Defending the Small lineup

[jom2003]

In what way Ed Davis is an upgrade for what Memphis have now? They have Brandon Clarke to deal with small lineups who is 10X better than Davis at everything basketball related.

He's a helper, not an upgrade. Words matter. Same as for Conley, in ideal world situation, being more of a "helper" instead of "upgrade" for us. Ed could be a cheap insurance for the grizz in case their bigs get hurt. not as "cheap" as for us of couse, given that we are paying 30mil to a non-contributer right now.

 

[SCS]

I'm honestly not convinced that we need a "fix" for our 5 out defense. We have a small sample size to judge how good/bad our defense is against 5 Out offense. And those sample results so far are skewed by some ridiculous anomalies (Houston being gifted a foul call on every drive and San Antonio having a red hot shooting night).

I do think that having a more athletic backup big is something we need that will help us against this particular offense. Running Bradley/Niang against it is a no no. Especially if a team tries it in the playoffs. Because neither one of those guys can handle guarding a player 1 v 1 on the perimeter.

I wish we would play Brantley and Morgan to see how they'd do against the 5 Out.

I do feel like we need to work on our offense against these small switchy lineups too. We get a little flustered by it. Our guards/wings tend to iso the "big" on the perimeter and dribble too much before launching a three when passes and movement could find a better look. Also... I don't like how Rudy just stands in one spot when he has a small guy on him. I understand why we don't have Rudy post. It's not his strength as a player and it's not something we do very much in our offense. But if he would cut/screen/slip/relocate more in those situations he could abuse the mismatch. Rudy is good when he's moving.

 

[Shad]

The Rockets are now 2-0 while playing nobody taller than 6 foot 6 (they played some random dude 6 minutes against us that was talker). I even noticed and pointed out that Ben McClamore was guarding Rudy and we still weren't feeding him the ball.

Well, today they literally had James Harden jump for the tip-off. They never played anyone 1 second over 6 foot 6 (while Chandler and some other random 7 foot dude was available). Coach Mike told reporters they're going to keep doing it until someone beats them down low.

Well, round 2 is right around the corner for us. Let's see what happens