Four in a row

March 15th, 2008 Posted in Avery Johnson, Game Recap

It’s so nice seeing this team doing what they’re supposed to do against these weak Eastern Conference teams. They’ve now won four in a row against these teams by an average of 23 points. Now only the Heat, in Miami but with no Dwyane Wade, are up before the real test of this home-stand comes. Tyronn Lue had a great game for only playing 16 minutes going 5 for 5 for 13 points. If he can keep that up against the better teams he’ll end up being a very helpful guy to have in the playoffs.

It’s kinda difficult to come up with ways to criticize a coach when his team is in a stretch like this but there were a couple of questionable things from last night. The lineup on the floor at the start of the 2nd quarter was Lue, Terry, Wright, Allen and Bass. I know when it’s a blowout you’ve got to get people minutes, but it almost seemed like Avery wanted the game to get close to keep the guys from getting bored. Of course that didn’t happen, so no harm done.

The other thing was that the 5 starters were in the game for almost 10 minutes in the fourth quarter. This continued even after things started to get chippy with 5 or 6 minutes left. Dirk almost had an elbow land on his throat, Stackhouse took a couple of spills, it just didn’t seem smart to have those guys in the game that long when it was under control. But it turns out there was a reason for it, as Avery explained after the game.

“We try go our zone defense when we had a good lead. And we messed it up. Same thing we talked about this morning. We screwed it up. Again, that’s something for us to talk about. We’ll have to be able to change our defenses some and I wanted to work on the zone more, but we screwed it up so bad, we couldn’t even go back to it. That will be a point of emphasis at practice tomorrow.”

So that’s what they’ve been working on for the past couple of games with these leads in the fourth. They didn’t seem to have that many problems with a zone the past couple of seasons, but maybe that’s because Del Harris was still here.


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