Showing posts with label NBA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NBA. Show all posts

Saturday, 27 November 2010

Beach Boys are not heating the Heat

It comes to my attention how "the beach boys" are not winning the games they supposed to.

Is understandable they need to find their roles in this new and excessively marketed Miami Heat, since all of them were scoring leaders in their previous teams. Big questions of the pre-season were who was going to step up offensively? and who was going to take Magic Johnson's role of drive the plays. After 15 games is Lebron who leads the team in minutes, points, assists and steals but so far it isn't working out very well having only 8 wins and 7 losses.
When you see a Heat game the 3 first quarters are ok, nice plays, dunks and fast breaks. But when the 4th quarter arrives, a lack of leadership is reflected in a really poor shot selection and is like each one of them is just isolated from the team. 

It is not a coincidence D Wade and King James are shooting 5% worst when compared with last year. Wade FG 09-10 was  47,6% and 10-11 is 43,8%, same with Lebron who was FG% 50,3% and this season is  45,5%. Dear Heat fans this is pure poor shot selection.

Although scoring responsibilities are well balanced having James with 23.6 ppg, Wade with 21.1 ppg and Bosh with 17.6. ppg it is certainly balanced between them but not for the team reflecting 62% of the offensive load in Miami. This is by no means healthy for a NBA final contender team. If we compare them with the first season together of the original big three in Boston, NBA champions of 2007, Pierce, Garnett and Allen were responsible of  55% in 2007 and by that time we talked of an unbalanced squad. The difference is that 07 Celtics' big three were having better shot selection reflected in 482 FG% while 2010 Heat's beach boys are shooting 469 FG%.

So Miami needs to start thinking about tweaking a little bit the offense in order to start winning more games, but this has to be from Spoelstra's head and his inexperience leading with superstars might be a big negative factor accomplish it. Only the time will show us the answer.

Monday, 25 October 2010

NBA sold out crowd in Montreal


What an evening! I enjoyed it more than expected I must say. It was more that a 108-103 Raptors win.

The first impression, the crowd. Thousands of NBA fans all over the Bell Centre with all kinds of NBA apparel shirts and hats, not only Raptors fans but from all around the league. It was impressive how the Stoudemire shirt #1 was already popular when the star has been in Knicks a few months.

Once you are inside the arena the feeling is even better, more than 22.000 fans sheering at every play, every point. The first idea that comes to your mind is why Montreal does not have a NBA team? With a crowd that support with that energy two teams which most probably will not make it to the playoffs is certainly a good sign. But is very different support a team all season long, specially at the same time you support the Canadiens, than go and enjoy an exhibition game. We can see the same effect with soccer and the Montreal Impact which can't take more than 9,000 fans in a semifinals game (we hope that change when in MLS though).

The game was a fun one, even when Raptors seamed to win easily on the 3rd quarter the Knicks recovered the distance and put the game by 4 points with 2 min left. Being able to see an all star like Stoudemire score 24 points in 26 min was just amazing. Also the 11 (8 offensive) rebounds by Evans from the Raptors give a difference in Toronto attack. A 3 pointer with 0,1 sec left from Calderon in the 3rd quarter was also one of the highlights of the night.

At the end we hope that next year we can have more preseason games to continue enjoying the show that the NBA is.