Game Preview Article: Los Angeles Lakers @ Brooklyn Nets
The Lakers won two straight road games at Minnesota and Detroit, so we are in front of an improved team right now? Not so fast! In those two games, the Lakers had huge early leads, as they led the Wolves by 29 points and Detroit by 18 points, but in both games, they allowed late comebacks to their opponents and this only shows how inconsistent they are, especially on second halves, where they keep constantly running out of gas! With Dwight Howard out, Pau Gasol has now the chance to play where he likes to play the most: at center position and he had back to back games where he played 40 minutes games, while recording two consecutive 20-points + 10-rebounds games! Offensively, as long as Pau Gasol keeps playing near the basket, the Lakers will be fine. Dwight Howard won't be playing tonight, Metta World Peace got suspended for one game and it looks like Kobe Bryant has a right elbow tendinitis and he has been wearing a medicine patch to get the inflammation out.
The Nets have won all their games they had this season so far against losing teams, so I guess tonight's game is a good spot for them. They struggle against elite teams, even though they defeated the Bulls at home on their last game, but they were completely shorthanded without Joakim Noah, Carlos Boozer and Kirk Hinrich. Brooklyn had three days of rest prior to this game and this season, when they have 2 or more days of rest, they are 7-3 on these games, while averaging a 112 offensive rating and a 106.5 defensive rating! Since Carlesimo became the team's head coach, Brooklyn has been playing batter, mostly thanks to an improvement on Deron Williams's form and Brook Lopez's dominance near the basket. However, Brooklyn has been showing a bad trend of committing turnovers and they have committed 20, 19 and 18 turnovers on their last 3 games! The Lakers aren't a team that can pressure the ball handler with success, so Brooklyn has a nice spot to fix these errors today. As a final note, it's also crucial to mention that the Nets have a lot of banged up players for tonight: Deron Williams, Andray Blatche, Jerry Stackhouse, C.J. Watson and Marshon Brooks.
Still Regarding the Nets x Lakers Game:
We are in presence of two slow footed teams. The Lakers are slow because of their aging roster, while the Nets are slow because they use a really big lineup that turns them really slow as well. Thanks to that, the fatal flow for both defenses has been their inability to defend transition plays. A good barometer of this were the games where both the Lakers and Brooklyn faced Miami lately: the Lakers allowed 21 fast break points and 68 points in the paint to the Heat, while the Nets allowed 20 fast break points and 40 points in the paint to the very same team. Also both the Lakers and the Nets committed a high number of turnovers with 20 and 19 respectively. The good news for both teams today is that they don't have a high volume of transition plays, as they simply prefer not to run on transitions. Brooklyn is #25 on transition plays volume with 10.3% and they are #22 in the league in efficiency with 1.09 PPP, while the Lakers is #21 on transition plays volume with 11.6% and #26 in the league in efficiency with 1.07 PPP! So, we can see that the main defensive weakness of both teams today won't be explored by their opponent, turning this game into a pure half court game.
The Lakers's defense has improved considerably even without Dwight Howard over the last 2 games. The LA team is averaging a 106.3 defensive rating on their last 10 games, with their defensive rating being even better over their last 5 games with 103.5! They struggle against dribble penetrations and pick and rolls, as Will Bynum from Detroit showed last Sunday afternoon, but Brooklyn simply doesn't run this kind of plays! Brooklyn's offense has been more stagnant lately and they averaged just 19.8 assists per game on their last 5 games. Worse than this, they are very predictable down the stretch, with Joe Johnson and his isolation plays being overused on the last minutes of the Nets's games. Just like the Lakers, Brooklyn has a lot of problems in terms of in-game consistency and so, I don't trust them for them to pick an easy win today. In fact, I would take the Lakers in here if both Dwight Howard and Metta World Peace were playing tonight. I was about to take the Under on this game, but with Metta World Peace out of tonight's game, Antwan Jamison will play major minutes tonight and he is one of the worst defenders in the league nowadays, so I'm staying away from this game after all.
Game Preview Article: Memphis Grizzlies @ Phoenix Suns
This will be the first game of this new "era" for Memphis. Tayshaun Price has already played on the team's last game against Washington, but the spot wasn't good at all for Memphis, as they had played at Oklahoma City the night before on a TNT game, while being super shorthanded. Prince came off the bench and he looked great with 7-11 FG and 3 assists in 32 minutes. For today, Memphis had 3 days off to rest and prepare tonight's game, so this will be their first real game after the trade. Now that Rudy Gay is gone, it seems that Zach Randolph wants to continue Gay's "legacy", as he shot 2-7 FG, 4-17 FG and 3-10 FG on the team's last 3 games, for a combined of 9-34 (26%) FG! It seems that sooner or later, Memphis will have to make one more trade, as they have too many frontcourt players right now. Besides the untouchable Marc Gasol and Zach Randolph, they have Darrell Arthur, Ed Davis and Jon Leuer, while their backcourt is really thin with Jerryd Bayless having to play at both the SG and PG position for heavy minutes and that's not a good sign for the future!
When Lindsey Hunter was appointed as the new Suns's head coach, he said that his team would have to defend better and on their first two games, Phoenix had indeed nice defensive efforts at Sacramento and then, at home against the Clippers, where they allowed 96 and 88 points. However, it seems that Phoenix went back to their old habits after that and in 4 of their last 5 games, Phoenix allowed 108 points or more, with the only exception being a home game against an old tired Lakers team that was on a back to back spot and that was only able to score 13 points in the fourth quarter of that game! Even with these defensive problems, the Suns have been competitive with Hunter as their coach, as after defeating the Lakers, Phoenix led Dallas by 75-74, before getting outscored by 35-24 in the fourth quarter and even on their last game at Golden State, even though they ended up getting blown out by 93-113, the Suns actually had a 10 points lead in that game during the third quarter! However, their lack of in-game consistency has been a big problem for them lately.
Game Preview Article: Milwaukee Bucks @ Denver Nuggets
We knew that Denver would sooner or later start playing better and winning more games simply because they had a brutal early schedule with a huge amount of road games. Now that Denver is on a homespan, they have been beating their opponents with ease. The Nuggets are just outgunning their opponents and they are averaging 22.9 fast break points per game and 58 points in the paint over their last 10 games, while their pace average on their last 7 games has been 97.5! One of the key factors of this Nuggets's improvement has been Ty Lawson, as over the team's last 7 games, Lawson has been averaging 20.3 points, 7.4 assists and 2.4 steals, while shooting 50% FG and 54.2% 3pts! Denver, who just couldn't shoot from the outside, has also improved big time from that area recently, with 58-150 (38.6%) 3pts on their last 7 games!
Curiously, the Bucks have been the Denver Nuggets of the Eastern Conference. They are clearly the team with the fastest pace of their conference, as they are #4 in the league in pace factor (Denver is #2, only behind the Rockets). Milwaukee's offense has been improving under Coach Boylan, even though of their offensive ratings lately haven't been pretty. However, they had a tough stretch with 4 games in 5 nights, but they had two days of rest prior to tonight's game, so they will be on a better spot. Their X factor has been Ersan Ilyasova, who has finally started to play at the level that made the Bucks resign him on the offseason. The Turkish player is the pivotal stretch four for Milwaukee, who allows Larry Sanders to operate down low, while he is stretching the floor on the perimeter. Milwaukee was supposed to be a good rebounding team, but they have been terrible on their last four games, with a rebound rate of just 46.83% on their last 4 games, while allowing 21, 15, 14 and 20 offensive rebounds to their opponents. They will certainly need to improve on this area, in order to be competitive against the Nuggets tonight.
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