Still, the defense is my main concern. Usually its KO I'm most cringy about but the bigger concern for me lately has been our complete inability to lock down anyone. We just cannot target a guy and take him out, since we don't have anyone who can do it. Tonight I felt like Sexton did a good job on John Wall, which was an interesting matchup both ways which I feel like Sexton won despite scoring less points.
I feel like offensively we also need to find a better solution to put games away. This time the 4th quarter passing was much better and looked like the guys were having fun, but the 2nd quarter which was the real chance to put them to sleep early we whiffed. Instead of playing clock control half-court offense or our brand of ball movement offense we usually just saw the guards take turns in running the ball up court and immediately chucking or driving. Didn't rotate the ball that much and didn't use the clock despite having a big lead. Gave them 23 shots in that quarter that allowed them back in the game.
Dug up the stats and in that 2nd quarter where we got outscored 34 to 23 Markkanen (9:17 minutes), KO (8:29), Kessler (8:29) and Vando (3:31) combined for 4 shots taken (1 of which didn't count as a FGA but gave Lauri 3 FTs), while Clarkson (8:29), Sexton (4:36) and NAW (7:24) combined for 13 with 0 assists (didn't even get assists between themselves). So 13 shots in 20:29 combined by guards, and 4 shots in 29:46 combined by the bigs. Wonder why we scored only 23...
Also Markkanen was 63/57/100 with 5 FT and he only got 11 shots in 36 minutes. I need someone to do a freaking deep dive analysis as to how and why this keeps happening. Is it something that he does or is he just not vocal enough or something? I feel like he moves around a lot on offense, participates in a lot of screens but the ball just doesn't go his way. Its so infuriating that we cannot use this guy more in the nights when he plays well.