Pretty much. Conley/Mitchell/Ingles/Clarkson combined for 17/53. If you take out Clarkson, who actually at least shot well, that goes to 9/39. Ouch.Guard play was awful tonight.
My belief is that Quin is the moneyball guy, hence no adjustments from the Clippers regular season game through the sounding horn on game 6. Just a belief of keeping rolling the dice because the numbers are with you. The reference to anomalies is the common retort for any close game lost, with an underlying implication that the next equation will be absent such anomalous variables. The stats arise from the floor and the floor doesn’t succumb to the stats. The directionality of this relationship is what befuddles moneyball practitioners on applying long-term strategy to finite situation. The problem, then, is what the moneyball approach allows us to take away from this game: absolutely nothing, except to moneyball harder.
I think the bigger issue connects what you’re talking about. The way Quin coaches leads me to believe his inflexibility is a result of attempting to more fully and consistently implement moneyball, approximating expected results over longer durations of time, so there’s no sense to develop any other strategies to make yourself more dynamic and able to respond on the fly because you need to cast your line in the water (execute moneyball) and let that line sit to maximize exposure. Even our defensive structure says moneyball and the numbers look good as a composite. But they can be exploited in any given moment. We’re good marathon runners. But that doesn’t help us when deciding who advances boils down to a few sprints. We’re not prepared at all for the sprints because we’re focused so much on the marathon and we pride ourselves on the amount of work and dedication that goes into being in the head of the pack for the marathon (it is undoubtedly impressive). When it’s you and four other people with a quarter mile left, sticking to your pace strategy becomes irrelevant. For Quin doing Ana amazing job getting himself into a position to win it, he mind-bogglingly falls back on his idea that keeping his rigid pace is what got him into contention through 25.95 miles and that there’s no sense in altering that approach, and ends up not being dynamic enough to respond to the specific situation in front of him.Moneyball is a great strategy for sports that have a league format without playoffs. Over a 38-game season in the Premier League, numbers will even themselves out. If you have quality players, they will create quality chances and eventually score them. Your players can't keep missing forever and the opposing goalies can't keep having the game of their life against you.
The NBA does have playoffs though, so it's really stupid to think that the numbers will simply work themselves out. Just ask Mike D'Antoni. His teams have won 60+ games 3 times and 50+ games 7 times. He hasn't even got a Finals appearance to show for it. If the NBA operated on the league system, he'd be one of the best coaches of this century. It doesn't though, and you don't get to choose which game your team is going to miss 20 threes in a row. When they do, all you can do is sit there and watch it all unravel because you have no way of making an adjustment.
It's not even that D'Antoni or Quin are unwilling to make them. That's the sad part. We were all yelling at the screen against the Clippers, but at that point, there was nothing anyone could've done. You can't throw defensive schemes that you've never really used before in a win-or-go-home game. You can't suddenly invent players who can defend on the perimeter when you and the front office have spent the past 5 years purposely avoiding signing, developing, and playing players like that.
There has to be a plan B for the playoffs. We all saw last season how over 72 games, numbers do work themselves out. They don't do it over a 48-minute period where you let Terance Mann score 39 on you. He might never score 39 in an entire playoff series again, but what good does that do to us now?
The moneyball isn't a reference to this game, and it's not a reference to smallball 5 (I've long said smallball 5 isn't an answer and also that Quin wouldn't use it). Smallball 5 kills us precisely because of moneyball. When we ended up sacrificing our defensive team for an offensive one, we continued to lean more and more into Gobert as a defensive crutch. The numbers on that look great because Rudy is amazing, but it's unfortunate side-effect has created a team-wide lack of defensive accountability. Our guys physically are pretty bad on the perimeter. But I refuse to believe that they are this historically bad on their own efforts and it's drastically exacerbated by years of conditioning in how they play defense. You're supposed to lead everyone to Gobert. Even tongue-in-cheek, every player for the past 3 years has talked about how it's great to have Gobert back there as backup. That's a consistent theme in interviews because that's a very hardly ingrained mentality. Go back to Royce's rookie year and watch the closing possession of when we beat San Antonio to win 10 in a row. Royce could stay in front of his man previously. Funneling everything to Gobert is working one muscle. It's pretty impressive because that muscle is massive. Unfortunately everything else has atrophied beyond functionality. That's the moneyball on the defensive side of the ball. The moneyball on the other side is that we rely too heavily on just being able to make our shots because if we do then we're historic. But then teams will take away the ways we get those and we end up left without a counter. The sum total of moneyball failures stand out most in the Denver and LAC losses. We had no adjustment to make, just a belief that we needed to keep doing our thing and that the "law of averages" would save us. There's always too much emphasis on specific anomalies that we blame for being responsible for losing games, when the bottom line is that every game and series will be filled with anomalies and it's about finding ways to win games. We win games through moneyball, so when we're in these situations when plan to keep moneyballing until the averages catch up. Unfortunately that doesn't always happen over 7 games, as we've seen the past two years.I'm not sure I understand where this "moneyball" criticism is coming from. How else was Snyder supposed to coach this game? With no Whiteside we saw the Gay at the 5 minutes everyone has been clamoring for, and we saw what a disaster it was. Gay can still be useful to us but he's not a viable option at the 5. Ingles has declined and you just aren't getting much out of him this season. They were really cold tonight, but they stayed in the game and gave themselves a chance by going inside as much as possible. Do you want them to stop taking threes all together? If we don't take the threes we stand no chance at winning. Maybe we have to get lucky with three point shooting to win the championship, but there is no other option for us to win it. There's no other way we could play. This is our personnel.
Don't think Jazz will get much for JoeNot even a single rebound for Joe in 26 minutes. Conley at barely six feet had 5 in almost 28 minutes.