Meh, a lot of exaggeration around here. But certainly, something to address. Stevens' penchant for going small doesn't help matters much, overplaying Sullinger in those units doesn't help matters much since he sucks on them. But if the other bigs are playing like crap, what can you do?
I see a lot of finger pointing last night to Sullinger around the blog, yet there's a distinctive lack of mention to the poor job Amir (who's primary assignment was Towns) and Zeller (who is the only player with the actual required size to defend opposing centers) did.
I mean, you also had some plays in which Sullinger was the only player boxing-out surrounded by other 3 white jerseys with no man on them. Before crying about lack of length to defend, there are so many small details that can be corrected to begin with and go from there.
Towns is a monster though. As for all the crying about how KO would've made the difference defensively, I think it's a lot of BS. Towns and Dieng are simply bad match-ups for us, with or without KO. They played very well this year against us prior to this one.
I'll also point out that Towns had big games against Toronto, New York, and Chicago in the past couple of weeks... three teams who don't suffer from length issues at all.
At some point people need to stop extrapolating things from single games, but further than that, recognize how dominant and legit talent Towns is.
There is no doubt about Town's talent, but it seems every big 6-10 or greater has been having their way with us. Even Gorgi Deng had a good game and he is no where near where Town's is. I don't blame Danny for not overpaying for a rental but I hope we can get some inside help this offseason.
As much as Towns, Dieng has had big games recently to teams that have the personnel for better interior defending.
There's plenty that can be done schematically, and more attention to detail. Having length is not really the main answer to that, else Zeller would've been a better solution for us than he's been for us this season.
Zeller has a shorter wingspan than Sullinger so he's actually not a more lengthy option.
Besides Towns/Dieng hurting us. Gobert and Favors also killed us. As did Greg Monroe and to a lesser extent even Robin Lopez. It's not just a reaction to last night, it's a reaction to what I have seen the entire year against traditional centers.
While I don't think it's a huge problem because not everyone has traditional centers like this who are issues, I would like to see the Celtics add a traditional center to the team next year.
I do think it's a problem that needs some addressing, but I think there's a lot of discounting how these players perform against other teams, and also other bigs that have had good performances against top interior defenders.
I don't think we're being "as killed" in the big scheme of things as it's been made out to be, though it's an area that certain types of players can certainly take advantage of.
For example, I already illustrated how Towns/Dieng have been playing recently outside of their play against the Celtics.
Robin Lopez just had a big game against Toronto and Minnesota (whose bigs we're apparently salivating over). He had another huge game recently against Dummond.
Gobert/Favors have been having big games all season long against a lot of teams.
Part of what I'm pointing out also is that our teams, from what I've seen, is not struggling all that much more than other teams. Seems to me that teams in general as a rule have trouble protecting the paint with few exceptions.
I'll point out that I'm not trying to argue that it's not an area we should be trying to improve (better collection of talent and/or schematically), but speaking of getting destroyed all year seems a bit exaggerated and spoken as if it were an aberration to what other teams are going through. But we're playing it by ear her, I'd love to discuss this more with actual numbers... that I don't have access to right now sadly.
We also have the context that we have a team that likes to play small, but don't have all the ideal bigs we'd like for such units, so we get burned a lot when that happens. Not really the full case last night as those two were beating us up regardless of our units. But in general we're sacrificing a lot of what remains to be somewhat competent in the middle in favor of looking for more advantages in other areas.
I do think that Stevens needs to employ double teams a bit more against some particular players. For example, like we did against Lopez when Olynyk was starting. Those strategies have seemed to work quite well for us since we have very good perimeter defenders who can switch and recover with just about anyone. So that's something I'd like to see to address some of those issues prior to bemoaning the lack of length with which we can do nothing about and doesn't guarantee that we'd play better schematically.
Also one has to wonder how much of our struggles defensively of other bigs occur when they need to over-help the player Thomas is defending. Just a lot of going on outside of lacking length that we can get better at.
Topic: Getting destroyed in the middle all year (Read 9844 times)