NBA 02/06 Game Previews Articles

Game Preview Article: Los Angeles Clippers @ Orlando Magic

If the Clippers are struggling without Chris Paul, they obviously only get weaker without Blake Griffin as well. On their last game at Washington, it was clear that the Clippers's frontcourt excluding Blake Griffin have no offensive skills and so, without him the Clippers only scored 28 points in the paint, with Lamar Odom shooting 1-3 FG, DeAndre Jordan 3-4 FG and Ronny Turiaf 0-1 FG! This made the Clippers become completely perimeter oriented and when a team is essentially a jump shooting team and still shoots 4-17 3pts, they don't really have a lot of chances to win the game. If we add the fact that the Clippers also committed 20 turnovers, then it was almost a miracle that the Clippers didn't lose by double digits against the Wizards.

It isn't fair for a team with little talent like Orlando to be without their four best players at the same time. Jameer Nelson, J.J. Redick, Arron Afflalo and Glen Davis were all out for the Magic's game at Philadelphia and so, Orlando's offense simply didn't exist. They scored 61 points and had an offensive rating of 73.4! This was the second worst offensive performance of a team this season, only in the front of that crushing that the Hawks got at Chicago, where they scored just 58 points. For today, Jameer Nelson, J.J. Redick and Arron Afflalo are all questionable and it will depend from their availability the competitiveness that Orlando will show on this contest. If the Clippers's depth is a strength of them, the opposite can be said about Orlando, so with so many key players out, they have no chances. The Clippers have to worry about winning games right now or they would look at Orlando with extra motivation, as the Magic won at LA by 104-100 last month, with Afflalo having his best game of the season with 10-19 FG and 30 points, while J.J. Redick also had a good game with 8-14 FG! By the way, Orlando was able to win that game, even with Blake Griffin having a monster game and Chris Paul playing and dishing 16 assists!

Game Preview Article: San Antonio Spurs @ Minnesota Timberwolves

Quietly, San Antonio's defense has been one of the great secrets of this league. When we think about San Antonio, we automatically think about how the Spurs have such a great ball movement and how deadly they are with their great second unit, but right now, San Antonio has the #3 best defensive team in the league, with only Memphis and Indiana having a better defensive rating than them! More than that, San Antonio has been averaging a 98.0 defensive rating over their last 10 games! They struggled a bit on closing their game against Washington, but it's possible that the Spurs's players got affected by Tim Duncan's injury and they couldn't focus in the second half. For this game, Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili will be out, but San Antonio has great depth and they should be able to remain competitive without these two players, especially when they had 3 days off to prepare the upcoming battles.

I had a Triple Dime Play on Minnesota on their last game against Portland and that was one of the weirdest games I've watched this season. I liked the way the Wolves have been using their four guards Ricky Rubio, Luke Ridnour, Alexey Shved and J.J. Barea to pressure the opposing ball handlers and in that game, they forced the Blazers to commit 28 turnovers! However, Portland was simply red hot and they built a nice lead, until Minnesota came back from a 39-51 score to 54-57, on a 15-6 run, just to commit a bunch of errors that sent the Blazers lead to 19 points in just 5 minutes! The errors only ended with Luke Ridnour committing a foul that gave two free throws to Portland with just 0.4 seconds to go on the third quarter, when the ball was behind the Blazers's basket! Considering the fact that the Wolves eventually lost the game by two points, this stupid error was very costly. Minnesota had another injury and this time, it was Andrei Kirilenko who played just 14 minutes and he is unlikely to play today. Meanwhile, Nikola Pekovic said after last Monday's game that it isn't at 100% physically due to a groin injury. Minnesota always plays hard, but they commit so many errors that when they bounce back, it's generally too late. 

Game Preview Article: Charlotte Bobcats @ Cleveland Cavaliers

Cleveland is coming from one of their best wins of the season, on a home game against Oklahoma City, where they were double digits underdogs. Kyrie Irving put on a show down the stretch, while showing that he will someday in the future be a MVP candidate. The most curious aspect of the Cavaliers lately is that their second unit has been playing really well. Their trade with Memphis looked to be just for the Grizzlies to dump some money, but the truth is that Marreese Speights and Wayne Ellington have adapted very quickly to Cleveland and suddenly, the Cavaliers don't have that weak bench anymore, where even Luke Walton was being forced to play significant minutes at the PF position. They have now more depth on their roster and some interesting chemistry as well. Against the Thunder, Speights was a major factor with 10-15 FG, 21 points and 10 rebounds, while the Cavaliers's bench outscored the Thunder's bench by 44-26! This improvement from Cleveland's bench has been preventing their level of play to go down big time every time Irving is on the bench. This is quite visible on their offensive ratings, as they are averaging a 103.8 offensive rating for the season, while their offensive rating average on their last 10 games was 108.9!

Charlotte took advantage of Miami's physical and mentally poor spot to be competitive against them in yesterday's game. The way they managed to do that was atypical to what the Bobcats have been doing this season. Miami's Big Three ended the game with a combined of 31-51 (60.7%) FG, but the worst 3pts defensive team in the league managed to hold one of the best perimeter shooting teams in the league to just 1-12 3pts, while Charlotte's best player, Kemba Walker, played just 22 minutes due to foul trouble. With the return of Byron Mullens, Charlotte has now a frontcourt player who has no problems in having an important role in the team's offense, even though he keeps shooting too much from the outside: he took 14 shots in just 28 minutes! After four games in a row where they were double digits underdogs, Charlotte has now a game where they can possibly be more competitive against this Cavaliers team. In the previous game between these two teams this season, Charlotte lost by 2 points at home, so I expect them to come confident to this contest, thinking that they have a shot of beating Cleveland on this contest.

Game Recap Article 02/05: Milwaukee Bucks @ Denver Nuggets

So the Bucks wanted to “outgun” the Nuggets in Denver against a rested Nuggets team? Good luck with that! Last night’s game was the second fastest contest so far this season, only one HOU vs OKC game back in December was faster! The Nuggets game plan early on was quite simply: edge hard Monta Ellis and Brandon Jennings in order to force them to take long range jumpers! If we look for both players FG%’s numbers at the end of the game, they were successful because Ellis = 6-21 FG & Jennings = 5-15 FG! The problem is that the Nuggets simply didn’t seem worried about the “Bucks bigs” and Dalembert…. well, he was 10-11 from the field for 21 points in just 9:29 of action at the half time!

In the second half, DEN was way more aggressive while Coach Karl decided to use his crazy small ball lineups something that MIL’s Coach Boylan acknowledged after the game:

"They played small the whole second half, which caused a little bit of a problem for us," said Boylan. "Especially with the guys I like to have out on the floor. Sometimes unfortunately you can't have everyone out there because when teams are playing small like that, I like to try to stay big to make them pay for it, but then the game started to slip away from us and we had to re-adjust and match up to them a little bit more."

Dalembert still ended up scoring 35 points w/ 17-21 FG and grabbed 12 rebounds but down the stretch he simply ran out of gas and the Nuggets won despite trailing by as many as 17 points.

Game Preview Article: Boston Celtics @ Toronto Raptors

No Rajon Rondo? No problem! Boston is now already on their fourth win a row without Rajon Rondo and not only as they have been able to maintain their good defense, as their offense has been competent enough for them to win games as well. Of course they are surprising their opponents with their new playing style and it will take a while for them to get figured out. They dished 24, 22, 30 and 23 assists on their last four games, in a sign of good ball movement and on their last game against the Clippers, they gave a great indicator of that. We were used to see Rondo getting about 80% of the team's assists, but on their game against the Clippers, eight different players had at least one assist, while Terry was the player with the most and just six! The Celtics are naturally still struggling on grabbing rebounds (Jared Sullinger was an underrated rebounder) so Boston needs to compensate that with solid offense and defense, but so far this is happening for them!

Toronto is possibly the team that needs the All Star break the most, so all their new pieces can gain some chemistry. Jose Calderon is gone and he will clearly the team leader, who had great chemistry with both Ed Davis and Amir Johnson. Kyle Lowry has now the freedom to lead the team, but this will take time. Coach Casey has now Rudy Gay at the SF position and he had excellent FG% numbers on his first two games in Toronto, while showing to be much more motivated to do well than he looked in Memphis. Besides that, Jonas Valanciunas returned on the team's last game and it seems that Andrea Bargnani will return tonight. Basically, the Raptors have new players at the PG, SF and Center positions, so it's tough for them to adjust some quickly. On their Sunday game against Miami, Toronto was competitive until the moment that both Kyle Lowry and Amir Johnson got into foul trouble and Miami decided to raise the game's intensity. For today, Toronto had two days off to prepare this game against Boston, so it will be interesting to see what kind of chemistry will Toronto show on this game.