Bucks @ Home

This will be a boxed set version of Scott's Shots, as I was busy juggling hosting a box, going to my seats, and looking after a 9 month old....

- Raps are back to comping and discounting tickets to schools again to pump up attendance. Cool by me, though, since it helps create a homecourt environment.
- MLSE sent out a survey recently asking opinions of in-house entertainment. Guess I wasn't alone in complaining about it. The new video and the U2 crap does nothing to get people pumped.
- Garbo comes out playing hard. Great swat early on.
- this game could get to 140-120 if they don't slow down hitting the threes. It's like 2 boxers coming out and going stroke for stroke.
- Juan Dixon is SMALL. I mean S M A L L. He's also still learning, but at least he is listening to his teammates as opposed to jumping in feet first and assuming he can get it done on his own.
- CV is in rare company: actually got nice applause when he entered the game.
- speaking of CV, he is showing no ill affects of his injury.
- Raps cannot break the zone. If this is still a prize fight, the Bucks just hit an uppercut.
- Guess Bargs decided to one-up Vince of old and stay and play a game.
- the double teams on Bosh are incredibly fast and effective. He looks helpless.
- well, one good thing for the Raps now that the shots are back to normal: more opportunity to learn how to rebound.
- my castle to the person that can teach Bosh how to hit free throws.
- men drinking wine is like a male dog squating to pee.
- if you had to pick 20 guys to play in a pickup game, you could do much worse than Michael Redd.
- Bogut was angry about playing time and touches earlier in the year. The anger looks to have been recognized. He got some nice touches. I wonder why he doesn't hustle more though.
- is it just me or does the home team tonight remind you of last year's home team? One improvement is ball movement, bless their hearts, but nothing is falling now and only token defense is being shown.
- this Bucks team is a great example of why I say that this season has been an incredibly odd one. They still aren't at complete full strength but they are running and hitting like the Bucks of old. I don't care, though...we have been decimated in the past, so lump it.
- so, 2nd best team in 2007, playing well above their anticipated abilities, #1 in their division....and you boo them. Classy. Admit defeat by a better team tonight and re-load.
- I don't think the Raps are this bad, even considering how much I have been critical. They had a bad luck night. What the did do, though, was cancel out the Houston win. They need to play well in Cleveland and take advantage of a reeling team.


www.altraps.com

Ladies and gents, welcome to The Other Side, a less-than-conventional look at the Raptors, the NBA, and occasionally life in general. Let's dive in.

In like a lion, out like a lamb. The Raptors went into this season on a flurry of trades, and they weren't the only ones. Seems only fitting, then, that deadline day should come and go with Fred Jones for Juan Dixon being the biggest deal. I can't remember a quieter deadline day since I've been watching the league. This trade can only be good for the Raptors: Fred Jones was doing nothing, and Juan Dixon costs less. Even if he does nothing too, we've saved money and cut a year off the books.

Speaking of Dixon, he's been making all the right noises about defense. Of course, we've heard that noise before. As I mentioned on www.altraps.com, I give it 3 games before that platitude evaporates, and defense becomes that minor inconvenience between shot opportunities. There is a contagion on this team, that seems to affect even the good defenders like Parker and Mo Pete. It saps their will to defend and replaces it with a shot-happy persona. Hopefully, with those two, Garbajosa and now Dixon, all having made noises about defense, we can reverse the trend. Me? Not holding my breath.

That sound you heard last night was the Raptors crashing to earth. We got spanked, soundly, by the best defensive team in the league. Bosh got owned, like he did against Rasheed. Strong, physical big men have always given him trouble: witness our game against Phoenix last year, when Brian Grant forced him into several turnovers in the last few minutes. I don't foresee the same problems against Houston, without Yao. We've done fairly well against them in recent years.

Has everyone forgotten that we still have the draft rights to Roko Ukic? There have been rumblings that his play has declined and his PT lessened, but I remember he was injured last summer, so that could be normal. Plus, PT in Europe is less anyway, and he's behind Juan Carlos Navarro, also known as the second-best player on the Spanish team that won the Worlds. All reports suggest that he's not in the right team to showcase his talents, and both Colangelo and Gherardini are saying he needs to play somewhere else. Maybe bring him over in the summer and put him in the D-League? He's a better shooter than either of our current PGs, but a touch undersized to play the 2. He's a hell of a passer though.

Random thought: if Ukic does come over, we'll have players from 7 different countries. Why not use the White Stripes' Seven Nation Army as a theme?

At the start of this season, I started driving a very unpopular bandwagon: the Trade Bosh bandwagon. I was singularly unimpressed by his performances down the stretch last season, and by his lackluster team leadership. I figured that trading him then, when his value was likely to be at its highest, would yield us some very nice pieces, letting us build around Charlie V and whoever we ended up drafting. Given that this team would be VERY young, we'd be high in the Greg Oden/Joakim Noah sweepstakes too. Boy am I ever giving up on THAT bandwagon.

One thing I will not give up on is my boy Carl English. Dude can flat out shoot, he's not bad on the ball, and he gives everything on every play. He might be a one-trick pony, but he's very very good at his one trick, and people like Steve Kerr made a very healthy living off that one trick. English has been playing VERY well for Team Canada, to the tune of 34 points against Germany, for example. Surely this warrants a spot at the end of someone's bench?

Are you smarter than a 5th grader? Gimme a break. Couple years back, everyone and his dog was doing a marriage show. Now, it's intelligence shows. At least they require a discernible skill, but who in their right mind would risk being found dumber than a 5th grader?

That's pretty much it for round 1, folks. I'll be back next week, same Raptor time, same Raptor channel. If you've got anything you want covered/explained/debated, email me at chrislansdell@altraps.com .

Bargs and Boards

Bargs and Boards
Well, well, well...what's happened to Bargs? Suddenly the rookie has discovered there are more interesting things to do with a basketball coming off a backboard then watch it.The last three games the seven footer has been (for him) on fire in the ribbie department, with a total of 24. That's better than one every four minutes, and wouldn't Sam Mitchell love to see that keep up, considering the minutes Bargs has been logging the last couple of months.

As an example of how stunning a transformation this has been, consider that on February 21st, against the Cavaliers, Bargnani had 7 rebounds. That was more than he totalled in his previous four games. In the two games since then the pace hasn't let up, with 6 rebounds in 25 minutes against the Pacers and 11 in 32 minutes in the Raps most recent outing against Charlotte.So what is the big rookie doing differently?

Consider that all but two of the last three games' rebounds have been defensive. He hasn't changed his offensive game. He still spots up from outside the arc, at the top of the key. His percentage is high enough that he doesn't get many misses coming back to him and he is rarely in position to pickup a rebound under the basket or one coming from a Parker or Peterson shot. So why the increase in defensive rebounds?

Watching him the last few games, he has been making a definite effort to muscle his opponents to positions outside the paint. He has also been leaving them a lot later, when providing help defense. These actions have had three major impacts:

One, he is in physical contact with them more often when a shot goes up. It is far easier to box out an opponent when you are making physical contact, and can maintain that contact as you spin toward the basket. Your opponent has to go around you to get the rebound, and you can beat him most of the time.

Two, if he is not in contact with them, at least they are starting from further out than he is. Bargs is fronting a lot less. Fronting might have been an effective strategy in Europe, where he may have been faster than many of the players he was playing against, but it doesn't work well in the NBA unless there is a significant mismatch in terms of height.

Three, by not being so quick with the help defense, he doesn't give his man a chance to pickup a rebound by sneaking inside while he concentrrates on the other player.

As an aside, looking at the rebounding stats of Charlotte, Indiana and Cleveland, we find that all three teams are in the top ten in rebounds in the league compared to Toronto's 28th spot, with the Bobcats the only one of the three whose opponents average more rebounds. So it's not that these teams aren't capable of rebounding.

Maybe Bargnani has turned a corner. Maybe it's a statistical fluke, but I wouldn't bet on it. The big rookie has shown a steady improvement in his play. His shooting percentage has gone up almost month by month (as has the whole teams, topic for another Blog), his defensive play has improved and he seems altogether more comfortable. I suspect we will see his improved rebounding continue, and maybe he will move up from 9th among rookies to challenge Garbo's 2nd ranking.

We Raptor fans can only hope.

Posted by Puffer at 7:31 PM 0 comments
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