Good day, friends. I still have all these notes from last night's horrible game. (If you're over there going "what horrible game?" then stop reading now and go outside. You are sweet and innocent and beautiful. Bless you.), so I figure I might as well poke through 'em. One thing I'd like to do is touch more on the stuff that went well. We'll see where else this goes.
- First of all, I meant to write this post sooner, but there is a guy 50 FEET UP IN A TREE WITH A CHAINSAW in my neighbor's backyard, just choppin' off branches. There is a man in a tree with a chainsaw, and he's making it rain giant tree limbs. As you can imagine, it's really hard for me to do anything other than spectate from my kitchen wearing nothing but my underpants and pom-poms and scream "AHHHHH IT'S RAINING TREES!!" at my dogs.
- But that guy and his crew just took a sandwich break, so let's talk a little about Landry Fields. I wouldn't say his attempts last night looked any better, but a bunch of them went in the basket, which they tell me is the desired result. He put down two of his three line drive jumpers,made a couple nice finishes near the basket (one off an absolutely gorgeous outlet feed from Tyson Chandler), and hit consecutive free throws for the first time since 1983. And his defense on Paul George, though it lapsed, was perfectly adequate in my estimation. In the end, it was pretty funny to see Fields sit the entire fourth, then come in for a defensive possession and IMMEDIATELY force a steal. I'm not sure that Landry's presence earlier in the quarter would have made much of a difference, but that play felt like a tiny little show of value/defiance/whatever.
- I still have no photos of this game in my photo feed, so I'm ready to accept that it didn't actually happen. The Knicks are 27-26 and this ulcer is just a cramp from eating these cookies too quickly.
- What do y'all think about the amount of help defense that took place last night? I thought there were some unnecessary switches, which was to be expected, but I also thought that guys were helping off the perimeter on Roy Hibbert and Danny Granger when they really didn't have to. Particularly in Hibbert's case...just let Chandler do his job. I just don't think Tyson Chandler's one-on-one defense is benefited much by, say, Baron Davis waddling over to poke Hibbert in the shoulder blade. It doesn't make a difference. At least it doesn't appear that way.
- Here is a nice little depressing nugget from Tommy Beer:
Pacers, who were down 15, beat NY by 8 = largest margin of victory for NBA team in a game it was losing by 15 heading into 4Q since Oct 2010
That's a good thing, right? Yayyyy.
- Still very happy to have seen Melo drilling his little step-backs and butt-shimmies and beating folks off the dribble and stuff.
- Holy shit! The guys started working again while I was typing and now the WHOLE TREE IS GONE. There was a tree, but there is no more tree. It's in the wood chipper. RIP tree.
- Last night's game was so rough that it spurred the creation of a ballad by my friends at WCWP. A ballad! It was that bad!
- Josh Harrellson's Jortstache has gone full handlebar. Josh Harrellson responded to mismatches against guards by backing down, then shooting turnaround fade-away baseline jumpers. Josh Harrellson his one of two said turnaround fade-away baseline jumpers. Josh Harrellson also finished a pick-and-roll with a gorgeous hand-switching finish under the basket.This has been the Josh Harrellson report.
- I said this somewhere last night, but the ratio between "degree to which J.R. Smith is willing to pass to most teammates" and "degree to which J.R. Smith is willing to pass to Steve Novak" is like 1:849349993. That's how ratios work, right? What I'm saying is J.R. Smith is not the willingest of passers, but if Novak's on the floor, he'll throw some INSANE passes to find Steve behind the arc. Check it out:
One of these days, Earl is gonna hit Novak with a crosscourt pass while he's on the bench. The hyper-deference is astounding and pretty hilarious.
- Aside from just having a bad game, Iman Shumpert received two pretty painful-looking money shots last night.Hibbert elbowed him in the face, then Chandler slapped one of his famed tip-outs directly into Shumpert's mouth. Rough night.
- I must reiterate that Novak blocked two shots last night and Mike Bibby blocked one. All on purpose. I'm beginning to believe that those plays caused the Knicks to lose by tearing the fabric of the universe or something. Also, at least two of those three plays ended in the Pacers scoring anyway.
That's it. On to the next one, I suppose.