still just asked to do a job. Okay, Jokic, you
struggle to protect the rim. Here's what we need you
to do. We need you to come up to the
level of the screen, be active with your hands, and
be more of a disruptor. We'll put more of the
rim protection responsibility of on Aaron Gordon. As long as
you do those things up at the level and you
get back into the lane to grab defensive rebounds, we
(11:14):
can as a team put together a functional defense. And again,
that was all that we were asking for from Luca.
We know he's the reason why they're here. We know
he's an APEX superstar. We know he's on an all
time great trajectory. That shit he did in the first
three games was not good enough. It was not good enough,
did it wasn't befitting of his reputation in the league.
(11:37):
And what you saw tonight was much more in line
with what he's capable of, which is, yeah, he's gonna
get beat off the dribble sometimes, but he can do
his job within the defensive scheme, and I thought he
did a beautiful job of that tonight. In addition to
him and Kyrie completely dominating the game offensively, they pour
in fifty points through the first three quarters, shot fifty
percent from the field, only two turnovers between the two
(11:59):
of them. Come, you've got their best and most efficient
offensive game of the series. By far their best defensive
game of the series. They soundly outplay Jason Tatum and
Jaylen Brown. And by the way, like I want to
be clear about something else, from the beginning of this game,
this was there was an effort element, and we're going
to get into that that You'd be foolish to not
pretend that's not a factor here. However, I did think,
(12:21):
especially early in the game, Tatum and Brown were trying
to get downhill. There were several plays where Mavericks made
defensive slides to cut off driving angles, and Tatum and
Brown were being really persistent about trying to beat that
guy off the dribble. Dallas was just doing doing a
good job of flattening them out, so like it wasn't
for It wasn't like Boston was just passing the ball
(12:42):
around the perimeter and just trying to jack up threes.
Boston was trying to get dribble penetration in this game.
It was the desperate effort from Dallas that rejected those attempts.
And again, it starts from your superstar, it trickles down.
Another guy I really want to shout out tonight is
Derek Lively. At the end the third quarter, get eleven
points and twelve rebounds in just twenty two minutes of play.
(13:04):
He had seven offensive rebounds, just an athletic wrecking ball
in this game. Was really intrigued by that corner three
he hit early on. One of the things with Lively.
I tweeted this out during the game, but like the
when I look at Dallas's potential and like, here's the thing.
Do I think They're going to be back in the
finals next year? Probably not, But that's literally because of
(13:27):
what NBA history tells us, right, Like, we have not
had a Western Conference team make more than one trip
to the finals in the totality of the last six
years since Kevin Durant and Steph Curry broke up as teammates, Right, So,
like that's just the West is too deep with teams.
Chances are we'll be sitting here exactly twelve months from
(13:47):
now talking about a team like the Minnesota Timberwolves, or
the Oklahoma City Thunder or the Memphis Grizzly, just some
random team that just kind of rises from the midst right, Like,
But if there is a dominant version of this Dallas
Maverick team that takes shape over the course of the
next few years, there's your guy. It's Derek Lively. If
Derek Lively turns into Tyson Chandler Across with like a
(14:09):
little bit of Anthony Davis Cross with a little bit
of like legitimate like can shoot corner threes and stretch
the floor a little bit, that's a top thirty, top
thirty five player in the NBA that can be a
profoundly impactful foundational piece alongside Luca and whoever his secondary
star is in the long run, whether it's Kyrie or
it's someone else, and like, just I mean kind of
(14:30):
removing ourselves from the scope of this series for a minute.
Derek Lively, just what if he's just awesome? If he's
just awesome, that could go a long way towards adding
another layer of resilience to what this Dallas Mavericks team
can accomplish year on a year out. What's the pathway
for Dallas. Dallas is going to somehow win this series?
What does it look like? Well, it's really simple. You
(14:51):
gotta win one basketball game on Monday. It's in Boston.
To my Mavericks fans that are listening, are you confident
any you think that you're a better team than Boston,
If any of you think that the level of optimism
that you had going into the series, if you think
there's legitimacy to that, go in a game. Go in
(15:13):
one game in Boston on Monday. Contain. Do exactly what
you did tonight. Work on the ball to contain flap maout,
dribble penetration, make for easier rotations so that it's easier
to contest without fouling, so that you can contain on
the contain defensive rebounds, right, and all of those things
(15:33):
trickle down to transition opportunities, which trickle down into cross
matches which prevent Boston from establishing their game plan. Not
to mention, we have the Porzingis injury wrinkle in all
of this. Right, So go to Boston on Monday and
win one game from there, you're the home team on Thursday,
(15:54):
You'll be favored. You'll be favored to send this thing
back to Boston for a game seven, where the exact
same principle applies. Like, we have never seen a team
come back from down three to zero, but we have
seen a team come back from down three to one
before in the NBA Finals, right, and it's a momentum thing.
Once Cleveland won Game five, which, by the way, how
(16:16):
did they win? They won because Lebron James and Kyrie
Irving went into that building and dropped eighty two points.
Do we think Luca and Kyrie are capable of that?
I sure as hell do that. It's a long shot,
but they're capable of it. Right, you win that game,
you come home with all the momentum. Do you guys
remember that Cavs Warriors Game six, It was like thirty
(16:37):
three to eleven or something in the first quarter, like
they jumped them early. That game was never truly competitive, right,
and then you end up in the knockdown, drag out
fight Game seven. So that's the pathway. If you believe
you're the better team, go into Boston on Monday, execute
on the details, win that game. From there, you have
a home game with a chance to send it to
send yourselves to a winner take all game seven. So yeah,
(17:00):
like do I think that's going to happen? Obviously not,
But that is the pathway, and that's where you have
to drive that belief. And there's no way you can
do it if you don't believe. And that is what
the mentality of that locker room is going to be
over the course of the next couple of days on
the Boston front. Like it's really this simple, Like you
can't fake urgency, it's completely impossible. There's playing hard and
(17:24):
then there's playing like your life depends on it. And
like playing hard is a character thing. It's what we
refer to as motor right. You either have the willingness
to push yourself when you're tired or you don't. Right,
that is like a thing that goes comes down to
the individual, right. But playing hard and playing desperate are
two fundamentally different things. It's impossible to replicate what you
(17:47):
saw tonight was a crazy desperate Dallas effort, right, So
all you have to do is bring that same level
of desperation in game five. For you, it's the exact
same concept in reverse that were talking about with Dallas.
You have to win on Monday, because if you don't,
you got to go to Dallas where they're gonna be
(18:07):
favored to send this thing to seven. Right, So everything
comes down to closing the deal on Monday, bringing that urgency,
flipping that dynamic, riding the home crowd again, a lot
of like game plan discipline stuff. So like Joe Mizula
has been talking a lot about spacing. That was the
quote coming out of halftime. All those same diligent all
(18:27):
the things that Boston was being very diligent about in
the first three games. Getting the right matchup, running action
early in the set to get switches so that you
have Dallas's rim protectors above the break rather than along
the baseline, and then from there creating dribble penetration, hunting
the great shot instead of the good shot. You do
(18:49):
all of that. You score. If you score, you get
to set your defense. If you set your defense, you
don't have transition cross matches. If you don't have transition
cross matches, you can execute your defensive game play, which
is something that Boston has done really well over the
course of this series. I think Boston is gonna win
Game five. However, we would all be foolish to write
(19:10):
off Luca and Kyrie in a must win game like that.
That certainly is a possibility that's on the table. But
I do think Boston is going to close it out
in game five. All Right, Well, you're going to get
into the mailbag, drop questions to the chat, and we're
going to get to as many as we can here
over the next twenty minutes or so. We're this close
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and responsible gaming resources. All right, first question, is Derek
White the best role player in the NBA? If not,
(21:14):
who is? This is a tough one. I'd have to
I'd have to take some time to really think about,
to really think about who the other candidates for that
type of kind of title is. That said, I do
think Derek White is kind of like the perfect NBA
role player. And the main reason why is there's like
a positional versatility with him. Like he's a guard, but
(21:34):
he's pretty big, and he's pretty athletic, and like can
do things with his length and athleticism on the back
line as a rebounder and as a shot blocker. You know,
there was a a comment I can't remember, Oh, it's
a tweet. It was a tweet that came out of
like a report somebody I'm gonna blank on who it was,
but somebody reported that Derek White could be considered for
the Olympic team spot should should Kawhi Leonard be on
(21:59):
a to participate? And when I saw that, I thought
that was interesting because like there's these other names that
you're going to see thrown around, right, Like, well what
about Tyrie? What about Jaylen Brown? And like both of
those guys would certainly be more deserving, right Like, if
you're just going on who has the better basketball reputation,
that player should get the spot. I agree, but strictly's
thinking about the game of basketball. Derek White, to me,
(22:22):
is an incredible spot up player who can run inverted
ball screen actions and has a ton of experience running
inverted ball screen actions, meaning he can set screens for Lebron,
set screens for KD, set screens for Jason Tatum who
will be on that team as well, and pop and
create advantages there a second piece of it, Like Derek
(22:43):
White is a professional off ball player, he is a
professional off of Superstars player, right. He is a guy
that has made his living learning how to be next
to a supreme talent and fit his talent a lot
longside what he does and to accentuate what the team does.
(23:03):
And so I actually reeded when I saw that. I
was like, Derek White would be perfect. He'd be willing
to take an on ball defensive role like it was
the most important thing that he's doing. Right. I think
Derek White is the consummate NBA role player that you
could plug into any team anywhere around the league. He's
great above the break, he's great in the corners. He
(23:24):
can run action, he can run inverted action. He's an
athlete that can impact the game on both ends. I
absolutely think that Derek White's in the conversation for best
role player in the NBA. Let's see should Joe Mizzoula
play Krisops Porzingis in Game five? There's two things that
you have to factor in here when it comes to Porzingis. One,
(23:44):
like Boston has a chance to repeat, like they're not
in the Western Conference where it's like ten bloodbath teams
every single year. Like the East is gonna be better
next year, but I think Boston is gonna be favored
to win the East next year, right, And so what
you can't do with is risk potentially him having some
sort of bigger injury that extends into next year or
(24:07):
affects his ability to stay in shape over the summer. Right, Like,
we don't even know what the fallout of this injury
is going to be like in the short term. So
there's that piece of it. There's like a risk reward factor.
If you think you can win the series without porzingis
you got to try to win the series without porzingis.
Second piece of it is how's mobility? Like, part of
what happened with Christops porzingis is he was playing awesome
(24:30):
in the first two games and a lot of that
had to do with his mobility. After he kind of
tweaked it, he wasn't playing as well, right, So, like
it doesn't matter if he's out there. If he's not
Christops porzingis, So like it really depends on the coaching
staff to know how much risk there is for severe
additional injury and two and I guess that's up to
(24:50):
the medical staff. And then two for the coaching staff.
How well is he actually moving? Is he actually moving
in a way where he can impact things? Because if
he's not, then it's not worth it all. Right, next question,
is there an argument that Tatum is the most switchable
defender in the league. So uh yeah, absolutely at this
point in time, because like we've seen, like there are
guys that are in that conversation for like best permitter defender,
(25:11):
Guys that are like Jaden McDaniels, who are like too
thin to guard the bigger, stronger players in the league.
But like to be clear, like Lucas had a lot
of success against Jason Tatum in this series too, So
like I wouldn't go as far as to say, like
some of that's just Luca being unguardable, right, But yeah, Tatum,
with his size and strength, should in theory be able
to do a better job on him than a guy
(25:32):
like Jada McDaniels. A. Jalen Suggs is another guy who's
regarded as one of the best permitter defenders in the league.
He's a touch on the small side, right, like Lou
Dort is a guy that I think can cause a
lot of problems to some power players, but like you know,
he can be a little bit on the underside side
in terms of lengths. So what about pull up shooters
when it comes to against a guy like him. Tatum
has that unique capability of like real size and strength
(25:55):
and perimeter mobility. Now, I don't think Tatum has been
the same level of defender that he was in twenty
twenty two this year. I think Jalen Brown has made
improvements since then. I think Tatum has gone down a
little bit of a level since then. But like, Tatum
hasn't done as good a job on the perimeter in
this series, but he's been really good at the rim.
He's been really good on the defensive glass, He's done
(26:17):
a good job holding up under any sort of physicality
that Gafford brings to the table. But like in terms
of switchability, meaning actual ability to guard one through five,
Tatum is certainly in that conversation. Again, I'd have to
think more about it to give you guys an actual list.
Let's see how do the Warriors become contenders next season. So,
anytime I see a team get written off, and we
just saw this last year with Dallas and we're seeing
(26:39):
it this year with Golden State, when you're writing a
team off, usually if they've got a couple of real
key foundational pieces, in this case Kyrie and Luca, or
in the Warriors case like Steph Curry. Some draft compensation.
Jonathan kaminga Draymond Green is still one of the best
defensive players in the league. Right, You've got foundational pieces,
so it's really about smart Tweaks. It's a little bit
(27:00):
more complicated for Golden State because Steph wasn't playing well
to end the season. He was like he was like
seventy five percent of himself for basically the last half
of the year. So like Steph is gonna have to
one get back to being Steph and then just smart Tweaks.
I think they absolutely have to get a bona fide
secondary shot creator. There's been a lot of buzz surrounding
(27:21):
like Zach Lavine with Golden State. In recent weeks. I've
talked about like Dejontay Murray. We've talked about, you know,
like like more on the margins moves, guys like Michale Bridges.
There are a bunch of different directions they could go.
But whoever that guy is, he needs to be somebody
that can legitimately take the reins from Steph for large
doses of basketball games. One of the underrated pieces of
(27:44):
the Warriors decline over the last couple of years is
Jordan Poole, kind of fell off and Andrew Wiggins kind
of fell off, and those two guys kind of like
combined for that legitimate secondary star in terms of offensive firepower.
I don't know that Wiggans ever is going to get
back to that, and Jordan is gone. I don't think
Chris Paul is going to be that. I'm not even
sure if he's gonna be on the roster next year.
(28:05):
So like you got to find a bona fide secondary
shot creator. A little bit more interior size, I think
is the second piece. I actually like their wing athleticism.
They just need to have a big look where they
can be more physically imposing, maybe a Draymond Green at
the four type of look. But again, don't underestimate small
tweaks on the margins and how they can improve a
(28:25):
team like Dallas literally just got a like a couple
of rim runners and a legitimate forward in PJ. Washington
and they nailed one veteran minimum signing and then boom
NBA Finals. So like that, that's again this stuff is
I always talk about that quote that I got from
(28:47):
Mark Titus that basketball is more art than science. That's
the kind of thing I'm talking about, Like you can't
just add up the pieces on paper. There's like a
synergy to the way basketball players fit together, and slight
tweaks that accentuate each other's strength can kind of lock
into place and allow you to become a basketball team
that is greater than the sum of its parts. With
the passing of the great Jerry West, I've always wondered
(29:08):
your favorite players from the older generations, and who do
you think would play well in today's NBA. I'm not
going to go that far back, mainly just because for me,
like as a basketball fan, I especially when you go
out past the eighties, I just I have not watched
enough of those guys to give an educated opinion on
(29:29):
how an opinion about how I believe they would fit
into today's game. All I will say is like, for me,
the guys that I ended up watching a ton of
even though I didn't watch them when I was actually
a kid, but more as an adult, is like the
kind of players that kind of had my same build.
So like I'm six ' six, I have long arms,
and I play on the wing. So like I watched
(29:50):
a lot of Bobbie Bryant growing up, I watched a
lot of Michael Jordan. Growing up, I watched a lot
of Grant Hill, Anny Hardaway, those kind of guys, because
those guys just kind of like played a we had
similar like frame to me, so like I would try
to play like they played because I wanted to do
the kind of things that they could do. And so
those are the guys that, like, I watched a lot
(30:10):
of like film on and things along those lines, and
I've watched a lot of like NBA Classic games and
stuff like that. But when it comes to like Jerry
West generation, I'm just so under exposed to them. And
one of the things that I try to do on
this show is like not talk about things unless i'm
unless I've done the appropriate amount of research. And so
so I don't talk about the draft until we get
out of the finals. I'm not going to sit here
(30:30):
and pontificate about draft picks when I haven't done the
requisite research. But interesting question again to me, Jerry West,
like I said this on the show with Colin, to me,
he's just one of the great basketball geniuses of all time,
and I look at things like him putting Kobe and
Shack together, him stopping the Kevin love for Klay Thompson,
trade him kind of like being one of the guys,
(30:50):
one of the in the brain trust that assembled to Clippers,
and they're the Clippers were supposed to be like Boston
in so many different ways, right and we're seeing that
come to fruition in the championship right now. So like
to me, Jerry West was just kind of in touch
with where the game of basketball was going and was
one of the great geniuses of our time. Hey, Jason
fan from India enjoyed the content. I've been learning a
lot about about basketball. Keep up the good work. Oh,
(31:12):
by the way, thank you for the kind words to
sincerely appreciate it. The one professional basketball contract I signed
before I hung up the shoes was in India. I
was going to play in this league called the Uba.
They paid me for like two weeks and then the
league and then the league folded. And then at that
point I like looked at my wife and I was like,
I can't keep doing this. I just got to go
to work. But I got to meet the When when
(31:33):
that league was being put to it was in like
the third or fourth season. They were doing like a
major showcase here in the US, and they've like flew
all these people out and I got to meet a
ton of people that actually live in India and it
was just like a really cool part of that experience.
And big one if for me in my life is
always wonder what would happened if that season would have
(31:54):
come to Fruition and then I would have gone over there.
Work ethic and psycho competitiveness is paramount to the greats.
As a GM, how do you evaluate players in the
draft for that intangible So here's the thing, Like I'm
a big believer in kind of staying in your wheelhouse.
It's impossible for me to really get into touch with
the intangibles of draft prospects because the people that do
(32:18):
it year round and watch every single interview, they do,
watch every single one of their games and really keep
an eye on their motor in the different their their
competitiveness within games and things along those lines. For me,
I have to do kind of a very abbreviated version
of that. Like the NBA Finals, let's say they end
on Monday, that's what the seventeenth. So like, I'm going
to have less than two weeks to prepare for the draft,
(32:40):
and so for me, I'm gonna be primarily focusing on
skills like skills and tape, Like just as much as
I can digest in a short period of time, that's it.
If I was working in the draft, that would be
a major element to my focus on player development, Like
player evaluations, I should say to me, Like, it goes
(33:01):
into the competitiveness or your you're like being a psycho,
your work ethic, those sorts of things, those to me,
they don't just manifest in skill development, they manifest in
the games, right, Like in order to be the kind
of player that buys into a defensive scheme and is
willing to do the dirty work, you've got to be nasty,
(33:23):
You've got to be competitive. There are no there are
no lazy guys that do that type of job. Right
But in addition to that, it's about the competitiveness, the pettiness,
the wanting to be better than the guy next to you.
That's what drives you on a daily basis to put
in the work. And one of the things I talk
about a lot on the show. And I know this
just from my own personal experience because I went through
(33:43):
skill development in my twenties because I was so late
to pick up the game of basketball, Like it's incremental guys,
Like you shoot ten thousand jump shots over the course
of two months over the summer, and you might get
this much better, like it is a year over year,
like just painstaking effort to improve your game on the margins.
(34:04):
The same thing goes with ball handling, ball handling and shooting,
Like you might experience some initial improvement, but it plateaus
pretty quickly and then it's like incremental improvement and so
like you got to be the psycho to be the
guy that improves in those areas, and it requires like
if you're just going into the gym three four times
a week over the summer with the trainer and shooting
a couple hundred shots, like that's literally not going to
(34:25):
do it. There is a psycho level of work you
have to achieve on a day to day basis to
make those sorts of improvements. How much of Browning having
better production than Jason Tatum in this playoffs has been
based on how they're being defended, for example, being guarded
by Nempard versus Nie Smith. It's a huge factor, right,
Like Tatum's always getting the primary defensive player. In terms
(34:47):
of the actions, it's the same, Like both guys are
getting the same help. Both guys are getting like aggressive
coverages and ball screens and things along those lines. But
there's no doubt in terms of the individual matchup, Tatum
has a tougher shake. One of the bigger pieces of
it is just the jump shooting. Though Jason Tatum is
just having a nightmare jump shooting postseason, Jalen Brown is
shooting better. That's the give and take of basketball, right,
(35:10):
Like if I always talk about like defenders being on
their toes or being on their heels, if they are
terrified of you shooting a jumper, they're going to be
up on their toes, which will make it easier for
you to go around them. If they're terrified of you
getting downhill, they're going to be on their heels. But
if they only have to worry about one of those things,
they can really sit on whatever that is. And so
(35:33):
Jason Tatum, it's like offer a late contest and he's
missing it right now. So like these guys are, it
makes containing him easier in dribble drive situations. So again,
I think it's part of it's the matchups. Part of
it is Jason Tatum is having a bad jump shooting
stretch and by the way, that can happen. That's part
of the game of basketball, right Like Lebron James last
(35:53):
year had the worst jump shooting season he's had in
ten years, and then this year he had the best
jump shooting season he's had in ten years. I'm sure
he worked hard last summer. I'm sure that was part
of it, but it's not like Lebron made some gigantic
improvement year over year in terms of his actual core
shooting capability. He had a rough season, he had a
(36:14):
hot season. Jason Tatum has been in a shooting slump
that's been lasting for a few months now. Who would
you favor in a potential Game six in Dallas? So
Boston deserves to be heavy favorite in Game five, right
as they should be if Dallas were to steal that game.
My guess is the line will be very slightly in Dallas.
His favorite something like Dallas minus point five. I also
(36:34):
wouldn't be surprised if Boston was a very slight favorite
in that game, like a minus one and a half,
a minus point five, something like that. For me going
into Game six in Dallas, it'd be a coin flip
for me. Main reason why is Boston's been really good
on the road. I do believe Boston is the better team.
I think that Boston has more advantages in this series.
And so even if Dallas were to get some sort
(36:55):
of crazy Kyrie Luca effort to steal Game five, I'd
still make it basically a coin flip in Game six,
but Dallas absolutely could win that game. What do you
(37:16):
think of Jordan Pool to the Nuggets. Wow, that's a
really interesting type of deal. I went on Washington Sports
radio a few days ago, and I was talking a
lot about how I wouldn't give up on Jordan Pool,
and so I imagine they'll keep him. I think that
young guards in particular have very volatile, you know, kind
of life cycles, and so I think that, you know,
Jordan Pool at age twenty seven is going to be
(37:38):
a pretty steady pro and I think whatever team bets
on that is going to have some success. Or the
reason why simple Jordan Poole can beat people off triple
inting knockdown jump shots. He's like, that's a really good combination.
Like he's quick as hell and he can knock down
jump shots. Now, you hadn't shot the ball well in
a couple of years, but that capability is certainly there.
We've seen it in the past. As far as the
(37:59):
Nuggets fit though, one of the things I talked about
a lot with the Nuggets. I love everything about that
team except for they don't have anybody that can just
generate dribble penetration since Bruce Brown has has left right,
Like everything with Jokich's size related, Jamal Murray's screen related right,
So like having a guy like Jordan Pooh can beat
people off the dribble would be a would be a
(38:20):
huge asset to that team. It'd be tricky to figure
out how to do the to work out that type
of deal, though, especially at his salary. Is Luca a
younger James Harden, an excellent scorer who doesn't know what
defense is. No, Luca's a way better version of James Harden.
In my opinion, James Harden was. James Harden was. What
happens when analytics takes too much of a role in
(38:44):
constructing an NBA offense. For instance, like James Harden, the
step back three, the left handed drive off of the
off of the between the legs dribble, and the occasional
crossover back to the right. Everything with James Harden in
his prime was at the rim step back three. The
rim step back three added a little bit of a
floater in twenty nineteen right, but like there was a
(39:07):
predictability with James Harden that made him easier to defend
as playoff series progressed. One of the reasons why I
think Luca has been a better player in the postseason
than James Harden is he never it seems like every
attack from him looks different. Like he's willing to attack
from the post. He's willing to attack straight iso, but
(39:28):
he's also willing to attack in ball screens. He's not
just taking step back threes. He's also getting into the
mid range. He's taking step backs from the mid range.
He's taking turnaround jumpers from the mid range. He can
put you in jail and kind of like manipulate things
from the middle of the floor. James Harden never would
stop in the middle of the floor in his prime.
In the twenty eighteen twenty nineteen stretch, that little like
(39:52):
kind of right handed push shot where he kind of
powers his way along the right lane line and kind
of fights her position and shoots that little pop shot
Like there's just so much more variety in Luca's game.
That makes him a much more a much more resilient
offensive player, especially against elite defenses down the line, as
far as the defensive end of the floor. Like, I
think Luca's gonna learn his lesson. I think he's just young.
(40:13):
I think he's arrogant. I think he needs to have
humiliation to kind of like have that slam slapped in
his face, right, Like I've talked about it with Lebron
all the time, Like twenty eleven, Lebron got embarrassed. Dude,
your jump shots two inconsistent. You don't have much of
it back to the basket game. You just you in
general just aren't good enough in these details to get
(40:34):
to where you want to go. And like a huge
part of what turned around his career twenty twelve in
twenty thirteen was his ability to turn his back to
the basket against KWHI Leonard, his ability to knock down
over the top jumpers, like his jumper saved him literally
in twenty twelve on the road in Game six in
Boston when they were down three to two, Like, Lebron
(40:54):
reached a level as a player as a result of
humiliation he like remember, he like disappeared that entire summer,
like didn't talk to anybody when he came back to
following seasons like reading books and shit, and like he
was just like Lebron, like got straight up humbled in
twenty eleven and it made him a better version of himself.
I think Luca needed to. I think Luca needed to
(41:15):
get punched in the mouth and like, hey, dude, you're
really fucking good, but you're not good enough and there's
these clear areas where you can improve, and I think
this series is amounting to that for Luca. What are
your thoughts on the Luca Carmelo cump As players. I
don't really see how they're that similar, even if I
point out the point, even if I get the point
about the poor defense, So don't look at it so
much as the player cump because obviously they're very very
(41:39):
different types of players. Right, Luca is a playmaking forward.
Carmelo is a scoring forward, but lucas also an elite scorer.
Right Like to me, Luca is just a much better
player with a much better standing in the league. I
never thought Carmelo was like a true Apex superstar, Like
he was just always in that second tier for me,
(42:00):
Like even when he was on those really good Denver
Nuggets teams in the late two thousands, Like I never
thought he was like at the Kobe level, at the
Lebron level. I always thought he was just like a
tier below that. I think Luca's been an APEX star
for you know, the better part of a half decade now.
So like to me, I don't see that specific side
of the cup where I do agree. And the point
(42:23):
that I think Colin is trying to point out is
like it's about unachieved potential. Like Luca's insanely good, and
he can be so much better. Like if he actually
became psycho competitive about how he cares for his body
and he became like a leaner, more muscular, better conditioned
version of himself, that's just a way better basketball player.
(42:44):
And when you combine that with the mentality to be
engaged on the defensive end, he can achieve anything. He
could be the goat that like, that's he could absolutely
go on a run and be remembered. As in the
conversation with Lebron James and Michael Jordan, that is an
absolute potential for Luca. But it is non negotiable that
(43:04):
he addresses those things. I don't think Carmelo ever had
that potential. But if you talked about what held him back,
it's the same things. It's a lack of attention to
a health and fitness and a lack of commitment to
the details, especially on the defensive end of the floor.
So I think that's the point he was trying to make. Again, like,
it's not a perfect comp but there are some similarities there. Somehow,
(43:27):
some way, somebody has to break the streak and win
from down to three. Could it be this Maps team?
Of course it could, It's just not likely. What I
always talk about with this is any team that has
the ability to go up three to zero has advantages
that allowed them to go up three to zero. You
don't go three up three to zero as a fluke.
You do it with advantages, right, So like, in order
(43:48):
for you to turn around and do the same thing
and win four in a row, you better have all
the advantages, and that would require roster dynamics flipping. So like,
I think the team that eventually breaks the three streak,
and it'll happen eventually, But the team that eventually breaks
the oh three Strake. It's gonna be injury related. It's
gonna be some team that goes up three to zero
(44:08):
and then some sort of pivotally pivotally important member of
the team gets hurt and then suddenly it just flips
all those advantages, and then the team with the advantages,
which is the down oh three team, is able to
rack together some wins just for fun. Who do you
think would win a seven game series between the twenty
twenty Lakers and the twenty twenty four Celtics. I just
think it's an interesting matchup when comparing champions. So I
(44:32):
think the twenty twenty Lakers are the best team since
the two thousand and Night since the twenty eighteen Warriors.
Main reason why is it's the only team in that
span that had two bona fide top five players in
the league. The Raptors had Kawhi. Your second best player
is Pascal Siakam, Right, the twenty twenty one Bucks, it's
like Giannis, and then it's Chris Middleton and Drew Drew Holliday. Right,
(44:56):
it's twenty twenty two Warriors, it's Steph Curry, and then
it's like Andrew Wiggins is probably second best player on
the team Denver Nuggets, it's Nicole Jokic and Jamal Murray
is really good. I have the Nuggets, I think if
I remember correctly, have him second in that list, but
like that team had like Jamal Murray is like somewhere
around the fifteenth to sixteenth best player in the league, right.
And then you have the Celtics team where I think
(45:17):
they have two guys that are in that like six
to ten range, right, So, like the Lakers had the
unbelievable top end star power. As far as the matchup goes,
the Lakers actually matchup pretty well with the Celtics because
they were an excellent team on the perimeter. Defensively they
had had They started Game six of the NBA Finals
against the Miami Heat with Lebron James, Anthony Davis, Alex Caruso,
(45:40):
Contavious Colwall Pope, and Danny Green. That's KCP dominant perimeter defender,
Alex Cruso dominant perimeter defender. Twenty twenty was the last
great defensive season of Lebron's career. Anthony Davis was the
best defensive player in the world. Danny Green was the
worst defensive player in that lineup. The Lakers would have
had the best player in the series. They'd had the
best two players in the series. Now, as we all know,
(46:02):
the Anthony Davis host twenty twenty, by virtue of injuries
and a lack of commitment to the details, has declined
as a jump shooter and has become a player that's
actually down in that tier with Jayson Tatum and Jaylen
Brown now. But in twenty twenty, he was better than
both of those guys, and than these versions of both
of these guys. Like you guys remember Ad in the bubble,
he was like like Kevin Durant mixed with the best
(46:24):
defensive player in the world right like he was. There
was a case to make that he was at the
same level as Lebron, and it was certainly close. Although
I still think Lebron is the best player in the
world at that point. Do you think Jalen Brown can
reach top tier superstar status. I don't know. I never
want to say never, especially to a top tier athlete.
(46:45):
The one thing with Jylen Brown that I think would
hold him back is even as he's made improvements as
a playmaker, most of the top tier superstars are at
least above average playmakers, and I don't think Jalen Brown
has ever been able to reach that level, but I
would never say never with a guy like Jaylen Brown. Hypothetical,
who would you have picked in the twenty twenty two
Western Conference Finals had the Sons beat the MAVs in
(47:06):
Game seven and played the Warriors, that's interesting, but give
me the give me the Warriors. I think Steph Curry
would have been the best player in the series by
a mile. That Suns team in particular two like they.
I was never as high on that Sun's team as
everybody else. They in twenty twenty one, I thought the
Lakers would have beat him if Anthony Davis didn't get hurt.
The reason why they made it to the finals had
(47:27):
a lot to do with injuries they ended up facing
that injured the Clippers team in the conference finals. Their
best player was Devin Booker, and I really like Devin Booker,
but I don't think Devin Booker is an APEX star.
They would have been. I would have picked the Warriors
against them, for sure. Saw a summer trade rumor of
marketing into the Knicks. What do you think of that?
That'd be awesome? That's like a now I think one
(47:50):
of the things with the Knicks is I think they
similarly to what we talked about the Warriors, I think
they need a legitimate secondary shot creator, and unfortunately Market
is more of a play finisher than a shot creator,
but he would certainly make them better as like kind
of a slot into that Julius Randall position and putting
ogn and Obi at the three. But if I was,
if I was the Knicks, I'd be targeting someone who's
(48:12):
more capable of creating things off the bounce. Should Lively
be considered the third best rookie behind Chet and Wemby.
That's tough, certainly, certainly if you're factoring in postseason contributions, right,
I'd have to go back and look at all the rookies,
but certainly considering postseason postseason contributions. Did Joe Missoula leak
(48:32):
the formula to playing against Luca? So? I talked about
this after game was a one or two? I can't remember,
but like, I immediately thought back to the Minnesota series and
I was like, man, shouldn't should they have just put
Jaden McDaniels on Daniel Gafford and put Rudy goo Baer
(48:54):
and Derek Jones Junior and done the exact same thing essentially,
meaning put your biggest forward on Dallas's lob threats, put
your rim protector on their bad above the break shooters,
which are Derek Jones and PJ. Washington. I don't know
if it would have been enough to turn around the
Minnesota series because Minnesota had issues on the other end
(49:14):
with their inability to penetrate Dallas's load up the strong
side type of defense. But like this, I do think
that Joe Miszoula has put together probably the best game plan.
And again, like when people talk about the Mavericks, like
their build is fine, they have rim protection, they have
perimeter defenders, they have the superstars. The one weakness is
(49:35):
they do not have a guy who can both guard
on the perimeter and hit above the break threes consistently.
So if you look at their situation, there's not really
a ton of opportunity to improve the roster this summer,
especially because they've gone all in in so many different ways.
But what I would do is I'd go to PJ.
Washington and I'd be and Derek Jones and I'd be like,
(49:57):
and who knows, Derek Jones might end up being poached
this summer because he had such good season and mostly
maybe the I think the Mavericks will probably try to
keep them with their mid level exception. But if if
Dallas can keep Derek Jones in PJ. Washington, you basically
point point to those guys in their postseason kind of
like wrap up meeting, and you say, above the break
(50:18):
threes all summer long, above the break threes and corner threes,
above the break threes and corner threes. Again, it's there's
a there's a It's not about winning one series against
a really good team. You have to beat four teams,
and every team is going to defend you in different ways.
Boston did put together a nice formula with Joe Miszula
(50:38):
for how to slow down Dallas' offense, and the only
counter for that is to be able to either have
Derek Lively turn into a three point shooter so that
he can pick and pop in those situations, or to
have Derek Jones PJ. Washington, that group of guys, Josh Green,
you know, that group of guys become effective above the
break shooters. Because again, if you if we look at
the geometry of the four, if the dunker spot is
(51:01):
occupied because Tatum or the other team's best forward is there,
and guys are glued up on the corners because they
don't need to help because the biggest forward is under
the rim. Then you're setting ball screens to attack their
center with your forward. If Luca's trying to get downhill
in that ball screen, just imagine the geometry of the
floor center in the dunker spot, Luca driving shooters in
(51:24):
the corners. That's four players. Where is the opening. The
entire above the brake line is open. If you have
that guy, the guy setting the screen in this case,
Derek Jones or PJ. Washington, if you have them roll,
they're rolling into all that shit show underneath the rim.
If you have them pop, there's just a ton of
opening above the brake and those guys are going to
(51:44):
be wide open every single time. So like that is
the ultimate counter to what Boston is doing is you've
got to You've got to force whoever it is that
they'll stop at that point because they won't want their
rim protector being pulled out above the break. You can
literally cancel out that adjustment and force them to go
back to putting their center on your center as long
(52:06):
as that guy's capable of hitting above the break threes,
and so that I think is going to be a
big kind of like skill development piece that PJ and
Derek Jones or whoever it is that they end up
filling that spot with. We'll have to work on over
the summer. All right, guys, that is all I have
for tonight. I sincerely appreciate you guys' participation in the
mail bag and as always for supporting the show. We're
(52:27):
going to run. This mail bag is breakout clips probably
on Saturday and Sunday, and then we'll be back with
Colin on Monday night to break down Game five after
the final buzzer live on YouTube. I will see you guys.
Then the volume
The volume. All right, welcome to Hoops Tonight. You're at
the volume. Happy Friday, everybody. This NBA Finals Game four
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(00:21):
How do you cash back? Well, you can't fake desperation.
The Boston Celtics run into an absolute buzz saw in
Game four against the Dallas Mavericks. Here's the plan for tonight.
I got about ten to fifteen minutes off the top,
not too much to get into into a game like
this that goes off the rails so quickly. So what
we're gonna do at the tail end is just do
a mailbag. So drop questions in the chat. Paul, our producer,
(00:46):
is going to text them to me so we can
hit them at the tail end of the show. Drop
questions in the chat. We'll go for about ten minutes
on the game, and then we'll get into the mailbag.
You guys are the drop before we get started. Subscribed
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Hoops tonight and then keep dropping mail back questions in
(01:08):
those YouTube comments so that can keep hitting them over
the course of the rest of the summer. All right,
let's talk some basketball, so storry. This game was obviously
Dallas's improved defensive effort. Now, Dallas is defended pretty well
in this series, not as well as they're capable of,
not as well as the numbers would show. Either. There's
(01:28):
a couple of pretty bad, like specifically inept Boston stretches,
particularly spamming the second and third quarters of Game one,
and then obviously that bad run in the middle of
the fourth quarter in Game three, and then there's also
some shooting variants there. But Dallas has done a decent job.
But we all can agree that they are capable of
doing a much much better job. And there's been a
(01:51):
lot of focus on the dribble penetration element in containing
the basketball, a lot of that on this show as well,
and I want to make sure we call attention to that.
But I thought that Dallas did an amazing job in
all four phases of half court defense in this game.
I would kind of delineate the roles of a defense
or the four parts of the defensive job down to
(02:13):
these things. First, containing the ball. Second, what you do
in rotation, meaning like when you suffer some sort of
defensive breakdown, whether it's a coverage related thing or some
dribble penetration, how do you kind of, like on the fly,
go from the next matchup to the next matchup in
your rotation to try to regain control of the situation.
(02:35):
It's like with the fire extinguisher, trying to put out
whatever the problem is. Right, the third piece of it
is contesting without fouling, and the fourth piece of it
is the defensive rebound, and all of them are actually
connected to each other. But that ball contained piece is
what we're going to start with, because all of those
other three become easier when you do a better job
containing the basketball. So to put it simply, I talk
(02:58):
a lot about on this show the concept of flattening
out drives. What that means is there's gonna be a
certain amount of dribble penetration that you can't control, whether
it's pushing the pace in transition, whether it's you're just
dealing with freaky athletes, Like you don't go into a
series against Anthony Edwards thinking like, we're just gonna completely
stop him from beating anybody off the dribble. It's like, no,
that's not how it works, right. So at a certain point,
(03:20):
what you're trying to do is turn a straight line
drive into a rounded off drive. You're trying to turn
a straight line drive into something where there's contact that
he has to fight through or he has to make
a counter move, so it's easier for that next help
defender to get into place. And when you do a
better job of that, when you flatten out drives, suddenly
what could be a hard help turns into maybe a
(03:42):
dig down. So for instance, like let's imagine that a
guy is dribbling on the left wing and he makes
an aggressive move towards the let's just say towards the
left side, towards the sideline because the defender's kind of
funneling him that way, and he gets just absolutely toasted
off the dribble. Then the next guy, the low man
out of that weakside corner, has to come all the
way over in hard help and it turns into like
(04:06):
a super easy kickout pass to the corner, or if
they rotate, it's an easy kickout pass to the wing. Right,
But if you flatten out the drive, then instead of
that guy having to hard help, maybe he sinks in
a little bit, maybe he stunts, but he's in a
better position to rotate. All of a sudden, that closeout
is a little bit easier, right, Or the next guy
(04:26):
who's up on the wing doesn't have to sink all
the way down to the corner, and maybe he's just
kind of stunting down, right, Like, that job gets easier
the contesting without fouling piece when you actually contain the
ball and then do a good job in rotation. The
last piece of it is eventually someone's gonna be looking
up at the clock and it's like we just tried
this drive and this drive and this drive and this drive,
(04:48):
and oh shit, there's four seconds on the shot clock.
One of us has to shoot. From there. You're gonna
be in a position where that guy's probably gonna have
to take a tough contested either shot at the rim,
shot in mid raine, or catch and shoot three. Right,
That contesting without fouling piece is easier when you do
a better job containing the ball throughout the possession and
(05:10):
then finally the defensive rebound. I was looking at the
stats at the end of the third quarter when we
started getting ready for the show. When I checked, I
think Boston only had two offensive rebounds. They only had
like eleven free throw attempts. So that's a clear sign
of you contesting without fouling and getting the defensive rebound. Now,
think of it like this. If you get toasted off
(05:31):
the dribble and somebody has to hard help, and now
everyone's in rotation, nobody's matched up. If nobody's matched up,
then when the shot goes up, it gets that much
harder to box out because now everyone's caught in that
blender and no one has a clear matchup to box out.
But if you flatten out the drive and you make
your rotations easier, and you do a good job in
(05:52):
those rotations, and you work deep into the clock and
the guy has to settle for some tougher contested jump shot,
everyone is now all of a sudden, there aren't these
like free runs to the rim from a wide open
guy because his defender got pulled into rotation. Elsewhere, everything
waterfalls down from containing the basketball. But I want to
(06:14):
be clear, they did an amazing job in all four
of those areas. I want to turn my attention to
Luca for just a minute, because I want to be clear,
because like, there's been a lot of criticism directed towards
Luca in this series, including from myself, and I believe
it's fair. I believe the criticism of some of the
whining at the officials, the stuff with his effort, focus
(06:34):
and energy on the defensive end is completely fair criticism.
And by the way, you want to know why, ask
a Dallas Mavericks fan what do you think of Luca?
Ninety nine percent of them are going to tell you
he's the best player in the world. Ninety nine percent
of them are going to tell you he's an all
time great in the making. Ninety nine percent of them
are going to tell you he's better than this guy,
that guy, and this guy and that guy at that
(06:55):
phase of their careers. What that means is he's held
to a different standards, not held to the standard of
you know, let's say forty year old Lebron James, who's
on the tail end of his prime, and it's like
he's not being held to that best player in the
world standard. You understand, when forty year old Lebron takes
a random possession off here or there. You understand when
(07:18):
you see a player that's not considered one of the
top tier apex predators in the league, making him a
lackadaisical effort or something like that, you just kind of
just allow it, right, You don't even think that much
about it. Luca has put himself through the by virtue
of his greatness under a microscope. That's just that's the
it's the it's at all. It's that old expression. Right,
(07:40):
heavy looks like heavy is the head that wears the crown,
right Like there is a there is a pressure and
an expectation that comes from his individual greatness. I want
to be clear, He's not why they're down for one
in this series. He is the reason why they're here,
as so many have been saying. That is that that
I want to be clear. He his indomitable offensive greatness,
(08:03):
got them to this point. However, it is unquestionable that
this series had a better chance to be competitive had
Luca given a better effort to this point. And again,
as I talked about, like there was so much focus
on the blowbys, and he still got beat off the
dribble a couple of times tonight. But as I said,
like that is nowhere near as damaging as not doing
(08:24):
your job. When the highlight clip was going around, If
you guys remember after I think it was after Game two,
the highlight clip that was going around of Luca getting
blown by and it was like the most blowbys in
over ten years of NBA Finals history, right, If you
guys remember that video, a lot of Mavericks fans were
saying things like, this is by design, this is what
we do. We funnel with Luca's job is to funnel
(08:46):
guys into the paint. Now, that's obviously ridiculous. However, I
guarantee you that Jason Kidd is prepared for that. Luca's
job is to do a better job containing the basketball.
He needs to compete better on the perimeter. That goes
without saying, but there is some truth to the fact
that when Jason Kidd is sitting down with his assistant
coaching staff and they're coming up with the game plan,
(09:08):
they're sitting there like, Luca's gonna give up a certain
amount of dribble penetration. How do we deal with this? Well,
there's obviously the back line element that's the other four players,
but they've crafted a job for Luca. His job after
he gets beat off the dribble is to make the
next rotation. That was something that was missing in the
first three games of this series. There was a specific
(09:30):
play tonight that I thought encapsulated Luca doing that job
a much better in a much better way. Luca gets
beat off the dribble by Jason Tatum in the left corner,
and in the sequence the ball gets worked, driven and
kicked over to the right corner. There's another drive. There's
a drop off to Jason Tatum in the dunker spot
in the right side. Luca had gotten thrown into the
(09:52):
blender with everybody else, but he made an extra rotation.
He came across the lane at the last second, jumped
up with verticality, contested Tatum at the rim, enforced to miss.
That is the important part of the defense. As I
said in the mailbag episode yesterday, the blowbys are the
least concerning thing with Luca. You want him to do better,
(10:13):
and he did a much better job of containing the
basketball tonight, forced a bunch of turnovers by just applying
some physical ball pressure. Luca was much better on the ball.
But the more important piece is making sure he's back
in transition defense. After giving up any sort of dribble penetration,
or if a teammate gives up dribble penetration, being in
(10:33):
the right spot in the rotation, and then making those
efforts on the defensive glass. That is what it takes
to run a functional defense. Every single offensively limited star
or excuse me, I should say defensively limited star, whether
it's Steph Curry in the mid twenty tens or it's
Luka Doncic and Nikola Jokic in this era, they are
(10:53):
still just asked to do a job. Okay, Jokic, you
struggle to protect the rim. Here's what we need you
to do. We need you to come up to the
level of the screen, be active with your hands, and
be more of a disruptor. We'll put more of the
rim protection responsibility of on Aaron Gordon. As long as
you do those things up at the level and you
get back into the lane to grab defensive rebounds, we
(11:14):
can as a team put together a functional defense. And again,
that was all that we were asking for from Luca.
We know he's the reason why they're here. We know
he's an APEX superstar. We know he's on an all
time great trajectory. That shit he did in the first
three games was not good enough. It was not good enough,
did it wasn't befitting of his reputation in the league.
(11:37):
And what you saw tonight was much more in line
with what he's capable of, which is, yeah, he's gonna
get beat off the dribble sometimes, but he can do
his job within the defensive scheme, and I thought he
did a beautiful job of that tonight. In addition to
him and Kyrie completely dominating the game offensively, they pour
in fifty points through the first three quarters, shot fifty
percent from the field, only two turnovers between the two
(11:59):
of them. Come, you've got their best and most efficient
offensive game of the series. By far their best defensive
game of the series. They soundly outplay Jason Tatum and
Jaylen Brown. And by the way, like I want to
be clear about something else, from the beginning of this game,
this was there was an effort element, and we're going
to get into that that You'd be foolish to not
pretend that's not a factor here. However, I did think,
(12:21):
especially early in the game, Tatum and Brown were trying
to get downhill. There were several plays where Mavericks made
defensive slides to cut off driving angles, and Tatum and
Brown were being really persistent about trying to beat that
guy off the dribble. Dallas was just doing doing a
good job of flattening them out, so like it wasn't
for It wasn't like Boston was just passing the ball
(12:42):
around the perimeter and just trying to jack up threes.
Boston was trying to get dribble penetration in this game.
It was the desperate effort from Dallas that rejected those attempts.
And again, it starts from your superstar, it trickles down.
Another guy I really want to shout out tonight is
Derek Lively. At the end the third quarter, get eleven
points and twelve rebounds in just twenty two minutes of play.
(13:04):
He had seven offensive rebounds, just an athletic wrecking ball
in this game. Was really intrigued by that corner three
he hit early on. One of the things with Lively.
I tweeted this out during the game, but like the
when I look at Dallas's potential and like, here's the thing.
Do I think They're going to be back in the
finals next year? Probably not, But that's literally because of
(13:27):
what NBA history tells us, right, Like, we have not
had a Western Conference team make more than one trip
to the finals in the totality of the last six
years since Kevin Durant and Steph Curry broke up as teammates, Right, So,
like that's just the West is too deep with teams.
Chances are we'll be sitting here exactly twelve months from
(13:47):
now talking about a team like the Minnesota Timberwolves, or
the Oklahoma City Thunder or the Memphis Grizzly, just some
random team that just kind of rises from the midst right, Like,
But if there is a dominant version of this Dallas
Maverick team that takes shape over the course of the
next few years, there's your guy. It's Derek Lively. If
Derek Lively turns into Tyson Chandler Across with like a
(14:09):
little bit of Anthony Davis Cross with a little bit
of like legitimate like can shoot corner threes and stretch
the floor a little bit, that's a top thirty, top
thirty five player in the NBA that can be a
profoundly impactful foundational piece alongside Luca and whoever his secondary
star is in the long run, whether it's Kyrie or
it's someone else, and like, just I mean kind of
(14:30):
removing ourselves from the scope of this series for a minute.
Derek Lively, just what if he's just awesome? If he's
just awesome, that could go a long way towards adding
another layer of resilience to what this Dallas Mavericks team
can accomplish year on a year out. What's the pathway
for Dallas. Dallas is going to somehow win this series?
What does it look like? Well, it's really simple. You
(14:51):
gotta win one basketball game on Monday. It's in Boston.
To my Mavericks fans that are listening, are you confident
any you think that you're a better team than Boston,
If any of you think that the level of optimism
that you had going into the series, if you think
there's legitimacy to that, go in a game. Go in
(15:13):
one game in Boston on Monday. Contain. Do exactly what
you did tonight. Work on the ball to contain flap maout,
dribble penetration, make for easier rotations so that it's easier
to contest without fouling, so that you can contain on
the contain defensive rebounds, right, and all of those things
(15:33):
trickle down to transition opportunities, which trickle down into cross
matches which prevent Boston from establishing their game plan. Not
to mention, we have the Porzingis injury wrinkle in all
of this. Right, So go to Boston on Monday and
win one game from there, you're the home team on Thursday,
(15:54):
You'll be favored. You'll be favored to send this thing
back to Boston for a game seven, where the exact
same principle applies. Like, we have never seen a team
come back from down three to zero, but we have
seen a team come back from down three to one
before in the NBA Finals, right, and it's a momentum thing.
Once Cleveland won Game five, which, by the way, how
(16:16):
did they win? They won because Lebron James and Kyrie
Irving went into that building and dropped eighty two points.
Do we think Luca and Kyrie are capable of that?
I sure as hell do that. It's a long shot,
but they're capable of it. Right, you win that game,
you come home with all the momentum. Do you guys
remember that Cavs Warriors Game six, It was like thirty
(16:37):
three to eleven or something in the first quarter, like
they jumped them early. That game was never truly competitive, right,
and then you end up in the knockdown, drag out
fight Game seven. So that's the pathway. If you believe
you're the better team, go into Boston on Monday, execute
on the details, win that game. From there, you have
a home game with a chance to send it to
send yourselves to a winner take all game seven. So yeah,
(17:00):
like do I think that's going to happen? Obviously not,
But that is the pathway, and that's where you have
to drive that belief. And there's no way you can
do it if you don't believe. And that is what
the mentality of that locker room is going to be
over the course of the next couple of days on
the Boston front. Like it's really this simple, Like you
can't fake urgency, it's completely impossible. There's playing hard and
(17:24):
then there's playing like your life depends on it. And
like playing hard is a character thing. It's what we
refer to as motor right. You either have the willingness
to push yourself when you're tired or you don't. Right,
that is like a thing that goes comes down to
the individual, right. But playing hard and playing desperate are
two fundamentally different things. It's impossible to replicate what you
(17:47):
saw tonight was a crazy desperate Dallas effort, right, So
all you have to do is bring that same level
of desperation in game five. For you, it's the exact
same concept in reverse that were talking about with Dallas.
You have to win on Monday, because if you don't,
you got to go to Dallas where they're gonna be
(18:07):
favored to send this thing to seven. Right, So everything
comes down to closing the deal on Monday, bringing that urgency,
flipping that dynamic, riding the home crowd again, a lot
of like game plan discipline stuff. So like Joe Mizula
has been talking a lot about spacing. That was the
quote coming out of halftime. All those same diligent all
(18:27):
the things that Boston was being very diligent about in
the first three games. Getting the right matchup, running action
early in the set to get switches so that you
have Dallas's rim protectors above the break rather than along
the baseline, and then from there creating dribble penetration, hunting
the great shot instead of the good shot. You do
(18:49):
all of that. You score. If you score, you get
to set your defense. If you set your defense, you
don't have transition cross matches. If you don't have transition
cross matches, you can execute your defensive game play, which
is something that Boston has done really well over the
course of this series. I think Boston is gonna win
Game five. However, we would all be foolish to write
(19:10):
off Luca and Kyrie in a must win game like that.
That certainly is a possibility that's on the table. But
I do think Boston is going to close it out
in game five. All Right, Well, you're going to get
into the mailbag, drop questions to the chat, and we're
going to get to as many as we can here
over the next twenty minutes or so. We're this close
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and responsible gaming resources. All right, first question, is Derek
White the best role player in the NBA? If not,
(21:14):
who is? This is a tough one. I'd have to
I'd have to take some time to really think about,
to really think about who the other candidates for that
type of kind of title is. That said, I do
think Derek White is kind of like the perfect NBA
role player. And the main reason why is there's like
a positional versatility with him. Like he's a guard, but
(21:34):
he's pretty big, and he's pretty athletic, and like can
do things with his length and athleticism on the back
line as a rebounder and as a shot blocker. You know,
there was a a comment I can't remember, Oh, it's
a tweet. It was a tweet that came out of
like a report somebody I'm gonna blank on who it was,
but somebody reported that Derek White could be considered for
the Olympic team spot should should Kawhi Leonard be on
(21:59):
a to participate? And when I saw that, I thought
that was interesting because like there's these other names that
you're going to see thrown around, right, Like, well what
about Tyrie? What about Jaylen Brown? And like both of
those guys would certainly be more deserving, right Like, if
you're just going on who has the better basketball reputation,
that player should get the spot. I agree, but strictly's
thinking about the game of basketball. Derek White, to me,
(22:22):
is an incredible spot up player who can run inverted
ball screen actions and has a ton of experience running
inverted ball screen actions, meaning he can set screens for Lebron,
set screens for KD, set screens for Jason Tatum who
will be on that team as well, and pop and
create advantages there a second piece of it, Like Derek
(22:43):
White is a professional off ball player, he is a
professional off of Superstars player, right. He is a guy
that has made his living learning how to be next
to a supreme talent and fit his talent a lot
longside what he does and to accentuate what the team does.
(23:03):
And so I actually reeded when I saw that. I
was like, Derek White would be perfect. He'd be willing
to take an on ball defensive role like it was
the most important thing that he's doing. Right. I think
Derek White is the consummate NBA role player that you
could plug into any team anywhere around the league. He's
great above the break, he's great in the corners. He
(23:24):
can run action, he can run inverted action. He's an
athlete that can impact the game on both ends. I
absolutely think that Derek White's in the conversation for best
role player in the NBA. Let's see should Joe Mizzoula
play Krisops Porzingis in Game five? There's two things that
you have to factor in here when it comes to Porzingis. One,
(23:44):
like Boston has a chance to repeat, like they're not
in the Western Conference where it's like ten bloodbath teams
every single year. Like the East is gonna be better
next year, but I think Boston is gonna be favored
to win the East next year, right, And so what
you can't do with is risk potentially him having some
sort of bigger injury that extends into next year or
(24:07):
affects his ability to stay in shape over the summer. Right, Like,
we don't even know what the fallout of this injury
is going to be like in the short term. So
there's that piece of it. There's like a risk reward factor.
If you think you can win the series without porzingis
you got to try to win the series without porzingis.
Second piece of it is how's mobility? Like, part of
what happened with Christops porzingis is he was playing awesome
(24:30):
in the first two games and a lot of that
had to do with his mobility. After he kind of
tweaked it, he wasn't playing as well, right, So, like
it doesn't matter if he's out there. If he's not
Christops porzingis, So like it really depends on the coaching
staff to know how much risk there is for severe
additional injury and two and I guess that's up to
(24:50):
the medical staff. And then two for the coaching staff.
How well is he actually moving? Is he actually moving
in a way where he can impact things? Because if
he's not, then it's not worth it all. Right, next question,
is there an argument that Tatum is the most switchable
defender in the league. So uh yeah, absolutely at this
point in time, because like we've seen, like there are
guys that are in that conversation for like best permitter defender,
(25:11):
Guys that are like Jaden McDaniels, who are like too
thin to guard the bigger, stronger players in the league.
But like to be clear, like Lucas had a lot
of success against Jason Tatum in this series too, So
like I wouldn't go as far as to say, like
some of that's just Luca being unguardable, right, But yeah, Tatum,
with his size and strength, should in theory be able
to do a better job on him than a guy
(25:32):
like Jada McDaniels. A. Jalen Suggs is another guy who's
regarded as one of the best permitter defenders in the league.
He's a touch on the small side, right, like Lou
Dort is a guy that I think can cause a
lot of problems to some power players, but like you know,
he can be a little bit on the underside side
in terms of lengths. So what about pull up shooters
when it comes to against a guy like him. Tatum
has that unique capability of like real size and strength
(25:55):
and perimeter mobility. Now, I don't think Tatum has been
the same level of defender that he was in twenty
twenty two this year. I think Jalen Brown has made
improvements since then. I think Tatum has gone down a
little bit of a level since then. But like, Tatum
hasn't done as good a job on the perimeter in
this series, but he's been really good at the rim.
He's been really good on the defensive glass, He's done
(26:17):
a good job holding up under any sort of physicality
that Gafford brings to the table. But like in terms
of switchability, meaning actual ability to guard one through five,
Tatum is certainly in that conversation. Again, I'd have to
think more about it to give you guys an actual list.
Let's see how do the Warriors become contenders next season. So,
anytime I see a team get written off, and we
just saw this last year with Dallas and we're seeing
(26:39):
it this year with Golden State, when you're writing a
team off, usually if they've got a couple of real
key foundational pieces, in this case Kyrie and Luca, or
in the Warriors case like Steph Curry. Some draft compensation.
Jonathan kaminga Draymond Green is still one of the best
defensive players in the league. Right, You've got foundational pieces,
so it's really about smart Tweaks. It's a little bit
(27:00):
more complicated for Golden State because Steph wasn't playing well
to end the season. He was like he was like
seventy five percent of himself for basically the last half
of the year. So like Steph is gonna have to
one get back to being Steph and then just smart Tweaks.
I think they absolutely have to get a bona fide
secondary shot creator. There's been a lot of buzz surrounding
(27:21):
like Zach Lavine with Golden State. In recent weeks. I've
talked about like Dejontay Murray. We've talked about, you know,
like like more on the margins moves, guys like Michale Bridges.
There are a bunch of different directions they could go.
But whoever that guy is, he needs to be somebody
that can legitimately take the reins from Steph for large
doses of basketball games. One of the underrated pieces of
(27:44):
the Warriors decline over the last couple of years is
Jordan Poole, kind of fell off and Andrew Wiggins kind
of fell off, and those two guys kind of like
combined for that legitimate secondary star in terms of offensive firepower.
I don't know that Wiggans ever is going to get
back to that, and Jordan is gone. I don't think
Chris Paul is going to be that. I'm not even
sure if he's gonna be on the roster next year.
(28:05):
So like you got to find a bona fide secondary
shot creator. A little bit more interior size, I think
is the second piece. I actually like their wing athleticism.
They just need to have a big look where they
can be more physically imposing, maybe a Draymond Green at
the four type of look. But again, don't underestimate small
tweaks on the margins and how they can improve a
(28:25):
team like Dallas literally just got a like a couple
of rim runners and a legitimate forward in PJ. Washington
and they nailed one veteran minimum signing and then boom
NBA Finals. So like that, that's again this stuff is
I always talk about that quote that I got from
(28:47):
Mark Titus that basketball is more art than science. That's
the kind of thing I'm talking about, Like you can't
just add up the pieces on paper. There's like a
synergy to the way basketball players fit together, and slight
tweaks that accentuate each other's strength can kind of lock
into place and allow you to become a basketball team
that is greater than the sum of its parts. With
the passing of the great Jerry West, I've always wondered
(29:08):
your favorite players from the older generations, and who do
you think would play well in today's NBA. I'm not
going to go that far back, mainly just because for me,
like as a basketball fan, I especially when you go
out past the eighties, I just I have not watched
enough of those guys to give an educated opinion on
(29:29):
how an opinion about how I believe they would fit
into today's game. All I will say is like, for me,
the guys that I ended up watching a ton of
even though I didn't watch them when I was actually
a kid, but more as an adult, is like the
kind of players that kind of had my same build.
So like I'm six ' six, I have long arms,
and I play on the wing. So like I watched
(29:50):
a lot of Bobbie Bryant growing up, I watched a
lot of Michael Jordan. Growing up, I watched a lot
of Grant Hill, Anny Hardaway, those kind of guys, because
those guys just kind of like played a we had
similar like frame to me, so like I would try
to play like they played because I wanted to do
the kind of things that they could do. And so
those are the guys that, like, I watched a lot
(30:10):
of like film on and things along those lines, and
I've watched a lot of like NBA Classic games and
stuff like that. But when it comes to like Jerry
West generation, I'm just so under exposed to them. And
one of the things that I try to do on
this show is like not talk about things unless i'm
unless I've done the appropriate amount of research. And so
so I don't talk about the draft until we get
out of the finals. I'm not going to sit here
(30:30):
and pontificate about draft picks when I haven't done the
requisite research. But interesting question again to me, Jerry West,
like I said this on the show with Colin, to me,
he's just one of the great basketball geniuses of all time,
and I look at things like him putting Kobe and
Shack together, him stopping the Kevin love for Klay Thompson,
trade him kind of like being one of the guys,
(30:50):
one of the in the brain trust that assembled to Clippers,
and they're the Clippers were supposed to be like Boston
in so many different ways, right and we're seeing that
come to fruition in the championship right now. So like
to me, Jerry West was just kind of in touch
with where the game of basketball was going and was
one of the great geniuses of our time. Hey, Jason
fan from India enjoyed the content. I've been learning a
lot about about basketball. Keep up the good work. Oh,
(31:12):
by the way, thank you for the kind words to
sincerely appreciate it. The one professional basketball contract I signed
before I hung up the shoes was in India. I
was going to play in this league called the Uba.
They paid me for like two weeks and then the
league and then the league folded. And then at that
point I like looked at my wife and I was like,
I can't keep doing this. I just got to go
to work. But I got to meet the When when
(31:33):
that league was being put to it was in like
the third or fourth season. They were doing like a
major showcase here in the US, and they've like flew
all these people out and I got to meet a
ton of people that actually live in India and it
was just like a really cool part of that experience.
And big one if for me in my life is
always wonder what would happened if that season would have
(31:54):
come to Fruition and then I would have gone over there.
Work ethic and psycho competitiveness is paramount to the greats.
As a GM, how do you evaluate players in the
draft for that intangible So here's the thing, Like I'm
a big believer in kind of staying in your wheelhouse.
It's impossible for me to really get into touch with
the intangibles of draft prospects because the people that do
(32:18):
it year round and watch every single interview, they do,
watch every single one of their games and really keep
an eye on their motor in the different their their
competitiveness within games and things along those lines. For me,
I have to do kind of a very abbreviated version
of that. Like the NBA Finals, let's say they end
on Monday, that's what the seventeenth. So like, I'm going
to have less than two weeks to prepare for the draft,
(32:40):
and so for me, I'm gonna be primarily focusing on
skills like skills and tape, Like just as much as
I can digest in a short period of time, that's it.
If I was working in the draft, that would be
a major element to my focus on player development, Like
player evaluations, I should say to me, Like, it goes
(33:01):
into the competitiveness or your you're like being a psycho,
your work ethic, those sorts of things, those to me,
they don't just manifest in skill development, they manifest in
the games, right, Like in order to be the kind
of player that buys into a defensive scheme and is
willing to do the dirty work, you've got to be nasty,
(33:23):
You've got to be competitive. There are no there are
no lazy guys that do that type of job. Right
But in addition to that, it's about the competitiveness, the pettiness,
the wanting to be better than the guy next to you.
That's what drives you on a daily basis to put
in the work. And one of the things I talk
about a lot on the show. And I know this
just from my own personal experience because I went through
(33:43):
skill development in my twenties because I was so late
to pick up the game of basketball, Like it's incremental guys,
Like you shoot ten thousand jump shots over the course
of two months over the summer, and you might get
this much better, like it is a year over year,
like just painstaking effort to improve your game on the margins.
(34:04):
The same thing goes with ball handling, ball handling and shooting,
Like you might experience some initial improvement, but it plateaus
pretty quickly and then it's like incremental improvement and so
like you got to be the psycho to be the
guy that improves in those areas, and it requires like
if you're just going into the gym three four times
a week over the summer with the trainer and shooting
a couple hundred shots, like that's literally not going to
(34:25):
do it. There is a psycho level of work you
have to achieve on a day to day basis to
make those sorts of improvements. How much of Browning having
better production than Jason Tatum in this playoffs has been
based on how they're being defended, for example, being guarded
by Nempard versus Nie Smith. It's a huge factor, right,
Like Tatum's always getting the primary defensive player. In terms
(34:47):
of the actions, it's the same, Like both guys are
getting the same help. Both guys are getting like aggressive
coverages and ball screens and things along those lines. But
there's no doubt in terms of the individual matchup, Tatum
has a tougher shake. One of the bigger pieces of
it is just the jump shooting. Though Jason Tatum is
just having a nightmare jump shooting postseason, Jalen Brown is
shooting better. That's the give and take of basketball, right,
(35:10):
Like if I always talk about like defenders being on
their toes or being on their heels, if they are
terrified of you shooting a jumper, they're going to be
up on their toes, which will make it easier for
you to go around them. If they're terrified of you
getting downhill, they're going to be on their heels. But
if they only have to worry about one of those things,
they can really sit on whatever that is. And so
(35:33):
Jason Tatum, it's like offer a late contest and he's
missing it right now. So like these guys are, it
makes containing him easier in dribble drive situations. So again,
I think it's part of it's the matchups. Part of
it is Jason Tatum is having a bad jump shooting
stretch and by the way, that can happen. That's part
of the game of basketball, right Like Lebron James last
(35:53):
year had the worst jump shooting season he's had in
ten years, and then this year he had the best
jump shooting season he's had in ten years. I'm sure
he worked hard last summer. I'm sure that was part
of it, but it's not like Lebron made some gigantic
improvement year over year in terms of his actual core
shooting capability. He had a rough season, he had a
(36:14):
hot season. Jason Tatum has been in a shooting slump
that's been lasting for a few months now. Who would
you favor in a potential Game six in Dallas? So
Boston deserves to be heavy favorite in Game five, right
as they should be if Dallas were to steal that game.
My guess is the line will be very slightly in Dallas.
His favorite something like Dallas minus point five. I also
(36:34):
wouldn't be surprised if Boston was a very slight favorite
in that game, like a minus one and a half,
a minus point five, something like that. For me going
into Game six in Dallas, it'd be a coin flip
for me. Main reason why is Boston's been really good
on the road. I do believe Boston is the better team.
I think that Boston has more advantages in this series.
And so even if Dallas were to get some sort
(36:55):
of crazy Kyrie Luca effort to steal Game five, I'd
still make it basically a coin flip in Game six,
but Dallas absolutely could win that game. What do you
(37:16):
think of Jordan Pool to the Nuggets. Wow, that's a
really interesting type of deal. I went on Washington Sports
radio a few days ago, and I was talking a
lot about how I wouldn't give up on Jordan Pool,
and so I imagine they'll keep him. I think that
young guards in particular have very volatile, you know, kind
of life cycles, and so I think that, you know,
Jordan Pool at age twenty seven is going to be
(37:38):
a pretty steady pro and I think whatever team bets
on that is going to have some success. Or the
reason why simple Jordan Poole can beat people off triple
inting knockdown jump shots. He's like, that's a really good combination.
Like he's quick as hell and he can knock down
jump shots. Now, you hadn't shot the ball well in
a couple of years, but that capability is certainly there.
We've seen it in the past. As far as the
(37:59):
Nuggets fit though, one of the things I talked about
a lot with the Nuggets. I love everything about that
team except for they don't have anybody that can just
generate dribble penetration since Bruce Brown has has left right,
Like everything with Jokich's size related, Jamal Murray's screen related right,
So like having a guy like Jordan Pooh can beat
people off the dribble would be a would be a
(38:20):
huge asset to that team. It'd be tricky to figure
out how to do the to work out that type
of deal, though, especially at his salary. Is Luca a
younger James Harden, an excellent scorer who doesn't know what
defense is. No, Luca's a way better version of James Harden.
In my opinion, James Harden was. James Harden was. What
happens when analytics takes too much of a role in
(38:44):
constructing an NBA offense. For instance, like James Harden, the
step back three, the left handed drive off of the
off of the between the legs dribble, and the occasional
crossover back to the right. Everything with James Harden in
his prime was at the rim step back three. The
rim step back three added a little bit of a
floater in twenty nineteen right, but like there was a
(39:07):
predictability with James Harden that made him easier to defend
as playoff series progressed. One of the reasons why I
think Luca has been a better player in the postseason
than James Harden is he never it seems like every
attack from him looks different. Like he's willing to attack
from the post. He's willing to attack straight iso, but
(39:28):
he's also willing to attack in ball screens. He's not
just taking step back threes. He's also getting into the
mid range. He's taking step backs from the mid range.
He's taking turnaround jumpers from the mid range. He can
put you in jail and kind of like manipulate things
from the middle of the floor. James Harden never would
stop in the middle of the floor in his prime.
In the twenty eighteen twenty nineteen stretch, that little like
(39:52):
kind of right handed push shot where he kind of
powers his way along the right lane line and kind
of fights her position and shoots that little pop shot
Like there's just so much more variety in Luca's game.
That makes him a much more a much more resilient
offensive player, especially against elite defenses down the line, as
far as the defensive end of the floor. Like, I
think Luca's gonna learn his lesson. I think he's just young.
(40:13):
I think he's arrogant. I think he needs to have
humiliation to kind of like have that slam slapped in
his face, right, Like I've talked about it with Lebron
all the time, Like twenty eleven, Lebron got embarrassed. Dude,
your jump shots two inconsistent. You don't have much of
it back to the basket game. You just you in
general just aren't good enough in these details to get
(40:34):
to where you want to go. And like a huge
part of what turned around his career twenty twelve in
twenty thirteen was his ability to turn his back to
the basket against KWHI Leonard, his ability to knock down
over the top jumpers, like his jumper saved him literally
in twenty twelve on the road in Game six in
Boston when they were down three to two, Like, Lebron
(40:54):
reached a level as a player as a result of
humiliation he like remember, he like disappeared that entire summer,
like didn't talk to anybody when he came back to
following seasons like reading books and shit, and like he
was just like Lebron, like got straight up humbled in
twenty eleven and it made him a better version of himself.
I think Luca needed to. I think Luca needed to
(41:15):
get punched in the mouth and like, hey, dude, you're
really fucking good, but you're not good enough and there's
these clear areas where you can improve, and I think
this series is amounting to that for Luca. What are
your thoughts on the Luca Carmelo cump As players. I
don't really see how they're that similar, even if I
point out the point, even if I get the point
about the poor defense, So don't look at it so
much as the player cump because obviously they're very very
(41:39):
different types of players. Right, Luca is a playmaking forward.
Carmelo is a scoring forward, but lucas also an elite scorer.
Right Like to me, Luca is just a much better
player with a much better standing in the league. I
never thought Carmelo was like a true Apex superstar, Like
he was just always in that second tier for me,
(42:00):
Like even when he was on those really good Denver
Nuggets teams in the late two thousands, Like I never
thought he was like at the Kobe level, at the
Lebron level. I always thought he was just like a
tier below that. I think Luca's been an APEX star
for you know, the better part of a half decade now.
So like to me, I don't see that specific side
of the cup where I do agree. And the point
(42:23):
that I think Colin is trying to point out is
like it's about unachieved potential. Like Luca's insanely good, and
he can be so much better. Like if he actually
became psycho competitive about how he cares for his body
and he became like a leaner, more muscular, better conditioned
version of himself, that's just a way better basketball player.
(42:44):
And when you combine that with the mentality to be
engaged on the defensive end, he can achieve anything. He
could be the goat that like, that's he could absolutely
go on a run and be remembered. As in the
conversation with Lebron James and Michael Jordan, that is an
absolute potential for Luca. But it is non negotiable that
(43:04):
he addresses those things. I don't think Carmelo ever had
that potential. But if you talked about what held him back,
it's the same things. It's a lack of attention to
a health and fitness and a lack of commitment to
the details, especially on the defensive end of the floor.
So I think that's the point he was trying to make. Again, like,
it's not a perfect comp but there are some similarities there. Somehow,
(43:27):
some way, somebody has to break the streak and win
from down to three. Could it be this Maps team?
Of course it could, It's just not likely. What I
always talk about with this is any team that has
the ability to go up three to zero has advantages
that allowed them to go up three to zero. You
don't go three up three to zero as a fluke.
You do it with advantages, right, So like, in order
(43:48):
for you to turn around and do the same thing
and win four in a row, you better have all
the advantages, and that would require roster dynamics flipping. So like,
I think the team that eventually breaks the three streak,
and it'll happen eventually, But the team that eventually breaks
the oh three Strake. It's gonna be injury related. It's
gonna be some team that goes up three to zero
(44:08):
and then some sort of pivotally pivotally important member of
the team gets hurt and then suddenly it just flips
all those advantages, and then the team with the advantages,
which is the down oh three team, is able to
rack together some wins just for fun. Who do you
think would win a seven game series between the twenty
twenty Lakers and the twenty twenty four Celtics. I just
think it's an interesting matchup when comparing champions. So I
(44:32):
think the twenty twenty Lakers are the best team since
the two thousand and Night since the twenty eighteen Warriors.
Main reason why is it's the only team in that
span that had two bona fide top five players in
the league. The Raptors had Kawhi. Your second best player
is Pascal Siakam, Right, the twenty twenty one Bucks, it's
like Giannis, and then it's Chris Middleton and Drew Drew Holliday. Right,
(44:56):
it's twenty twenty two Warriors, it's Steph Curry, and then
it's like Andrew Wiggins is probably second best player on
the team Denver Nuggets, it's Nicole Jokic and Jamal Murray
is really good. I have the Nuggets, I think if
I remember correctly, have him second in that list, but
like that team had like Jamal Murray is like somewhere
around the fifteenth to sixteenth best player in the league, right.
And then you have the Celtics team where I think
(45:17):
they have two guys that are in that like six
to ten range, right, So, like the Lakers had the
unbelievable top end star power. As far as the matchup goes,
the Lakers actually matchup pretty well with the Celtics because
they were an excellent team on the perimeter. Defensively they
had had They started Game six of the NBA Finals
against the Miami Heat with Lebron James, Anthony Davis, Alex Caruso,
(45:40):
Contavious Colwall Pope, and Danny Green. That's KCP dominant perimeter defender,
Alex Cruso dominant perimeter defender. Twenty twenty was the last
great defensive season of Lebron's career. Anthony Davis was the
best defensive player in the world. Danny Green was the
worst defensive player in that lineup. The Lakers would have
had the best player in the series. They'd had the
best two players in the series. Now, as we all know,
(46:02):
the Anthony Davis host twenty twenty, by virtue of injuries
and a lack of commitment to the details, has declined
as a jump shooter and has become a player that's
actually down in that tier with Jayson Tatum and Jaylen
Brown now. But in twenty twenty, he was better than
both of those guys, and than these versions of both
of these guys. Like you guys remember Ad in the bubble,
he was like like Kevin Durant mixed with the best
(46:24):
defensive player in the world right like he was. There
was a case to make that he was at the
same level as Lebron, and it was certainly close. Although
I still think Lebron is the best player in the
world at that point. Do you think Jalen Brown can
reach top tier superstar status. I don't know. I never
want to say never, especially to a top tier athlete.
(46:45):
The one thing with Jylen Brown that I think would
hold him back is even as he's made improvements as
a playmaker, most of the top tier superstars are at
least above average playmakers, and I don't think Jalen Brown
has ever been able to reach that level, but I
would never say never with a guy like Jaylen Brown. Hypothetical,
who would you have picked in the twenty twenty two
Western Conference Finals had the Sons beat the MAVs in
(47:06):
Game seven and played the Warriors, that's interesting, but give
me the give me the Warriors. I think Steph Curry
would have been the best player in the series by
a mile. That Suns team in particular two like they.
I was never as high on that Sun's team as
everybody else. They in twenty twenty one, I thought the
Lakers would have beat him if Anthony Davis didn't get hurt.
The reason why they made it to the finals had
(47:27):
a lot to do with injuries they ended up facing
that injured the Clippers team in the conference finals. Their
best player was Devin Booker, and I really like Devin Booker,
but I don't think Devin Booker is an APEX star.
They would have been. I would have picked the Warriors
against them, for sure. Saw a summer trade rumor of
marketing into the Knicks. What do you think of that?
That'd be awesome? That's like a now I think one
(47:50):
of the things with the Knicks is I think they
similarly to what we talked about the Warriors, I think
they need a legitimate secondary shot creator, and unfortunately Market
is more of a play finisher than a shot creator,
but he would certainly make them better as like kind
of a slot into that Julius Randall position and putting
ogn and Obi at the three. But if I was,
if I was the Knicks, I'd be targeting someone who's
(48:12):
more capable of creating things off the bounce. Should Lively
be considered the third best rookie behind Chet and Wemby.
That's tough, certainly, certainly if you're factoring in postseason contributions, right,
I'd have to go back and look at all the rookies,
but certainly considering postseason postseason contributions. Did Joe Missoula leak
(48:32):
the formula to playing against Luca? So? I talked about
this after game was a one or two? I can't remember,
but like, I immediately thought back to the Minnesota series and
I was like, man, shouldn't should they have just put
Jaden McDaniels on Daniel Gafford and put Rudy goo Baer
(48:54):
and Derek Jones Junior and done the exact same thing essentially,
meaning put your biggest forward on Dallas's lob threats, put
your rim protector on their bad above the break shooters,
which are Derek Jones and PJ. Washington. I don't know
if it would have been enough to turn around the
Minnesota series because Minnesota had issues on the other end
(49:14):
with their inability to penetrate Dallas's load up the strong
side type of defense. But like this, I do think
that Joe Miszoula has put together probably the best game plan.
And again, like when people talk about the Mavericks, like
their build is fine, they have rim protection, they have
perimeter defenders, they have the superstars. The one weakness is
(49:35):
they do not have a guy who can both guard
on the perimeter and hit above the break threes consistently.
So if you look at their situation, there's not really
a ton of opportunity to improve the roster this summer,
especially because they've gone all in in so many different ways.
But what I would do is I'd go to PJ.
Washington and I'd be and Derek Jones and I'd be like,
(49:57):
and who knows, Derek Jones might end up being poached
this summer because he had such good season and mostly
maybe the I think the Mavericks will probably try to
keep them with their mid level exception. But if if
Dallas can keep Derek Jones in PJ. Washington, you basically
point point to those guys in their postseason kind of
like wrap up meeting, and you say, above the break
(50:18):
threes all summer long, above the break threes and corner threes,
above the break threes and corner threes. Again, it's there's
a there's a It's not about winning one series against
a really good team. You have to beat four teams,
and every team is going to defend you in different ways.
Boston did put together a nice formula with Joe Miszula
(50:38):
for how to slow down Dallas' offense, and the only
counter for that is to be able to either have
Derek Lively turn into a three point shooter so that
he can pick and pop in those situations, or to
have Derek Jones PJ. Washington, that group of guys, Josh Green,
you know, that group of guys become effective above the
break shooters. Because again, if you if we look at
the geometry of the four, if the dunker spot is
(51:01):
occupied because Tatum or the other team's best forward is there,
and guys are glued up on the corners because they
don't need to help because the biggest forward is under
the rim. Then you're setting ball screens to attack their
center with your forward. If Luca's trying to get downhill
in that ball screen, just imagine the geometry of the
floor center in the dunker spot, Luca driving shooters in
(51:24):
the corners. That's four players. Where is the opening. The
entire above the brake line is open. If you have
that guy, the guy setting the screen in this case,
Derek Jones or PJ. Washington, if you have them roll,
they're rolling into all that shit show underneath the rim.
If you have them pop, there's just a ton of
opening above the brake and those guys are going to
(51:44):
be wide open every single time. So like that is
the ultimate counter to what Boston is doing is you've
got to You've got to force whoever it is that
they'll stop at that point because they won't want their
rim protector being pulled out above the break. You can
literally cancel out that adjustment and force them to go
back to putting their center on your center as long
(52:06):
as that guy's capable of hitting above the break threes,
and so that I think is going to be a
big kind of like skill development piece that PJ and
Derek Jones or whoever it is that they end up
filling that spot with. We'll have to work on over
the summer. All right, guys, that is all I have
for tonight. I sincerely appreciate you guys' participation in the
mail bag and as always for supporting the show. We're
(52:27):
going to run. This mail bag is breakout clips probably
on Saturday and Sunday, and then we'll be back with
Colin on Monday night to break down Game five after
the final buzzer live on YouTube. I will see you guys.
Then the volume
Hosts And Creators
Colin Cowherd
Jason McIntyre
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