Well, watched a good portion of Miami vs Boston and a bit of Houston vs Lakers to celebrate the start of NBA season, which really gets underway tomorrow with Dino and I at the Oracle after being tortured by the Giants for a couple hours!
A couple random thoughts...
Firstly, Miami looked almost exactly like Cleveland to me. I know they all have to play together more, and Wade has to get into game shape and all that, but it really felt eerily similar. Good, scrappy defense, no real offensive flow, and the revelation that any team is going to be at least close at the end with Lebron. They really put a scare into Boston after looking dead in the water to start, but ultimately the Celtics dragged a win from the swamp of fairly ugly basketball. I imagine at some point we'll start oooing and ahhing at the Heat, but this wasn't one of those nights. Perhaps when they play the Wizards, or someone else that doesn't match up so perfectly with them.
Also, I was really baffled by Rondo's play. I think that dude is seriously altered in the head. He's so immensely talented, and yet I think, like Artest, that part of his edge comes from being erratic. There is not a player on the Heat who can come close to slowing him down, and yet he was remarkably passive. I mean, it's hard to call a 17 assist game passive, but a lot of those assists came from just dealing to Ray Allen off of screens. Part of that was Wade playing defending him from about 20 feet sagged under the basket, but I also wondered about the psychology of being cut from the FIBA team. Is he sulking? Or perhaps confidence hurt? In fact, why WAS he cut from the FIBA team in the first place? Couldn't beat out Eric Gordon fer chrissake? This a a guy who was one of the 5 most terrifying players in the playoffs last year. Anyway, he didn't have a horrible game, but he just looked out of sorts some how. Weird.
I realized after Dino's post about the Heat a little while back, that I am, in fact, a hater. And the more I thought about it, I realized I have always been a Lebron hater. "Hate" in the street sense, of course. I don't actually HATE the guy. I just have always been skeptical, and almost always have been proven wrong. I really like the Free Darko Almanac piece about him, and I think maybe that's what turned me off a little. He has Jordan's dedication to business and himself in a way that feels a little hollow. I never got hooked into rooting for his improvement. But I also think it's something about me, that I can't really get behind obvious prodigy genius. I need someone to be a bit ragamuffin, to work harder, like choosing Beethoven over Mozart. I've always rooted for him to fail. There, my secrets out.
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ReplyDeleteray allen sunk the heat with a three, three hours later steve blake sunk the rockets with a three. as many times as i told myself that this was just the first game of 81 more, it was hard to escape the feeling that these two teams are once again on a collision course, and every other effort is ultimately futile.... sigh. lakers and celtics look ridiculously deep. take note of how the lakers won that game, kobe on the bench and blake and shannon brown scoring most of the points, as well as pau. kobe being slower and hurt is probably the best thing that could have happened to them. their biggest weakness has always been kobe shooting too much.
chris webber said the heat played the best terrible game he's ever seen. that sums it up pretty well. i still can't figure out how they got within 3, they nearly won that game. they looked comically bad and out of sync. i think lebron reverted to the cleveland approach because nothing else was working, they have no chemistry yet, and almost no offensive coaching yet. a few little glimmers tho in this game of new things we might see, like running some screens to get lebron in good post position. he is amazing in the post! but a little awkward finishing those moves still. i hope they do that more and develop that because, wow, that could be, yea. something.