#like Harry only going to Toronto was a low blow

[gstqaobc]

CBC THE ROYAL FASCINATION

Monday, March 08, 2021

Hello, royal watchers and all those intrigued by what’s going on inside the House of Windsor. This is a special edition of royal news and analysis following Prince Harry and Meghan's interview Sunday evening with Oprah Winfrey. Reading this online? Sign up here to get this delivered to your inbox.

Janet DavisonRoyal Expert

The Meghan and Harry interview: A 'damaging' view on race as Palace history repeats itself

(Harpo Productions/Joe Pugliese/Reuters)

The revelations just kept coming Sunday night as Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, gave Oprah Winfrey — and a worldwide television audience — their view on why they had to leave the upper echelons of the Royal Family. The reasons were many, but amid all they had to say, there was one statement that stood out and seems particularly serious for the House of Windsor: Meghan’s declaration that a senior member of the Royal Family had worries about the colour of the skin of their first child before he was born. “I think it’s very damaging — the idea that a senior member of the Royal Family had expressed concern about what Archie might look like,” Carolyn Harris, a Toronto-based royal author and historian, said in an interview late Sunday night. Meghan told Winfrey the concern had been relayed to her by Harry, and when questioned further on it, Harry refused to offer more specifics, saying it’s a “conversation I’m never going to share.” And that, Harris suggests, speaks to the seriousness of the matter. “It’s very clear that Harry didn’t want to go into details feeling that it would be too damaging for the monarchy.” It will take time to digest the impact of all that Harry and Meghan had to say to Winfrey. But some early comments in the British media this morning suggest Harry and Meghan’s account will have a profound impact. “They have revealed the terrible strains inside the palace. They have drawn a picture of unfeeling individuals lost in an uncaring institution. They have spoken of racism within the Royal Family. This was a devastating interview,” the BBC’s royal correspondent, Jonny Dymond, wrote in an online analysis. “But Harry describing his brother and father as ‘trapped,’ and Meghan revealing that she repeatedly sought help within the palace only to be rebuffed is a body blow to the institution.” The Guardian reported that Harry and Meghan telling Winfrey of conversations in the Royal Family about Archie’s skin colour is “a damning allegation that will send shockwaves through the institution and send relations with the palace to a new low.” Many themes and issues developed over the two-hour broadcast, which sprinkled lighter moments — they’re expecting a girl, they have rescue chickens and Archie, age almost two, has taken to telling people to “drive safe” — with much more serious concerns, including the lack of support they say they received, particularly as Meghan had suicidal thoughts. “A theme that emerges again and again, and it’s something that Harry explicitly states in the interview, is the Royal Family being concerned with the opinion of the tabloid press,” said Harris. “This may very well have influenced decisions not to speak out about the way Meghan was being treated and that may have influenced some other decisions as well.” One of those might be the question of security, something that was of considerable concern to the couple when they learned royal support for it would be withdrawn. “The Royal Family has frequently in the past received bad press regarding minor members ... receiving security,”said Harris. “There were a lot of negative headlines regarding Beatrice and Eugenie continuing to receive security and their father’s [Prince Andrew’s] insistence they receive security despite being comparatively minor members of the Royal Family who do not undertake public engagements representing the Queen.” There was also a sense out of Sunday’s interview that issues that troubled the Royal Family in the past may still be a worry now. “Even in the 21st century after all of the problems that the Royal Family encountered in the 1990s with the breakdowns in the marriages of Prince Charles and Prince Andrew … there still doesn’t seem to be a consistent means of mentoring new members of the Royal Family,” said Harris. Meghan said she had to Google the lyrics for God Save the Queen, and was filled in at the last minute about having to curtsy to Elizabeth just before meeting her for the first time. Throughout the interview, Harry and Meghan repeatedly expressed respect and admiration for the Queen, if not for how the Royal Family as an institution operates. But there is considerable murkiness around just who may be responsible for some of the more serious issues they raised. “We know they respect the Queen and have a good personal relationship with the Queen. We know that Meghan had a conflict with Kate but says Kate apologized and Kate forgave her and she doesn’t think Kate’s a bad person,” said Harris. “But when it comes to who made racist comments about Archie’s appearance or who was dismissive directly of Meghan’s mental health, [on] that we don’t have specific details.” High-profile royal interviews such as this — particularly one by Harry’s mother Diana, in 1995 — have a track record of not turning out as the royal interviewees may have intended, and it remains to be seen the lasting impact of this one. Harris sees parallels with Diana’s interview, as she “spoke frankly” about a lack of support from the family, and felt that she had been let down by Prince Charles. Harry talked of hoping to repair his relationship with his father — “I will always love him but there’s a lot of hurt that happened” — but said he felt really let down, and noted a time when his father wasn’t taking his calls. Harris expects the interview will prompt further critical scrutiny of Charles, and Harry’s older brother Prince William. The relationship with William has already been under intense scrutiny, and is clearly still a delicate matter for Harry, who hesitated noticeably before responding as Winfrey pressed him on it. “Time heals all things, hopefully,” Harry said. How Buckingham Palace responds to all this remains to be seen. Generally, the public approach in matters such as this is silence, and a determination to be seen as carrying with regular duties. Whether a member of the family might make a more informal comment — say in response to a question from someone at a public event — also remains to be seen. But from what did emerge Sunday evening, there is a sense that whatever efforts the House of Windsor has made to put a more modern face on the monarchy, they appear not to have yielded the fruit that might have been hoped. “There’s been some elements of modernization, but it’s very clear that the institution has difficulty adapting to the needs of individuals who marry into the Royal Family,” said Harris. “It’s clear that Meghan came away from her experiences feeling that she was not supported or mentored in her new role.”

Cheers!

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GSTQAOBC 🇨🇦🇬🇧🇦🇺🇳🇿

[anonymoushouseplantfan]

Which do you think came first -- Prince Phillip retiring which led to Charles and Andrew pushing Geidt out or Charles and Andrew pushing Geidt out which led to Prince Phillip retiring?

Prince Philip’s decision was apparently the cause of the huge BP meeting in May 2017 and Geidt wasn’t pushed out until later that summer, so I’d say Philip’s retirement came first.

My tinhat theory is that Meghan showed up in 2016 and everyone disapproved of her, particularly after her topless pics came out during the Queen’s Christmas luncheon. In response, Harry and Meghan started the “Everyone Loves Classy” pr makeover in late December to try to sell her to the brf. She went to India and they did the Soho House pap walk to show the brf they were serious. The brf, however, freaked out over political comments on her Instagram and political meetings in India,  so she was pushed out in mid-February when she posted the #nobadvibes pic and did the teary Toronto pap walk with Jen. 

Harry got pissed and threatened to go nuclear between Jan-March 2017 and he planted some bombs in the Newsweek interview and the Diana documentary to show them what he was capable of. He also took Meghan to Jamaica that March to show they were serious, and he started pushing for an invite to Pippa’s wedding. 

Meghan then blows all her money on a huge India trip pr drive that paints her as the best humanitarian EVER. She knows this is the moment of truth so she emails E! to explain that she is barely related to any of the Markles and she, Doria and Tom have been the perfect divorced family for years (LOLOLOLOLOL).

The brf goes wobbly between March/April because the pr drive against Pippa and the Middletons was so intense. Charles eventually buckles in April, likely because he has the long-dreaded Diana anniversary coming up and he needs Harry on his side to survive that that. He tentatively approves the engagement, as long as they date for a year and Meghan lays low and focuses on her job. Harry and Meghan start a pr drive asking for Di’s emeralds. Charles breaks out in laughter.

William is told to invite Meghan to Pippa’s wedding. Philip gets pissed as hell and quits in a huge huff in May.

Meghan quits Suits, starts shopping for hats and sets up her super-cringe Vanity Fair interview arguing that it’s “part of her job as an actor.” Carole puts her foots down and says Meghan can only go to the evening party and there will be absolutely no photos. Will glares at Meghan during polo. Meghan does her “yoga butt” pap walk because she’s mad she didn’t get a church invite then calls a pap to get pics of her while she’s on her way to the wedding (forcing Harry to drive to KP to pick her up so the pap can get the pics). Harry goes to Botswana to look for cheap stones he can sell as “official Di collection diamonds.” His Newsweek bomb explodes shortly thereafter, but he quickly walks back his comments about now one wanting to be a royal.

Meghan starts her airport pap-walks and leaks that she has “moved in” to Nott Cott. She also shoots her VF cover. Charles takes advantage of Philip’s retirement and pushes Geidt out, putting out a ton “Regent Charles” PR. Kate bats her eyelashes at Will and suggests this is the perfect time to try for another baby. 

HM sticks her head in the sand and goes to Balmoral hoping Harry will get tired of his embarrassing American girlfriend (fat chance!), and her new event planner Chief of Staff will somehow manage to keep things stable. Harry and Meghan are not invited to Balmoral for the family vacation. Harry insists on a Balmoral visit to Meghan can meet HM and he can get the engagement officially approved. HM says no again then squashes the “Regent” rumors in August with a few leaks, because if Charles can’t even keep his son under control he's not qualified to be Regent.

Harry and Meghan do a huge “birthday trip to Africa with proposal” pr drive to get hype up the upcoming engagement, which they are sure they can push for. The Diana documentary bomb explodes, but Harry refuses to walk back his “no child should ever be forced to do that comments” unless HM approves the engagement. Facing a huge pr crisis during a critical moment (EDIT: I should have added here “and without Lord Geidt around to calm the waters and manage the issue”), HM buckles and Harry and Meghan are invited to Balmoral. Harry walks back his comments and attends the Diana garden memorial. He and Meghan head up to Balmoral.

And the rest is history.

So that’s my 2017 timeline. 

[junker-town]

5 NBA stars who could get traded this season (plus one who probably won’t)

Which NBA star is the most likely to get traded this season?

The NBA’s title picture can swing on a trade. These are the biggest names that could be on the move.

Bradley Beal’s contract extension was a serious bummer for every team that saw him as the missing third star who could push them ahead of every other dynamic duo. Twenty-six-year-old combo guards who are skilled enough to singlehandedly prop up a blah roster’s offense hardly ever come available for a reason.

But Beal’s decision won’t stop those same teams from treating the 2019-20 season as the arms race it’s supposed to be. With the Golden State Warriors depleted and LeBron James about to turn 35, almost a third of the league will puff its chest out and exchange a relatively secure future for a short-term sugar rush. Even those that aren’t close to the top still want to make the playoffs, while bad teams (and those in small markets) want draft picks. Trades will be made.

Here’s a look at six stars who can tip the scales for a contender/pseudo-contender — depending on which team acquires them, these are either ideal third wheels or helpful second fiddles. Actual moves depend on whether their incumbent team plays above or below expectations, but don’t be surprised if any (or all) are dealt this season.

Kevin Love

The Cleveland Cavaliers stand in a deep hole on the first step of a long ladder. Love is their best, highest-paid (by ~$10 million), and oldest player. He’s past his prime, injury-prone, and makes less financial sense where he is — Cleveland’s payroll rivals the Los Angeles Clippers’ — than on a playoff team.

But gauging Love’s value isn’t easy. Some rival front office executives polled for this story are weary about his body, and whether he can stay healthy enough to justify the financial commitment that would be made by trading for him. When he’s right, though, Love is a net positive in almost any environment. Stretch fours who rebound, pass, and are skilled enough to let you run an entire offense through them at multiple spots on the floor are worth the money he makes. Love has gravity. He’s nimble and does wily things few at his position can:

During Cleveland’s four straight title runs he was the Hester Prynne of their defense, condemned for his struggle guarding Golden State’s impossible system in space. In spite of a championship in 2016, the whole experience bruised his reputation. Going forward, that’s a little unfair. Versatility still matters, but Love’s weaknesses on that end never popped until the Finals against a beast that no longer exists; Cleveland’s defense was pretty good in almost every other series for four straight years with him on the floor.

He was younger and moved a little better then, but Houston, Utah, LAC, Portland, and maybe even New Orleans should all have interest. (Also, is it that hard to picture Robert Sarver getting seized by a restless conniption and then instructing James Jones to do whatever it takes to trade for his former teammate?)

But a reasonable asking price is where things get murky. The Jazz sent three positive assets — a protected first-round pick, Grayson Allen, and Jae Crowder’s expiring contract — to the Grizzlies for Mike Conley, who can opt out of his contract this summer. If the Cavs can extract something similar for Love, they should, even if his off-court influence on such a young team is important.

He’s under contract until 2023, when he’ll be 34, but the money isn’t that high when you factor in a rising cap (no guarantee given the NBA’s ongoing feud with China, but still) and the way his deal is structured (it decreases by $2.3 million in the final year). Even if his All-Star appearances are in the rearview mirror, Love is still a difference maker in the right situation. The NBA playoffs will be more interesting if he takes part.

Blake Griffin

The Detroit Pistons are not where you want to be. Their floor is just high enough to compete for a playoff spot, and their ceiling is low enough to keep them from actually winning a series. They acquired Griffin — who’s hurt, again — 18 months ago and the deal already feels sort of stale. By trading him they would solve one problem while diving head first into another: It’s easy to blow up a roster, but building it back up in a market that won’t attract free-agent stars is very much not.

The good news is Andre Drummond can opt into free agency this summer, Reggie Jackson’s contract is about to expire, and the path to a clean cap sheet is uncomplicated. At the same time, cap space in Detroit means very little. Their plan should be to cut costs and build through the draft/collect retainable rookie-scale contracts, and Griffin is the only trade chip on their roster who can help them do it

Blake is still very good. He made third-team All-NBA last year and 22.5 percent of all his shots were pull-up threes that went in 36 percent of the time. That is crazy impressive and useful as he journeys to the other side of 30. The next question is how many teams would even be interested, let alone have enough assets to make this worth Detroit’s while?

Boston needs frontcourt help and can balance its roster by moving Gordon Hayward, Semi Ojeleye, and a couple first-round picks. Portland can dangle Anfernee Simons or Zach Collins with Kent Bazemore and Rodney Hood. Miami seems like a sensible destination. I wonder if Orlando would be willing to move Aaron Gordon, Markelle Fultz, and Mo Bamba for him. (That trade would hinge on whether they think Jonathon Isaac, Blake, and Nikola Vucevic can share the floor — there’s enough shooting, sure, but defensively they may be compromised in the playoffs.)

For Detroit to actually make any of these trades something disastrous would have to happen. Blake’s overall value to them can’t be fully illustrated on his basketball-reference page. He’s marketable. A real star! And any deal wouldn’t bring another one back, which may be what an owner who just opened a new stadium in downtown Detroit wants. If they drafted Donovan Mitchell instead of Luke Kennard, or Justise Winslow over Stanley Johnson, or any warm body over Henry Ellenson, things would be different. But this is what happens when you stumble in the draft as long as Detroit has. Free Blake.

Kyle Lowry

I’m not sure if this is true after what happened last June, but Kyle Lowry still feels like the least appreciated star of my lifetime. At 33, he’s a five-time All-Star, NBA champion, and plus/minus God. History will shine a brighter light on his career than it received at any point while he played, and right now, as his franchise’s all-time franchise player, Lowry is well-positioned to prop up Toronto’s future as a delicious trade chip.

Of everyone mentioned in this entire article, none can upend the season’s entire landscape if moved to the right team like Lowry can. That team is not Minnesota or Miami (maybe it’d make the Heat an Eastern Conference Finalist and apologies ahead of time for casting doubt upon Lowry once again), but what if Denver offers Gary Harris, Will Barton, and Michael Porter Jr.? Or what if the Raptors sent him to Milwaukee in a deal centered around Eric Bledsoe and a lightly-protected first in 2024. (That probably isn’t enough for Toronto, but forwarding Lowry to a place where he can compete for another championship would make that front office look genial in a precarious situation. How teams treat their players has never mattered more than it does right now.)

Elsewhere, if the Sixers trade Tobias Harris for him they probably win the title. But my favorite destination is Dallas, where Lowry would be the absolute best point guard for Luka Doncic over the next two years. Unfortunately, Jalen Brunson isn’t going to get a deal done.

The Raptors just signed Pascal Siakam to a four-year max contract because Lowry’s one-year extension ate the cap space that once justified waiting until next year to get a deal done. If you can avoid frustrating Siakam, you don’t; signing him now is a signal that the Raptors have their eye on the long game. If they blow the doors off every other team they play in the first few months of the season, there will be an obvious incentive to hold the core together as long as they can. But this team isn’t winning it all, and the longer they wait to break it up, the less they’ll get in return.

Chris Paul

A lot of what was just written about Lowry applies here, except Paul is one year older and due $60.7 million more over the next three seasons. Minor details. Even though he just spent the past two years proving how useful he can be off the ball, Paul can’t blend into any ecosystem quite like Lowry can. He’s not as jumpy, fluid, or self-sacrificial. All that makes moving him this season pretty hard, and also I don’t think the Thunder should. (It’d be cool if OKC and the Lakers could find a third team to facilitate something — James really needs another playmaker — but don’t count on it.)

LaMarcus Aldridge

Aldridge is known as a metronomic post presence who dines in that inefficient valley between the arc and paint, but he’s still unguardable when he wants to be. Only three players dropped more than the 56 points he gave Oklahoma City last season: James Harden, Devin Booker, and Kemba Walker. Last season was probably the best of his career, and there aren’t five players who make more stylistic sense as a third wheel beside two All-Stars. Actually getting him there is easier said than done, though. Plop him beside James Harden and Russell Westbrook or Kawhi Leonard and Paul George, sure. But what are those two teams offering that San Antonio actually wants?

A trade back to Portland makes sense and would be a nice story, but to me, the most interesting and realistic destination is Brooklyn. Nets general manager Sean Marks has close ties to San Antonio and their window won’t be open forever. Caris LeVert is a bit too steep of an asking price, but if a package built around Spencer Dinwiddie and Joe Harris is presented, both teams should go for it.

There are caveats, though. San Antonio wants to make the playoffs, values continuity, and doesn’t make a ton of blockbuster trades. They aren’t going to move him just because they’re bad. The right offer must come along. Also, Aldridge led the league in two-point field goals last year, a stat that may be more trivial than telling. Some people think his game isn’t a good fit in a league that’s decided on the perimeter, but those people are wrong. Aldridge might be the NBA’s most underrated defender, and he’s still powerful enough to bend opponents when he goes to work in the mid post. Go ahead, let him destroy his man in single coverage while you hope the math eventually works in your favor. He demands help. On a team that has two other stars, he’s perfect.

BONUS: Khris Middleton

I don’t think Middleton will get traded. (REPEAT: I don’t think Middleton will get traded.) Preseason title contenders don’t usually trade their second-best player, but no team is feeling more pressure to reach the Finals. Like, imagine how Milwaukee would react if they started slow and then got crushed by the Sixers in the regular season? Or Giannis Antetokounmpo publicly voiced frustration with literally anything. On the court, the Bucks are in a position of strength, but their net rating can’t reflect how fragile this situation truly is.

Shipping Middleton out of town a few months right after they signed him to a five-year contract would be politically treacherous for Milwaukee’s front office. And finding anything that actually makes sense is almost impossible. The Bucks don’t do it unless they know they’re receiving a player who’s better than Middleton and complements Antetokounmpo. No star for star swaps make sense, contractually. It’d have to be something wildly disruptive, like Chris Paul and Danilo Gallinari for Middleton, Bledsoe, and another contract. Madness. That’s just about never happening, but anything is possible in today’s NBA.

[forkanna]

[AO3 LINK]

It took me all night to stop feeling embarrassed about the scene Knives caused. Maybe deep down, I really did feel flattered that she cared this much, but it was buried under so much shame and annoyance that I couldn't even feel it accurately. Where did she get off inserting herself into my life as some weird kind of protector? Especially since I didn't need any protecting. At all. That was just some random crap I made up to make it clear that I wasn't interested in her hanging around and making me feel better. Not my fault she was too dense to realise.

A few days later, I saw her again. Just enough time to forget that the whole incident happened before I was freshly reminded because she came barging back into my life. Great.

"Are you stalking me?"

"What?" Knives asked, trying to casually drop down from the tree branch. She landed with a quiet tmp against the little patch of grass around the trunk, a would-be innocent smile playing across her lips. "Noooo… not at all."

"Because it feels like you're stalking me. And what's with that?"

"Nothing!" Her hand whipped to one side, throwing the binoculars so hard that they disappeared into the sky with a brief gleam. "Nobody was watching you since you left the house this morning, don't be silly!"

Sighing, I continued walking down the pavement. She kept pace with me; now that I'd found her out, apparently she had decided there was no point in keeping a low profile anymore. My hands clenched into fists in my hoodie pockets. "Fine. What do you want?"

"Well… I'm trying to do surveillance."

"Yeah, I got that."

"For the challenges? You know… see if I can tell from the outside anything more about what I'll face on the inside. So far, nothing obvious. But I wanna be ready!"

"For the imaginary challenges? Wow, quelle surprise."

"Are they imaginary though?" she breathed with a slight squinting of her eyes.

"Dude… you are so weird." For some reason, that made her grin at me, and I rolled my eyes. Didn't seem to be any point in trying to get rid of her anymore, so I just said, "I'm going to work. You won't have anything to do there but watch me watch old movies."

"I love old movies! Like, like… the first Harry Potter!"

Inwardly, I died a little.

                                                      ~ o ~

This manic chick actually came with me to the video rental store. I shouldn't have to tell you that in this millennium, especially after the first decade of it, there's really no point in even having a video rental store anymore, so we had no customers. It was literally hours of sitting around and watching movie after movie, while maybe one guy came in and asked where 'the good stuff' was kept. My glare sent him packing.

"So was it that bad wherever you went for uni that you ended up slumming it back here again?"

"Not bad," Knives told me as she sat on the counter, spinning the orange she had gotten from a convenience store on the way in her hands. It was the last thing either of us had to eat after we made our way through some cheesy Nineties rom-com. "Just not home. Toronto is just, you know? Like… everything's so cool here."

"Yeah, it's freezing."

"Not right now. Summer in Toronto is like, the best. Plus my friend Tamara lives here, I was hoping I'd see her."

There was something about how genuine Knives was that reminded me of Scott when we first met. That could probably play a role in why they were attracted to each other in the first place, and I might be more certain of that if I were some kind of TV pop-psychologist. As in, Scott saw something of his younger self in Knives, the way he was before he broke my heart and Envy broke his in turn. Yadda yadda.

Maybe that's why I hadn't thrown her out yet. Nostalgia.

"Kim?"

"What?" I snapped, since I had been snapped out of my stupor.

"The movie's over."

"Oh…" Ducking my head, I reached over to pull the DVD of 'The Mystical Head' out of the player. "Shit…"

Head tilted to one side, Knives asked me, "What would you be watching if you had to pick? Right now?"

"Zombie Corpse Mutilator IV: The Zombining."

"Really? Is it any good? I don't watch very many scary movies…"

With a long sigh, I stood up and stretched my arms over my head. Knives tried to balance the orange on the bridge of her nose, failed, and caught it before it fell very far. "You probably just want me to put on some drivel like 'Let's Hope There's A Heaven,' don't you?"

"No," she laughed easily. "What about… 'Seven Shaolin Masters'? I like action, but not like, just a bunch of stuff blowing up. And I heard that one's supposed to be pretty authentic, it was done by a Chinese director."

The way she looked all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed reminded me of a squirrel spotting a nut it hadn't cracked yet. Maybe I was the nut. Who knows? But for some reason, her excitement and complete disregard of whether or not I crapped all over her good mood was getting past my defenses. So much so that I said…

"Sure. Think we have a few copies."

We watched it. Not a bad flick. I guess I like it about as much as I like anything, really. Not high praise, but you get the picture. Knives was eating it up. Really… the weirdest part is that she never complained about having to sit there on the counter, just hopped down once in a while to stretch her legs and lean against it instead. Like we had been doing this for years: her coming to hang out with me while I 'worked'. Felt like the plot of some low-budget indie film, shot in black-and-white to be 'ironic'.

About halfway through, she did go to the lavatory, and when she came back she stayed behind the counter. I started to tell her she wasn't allowed, but decided I didn't care enough. Maybe I'm getting soft at the ripe old age of twenty-four.

"Hey," I suddenly asked, during a boring part in which the main character was meditating.

"Hm?"

"What are you doing?"

"Watching a movie."

"No… I mean like, going to uni. What's your whole deal?" I cringed; that was a pretty crappy way to ask the question. But, as usual, Knives didn't seem to mind.

"Not really sure. Just want to figure out what I'm doing. My mom wants me to be a doctor, but that is so not happening. Like… I kinda want to found a martial arts school. Super cliché, but I've never really been good at anything else, except fangirling. Which isn't really a 'job' I can get."

"Sure you could. Rent yourself out as a professional fangirl."

Her eyes went round. "You can do that?!" But for once, she seemed to get that I was teasing and smiled. "Aww, silly Kim. But… actually I wonder if there'd be any interest in it… maybe I could start a whole new thing!"

"Weirdo."

"What about you?"

That caught me off guard. "Huh? I'm a drummer."

"Yeah, but you aren't really in a band right now, right? You said you and Neil's sister are just kind of trying stuff."

"It's none of your-" But I cut myself off. This wasn't an interrogation, and Knives wasn't trying to pry. Wasn't trying to. "I just… am trying to figure that out. My life got kicked in the butt by a few events and I need a rebuilding year."

"But it's already been a year since your last band-"

"Knives…"

She fell silent, turning away to finish the movie. She looked guilty, which wasn't really what I wanted; I just wanted her to take the hint that it's not the most fun subject to bring up for me right now. But I didn't know how to tell her that without getting all sappy and feelsy, so I didn't try.

When Comeau came in to relieve me, we split, and she followed along behind like a good puppy. A good stray puppy. One I never wanted, but for some reason, I didn't mind her there. We did start getting along toward the end of Sex Bob-omb's career, I guess.

"You wanna get some food? It's about dinner time. Or you probably have plans, huh?"

Shrugging, I managed to mutter, "Eh." I didn't have any plans. I never had many plans anymore; met up with Stephen once a week, or less. Steph wasn't so much a friend as a colleague… which I guess was where both of them stood with me. Where did everybody go?

"Cool. Wanna get Sneaky Dee's?"

"Ugh… too noisy. Not in the mood."

"Poutine? Sushi?"

I started to make a very vaguely racist joke about sushi being the wrong food for her, but decided it would be more hurtful than funny. Especially to Knives, who only seemed to get the most obvious jokes. "Poutine works. I could use some gravy-laden goodness."

"Cool. Let's do it!"

She skipped off down the path, hair bouncing on the breeze. I didn't notice before that she was still keeping it short, I was so focused on the fact that she stopped dyeing it in the front. Kind of a compromise between who she had been before Scott and who she was after, maybe.

Not that I knew why I was noticing now. I must really have been bored. "Wait up, you dumbass," I grumbled under my breath as I trudged after her.

                                                      ~ o ~

Somehow, grabbing dinner with this almost-a-stranger was fine. She gushed about college life, about some group of friends she found online and really connected with or whatever. I was only half paying attention while I chewed. Between bites she was drinking a ginger ale, and kept setting it down so hard that a few droplets would fly up and land on the table, or even on her face. That annoyed me, but it was also kind of… cute somehow. Maybe I needed therapy.

Once we finished up, we walked to the bus stop that would take her back in the direction of her house. It was awkward. There was no real reason for it to be awkward but it was; she looked down at her boots, rocking back and forth with her hands in the small of her back.

"U-um… do you mind if I drop by more? You seemed kind of unhappy to see me at first. If you really want me to leave you alone forever…"

"Yes. I do."

"Okay. S-sorry, Kim."

Now I felt like I was kicking a puppy. She wasn't really that bad; I just hated being forced to endure the company of anyone besides myself and my inner demons. "Ugh… just don't make a big deal about it, and shut up if we get too busy, alright? God."

Her mopey face turned into a wide smile over the course of the following five seconds. "YAY!" No seriously, she said 'yay'. And meant it. What the fuck was she even? Her arms sprang forward, and before I could tell what was about to happen, she had me caught in a crushing hug.

"Let GO. Dude, seriously! Off!"

"I'll see you tomorrow! Oh man, this is gonna be a great summer!" Without any further ado, she pranced over to the bus stop, walking backward so she could wave at me the entire time. Anybody could have predicted that she would trip over the old man's dachshund, but she picked herself up right away with a light giggle, apologising to both of them before waving again.

Our definitions of "great summer" don't have much overlap.

                                                       To Be Continued…

[jonjost]

In autumn of 1977, I returned to Los Angeles after a swirl of festivals with Angel City and Last Chants for a Slow Dance.  By chance I met with a friend, whose floor I was crashing on in Venice, over a meal with Michael Crichton’s sister, two wanna-be producers.  They said they were hot to make a movie, and could readily raise $35K, in Hollywood at the time nothing, but for me a fair bit. [I shot the film in 16mm and made a 35mm blow up for that budget, at the time a miracle of economy.] The following period equaled a nightmare, but out of it came Chameleon which went on to a mess of festivals, and suggestions that Hollywood would soon be knocking at my door.   Had they ever seen or understood Angel City or Chameleon, one would think not.  The experience of making Chameleon, at however a low level, turned me off any interest whatsoever in working there or in the film business.

    CHAMELEON

1978, 16mm blown to 35mm, color/snd, 90 minutes

Produced, written, directed, photographed and edited by Jon Jost. With Bob Glaudini, Nick Richardson, Lee Kissman, Kathleen McKay, Ellen Blake, Norman Gibbs, Fox Harris, Lola Moon, Winifred Golden, Gene Youngblood, and others

Shown at Taormina, Toronto, Sydney, Melbourne, US (now Sundance) Best of Fest, 1978; Edinburgh Festival, Deauville, Florence 1979; and others.

Broadcast by UK’s C4, 1982

A scathing portrait of the Hollywood/LA arts milieu of the late 70’s, Chameleon follows the amorphous day of its lead character, an Armani-jacketed tony peddler of high-class dope, fraudulent art, and preening postures suit-to-fit the victim.

  Critics comments:

“Jost’s Chameleon cost a mere $35,000 to make (including the 16 to 35mm blowup) and is a triumph of artistry over budget. Jost’s day in the life of a lean, mean Los Angeles hustler (Bob Glaudini) is a cautionary tale about the self-destructiveness of American opportunism. The main character – hero or villain, according to taste – moves reptilelike through a land of easy-prey gullibility, sucking dry his victims and his own humanity alike. The film is packed with bold visual metaphors. When a gun is fired, the whole screen explodes into white; when the hustler changes his “act” for different clients, the screen, chameleonlike, changes its colors. Chameleon is a nervy, intelligent, exciting advance on Jost’s last film, Angel City.”

Nigel Andrews, American Film

“…but I also like the film because Bob Glaudini’s performance as Terry is absolutely riveting (why this man isn’t better known I’ll never understand) ; because Jost seems to have captured, more or less exactly, the kind of California life-style that makes a convention of the unconventional, and because Jost’s inventiveness, undoubtedly born out of necessity, has an irrepressible edge to it that stops pretension in its tracks. In a way he is the American Wenders, equally attracted to but critical of Hollywood prototypes.”

Derek Malcolm, Guardian

“Jon Jost’s Chameleon was probably the happiest instance of a mixed marriage at the Festival (Edinburgh 1979): combining a freak, trippy (in fact almost Corman-esque) saga of a dope-dealer and all-round hustler with an abstract distillation of patterns of color and light. The place of the latter in the film is both somewhere within the drug-laced nimbus of its title character, Terry (Bob Glaudini), and somewhere outside its ironic description of the rampant merchandising of all other human activities. In a way, this abstract element almost serves as a secondary narrative, or at least becomes the ‘point’ of the film. At the beginning, Terry is seen hustling a painter of just such abstract designs to come up with six imitations of another painter which he can unload on the art market. With some ‘persuasion’, Terry overcomes the painter’s reluctance, and at the end of the film returns to collect his merchandise. But the rolls of paper his is given turn out to be blank, and the painter defiantly protests, ‘My life is color, form, the shape of things…’ before Terry knocks him down and leaves him lying in a pool of spilled colors that returns us to the abstracts which were shown in detail in the opening shots. It is probably not too deterministic a reading to see Jost as the painter and the blank sheets as the conventional movie which he has refused to provide for audience consumption.

But in between, his narrative not only holds together but unfolds through a fascinating succession of moods as Terry drives about LA, moving from appointment to appointment, from role to role. At one point, at the end of a long sequence in which he seems to be renewing a personal acquaintance on a hilltop some way outside the city, he and his companion go into a brief song and dance (I want to be phony, I want to be fake, not real:). The unreality of Los Angeles clearly serves as a prime cause, and natural cradle, for the dreaming of cocaine dreams, and through it Jost even makes contact with a literary source.. Terry refers to science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick and comments, “This feller seemed like a casualty straight from his pages.”

Richard Combs, American Film

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/chameleon2

LA Again: Chameleon In autumn of 1977, I returned to Los Angeles after a swirl of festivals with Angel City…

[biofunmy]

Astros Beat Yankees as Bullpen Battle Ends With One Swing

HOUSTON — Carlos Correa stopped halfway to home plate as his Houston Astros teammates bounced around in delight. As J.A. Happ and the rest of the Yankees trudged off the field after Game 2 of the American League Championship Series, Correa tossed his helmet like a basketball into the circle of his delirious Astros and charged into the celebration.

After 11 innings of taut baseball between the two best teams in the American League, the Astros defeated the Yankees, 3-2, as Sunday night turned to Monday to even their best-of-seven series at a game apiece. Correa’s hit exposed the underbelly of the Yankees’ bullpen.

When James Paxton’s command faltered early in Sunday’s game, Yankees Manager Aaron Boone decided not to play with fire. It didn’t matter that the Yankees trailed by only one run at the time, or that there was one out in the third inning. Boone wanted the strength of his team’s pitching staff, the bullpen, to take control of the game.

After the Astros tied the score against one stout Yankees reliever and outlasted the others, they pounced on Happ, a starter during the regular season. Happ escaped a jam he inherited in the 10th inning, but the first pitch he threw to Correa in the bottom of the 11th inning was blasted over the right-field fence. It was the Astros’ first hit since the fifth inning, but it ended the game.

The series now shifts to Yankee Stadium for Game 3 on Tuesday afternoon. Gerrit Cole, in the midst of a remarkable run of success, will take the mound for the Astros, while Luis Severino, making only his fifth start of the year because of injuries, will counter for the Yankees. The Astros have not lost a game started by Cole since July 12.

Before Sunday’s game even started, the Yankees were dealt an all-too-common blow during this injury-ridden year. Left fielder Giancarlo Stanton, who missed most of the regular season with a litany of injuries but returned a month ago, was dropped from the lineup with a right quadriceps strain. Stanton sustained the injury beating out an infield hit in the second inning of Game 1. He continued to play and later hit a home run, and didn’t report any issues until after the game.

Boone said Stanton had a magnetic resonance imaging examination and was evaluated by the team’s doctors. Whether Stanton would need to be replaced on the A.L.C.S. roster was still an unknown; the Yankees said they hoped Monday’s day off would give Stanton some time to rest and then be re-evaluated. Cameron Maybin, one of the many fill-ins who kept the Yankees afloat this season amid a wave of injuries, started instead in left field on Sunday.

Even without Stanton, the Yankees had plenty of firepower for their battle against the Astros’ Justin Verlander, one of the best pitchers in baseball. The Yankees countered with Paxton, whose second-half turnaround was sparked by increasing the usage of his curveball. That pitch would be essential against an Astros offense that was the best in the major leagues at making contact during the regular season, one known for its ability to clobber fastballs.

Pitch selection mattered less when Paxton’s command faltered. The Astros took a 1-0 lead in the second inning when Alex Bregman smacked a leadoff single and he scored on a double to left by Correa.

In the third inning, Paxton again fell behind in counts and needed his fastball more. With one out, he coughed up singles to Michael Brantley and Jose Altuve on fastballs. Trailing by 1-0 and wary of falling farther behind against Verlander, who had started strong, Boone pulled him.

With no game on Monday and 10 relievers at his disposal, Boone was asking his bullpen to get 20 outs. They got even more.

It helped that Judge soon gave the Yankees a 2-1 lead. D.J. LeMahieu had drawn a leadoff walk in the fourth inning before Judge, the next batter, took advantage of a momentary lapse in Verlander’s command. Judge fouled back a 95-mile-per-hour fastball over the plate. He then hammered the next pitch, a slider to the same spot, over the center-field fence for a go-ahead two-run homer.

As the game progressed, Boone’s strategy of leaning on his bullpen appeared to be working until Adam Ottavino entered the game. Despite pitching well this season, Ottavino has been shaky lately. Five of the 10 batters he had faced this postseason entering Sunday had reached base. That continued in Game 2.

After Chad Green delivered two scoreless innings on 26 pitches, Ottavino entered in the fifth inning to face the top of the Astros’ lineup, the type of assignment he has drawn all year. But the first pitch he threw was a poor slider over the heart of the plate that George Springer blasted to left field for a homer that tied the score at 2-2.

The rest of the game was a tense affair between the two best teams in the A.L. Players hit balls hard into the air that died at the warning track. A potentially fruitful scoring chance for the Yankees in the sixth inning fizzled when Altuve, Houston’s second baseman, booted a ground ball but Correa, the shortstop, smartly raced over to recover it. The Yankees third-base coach, Phil Nevin, waved LeMahieu home from second base but Correa’s throw beat him by 20 feet.

Verlander survived his fading command long enough to get two outs in the seventh inning and departed after 109 pitches. Like Boone, Astros Manager A.J. Hinch then deployed his bullpens to neutralize the Yankees’ lineup. For about two hours, neither team mustered anything: Brett Gardner’s sixth-inning single, in fact, stood as the only hit by either team

But the Yankees couldn’t push a run across, and Correa won the game in the bottom of the inning.

Benjamin Hoffman tracked the game for The Times. Read on to follow it as it happened.

11th Inning: The Astros End It

After two quick outs, Edwin Encarnacion walked for the Yankees, leading Astros Manager A.J. Hinch to pull Joe Smith for Ryan Pressly. Brett Gardner, who had the game’s previous hit (in the top of the sixth) got another one, singling to right, and Hinch proceeded to replace Pressly with Josh James. That brought up Gary Sanchez with two on and two out, and the slugging catcher struck out looking in a fairly epic 10-pitch at-bat. Sanchez argued loudly with the call on a ball that appeared to be low and outside.

Carlos Correa then won the game on the first pitch of the 11th inning with a home run.

David Waldstein: Updating the situation earlier, with an injured person in Houston’s dugout, the Astros released a statement saying that it was a paramedic supervisor who was hit by a foul ball off the bat of Michael Brantley in the fifth inning. He was taken to a hospital and is in stable condition, the team said.

10th Inning: Lots of Pitchers, No Runs

Aaron Hicks made his postseason debut by pinch-hitting for Cameron Maybin. He proceeded to ground out to first against the reliever Joe Smith. Didi Gregorius popped out in foul territory, with Alex Bregman making the catch after a bit of a run, and D.J. LeMahieu hit a chopper back to Smith to end the half-inning.

With Aroldis Chapman having thrown 25 pitches in the ninth, Aaron Boone replaced him with C.C. Sabathia to start the 10th. The veteran starter is helping serve as a left-handed specialist in this series after having been left off the division series roster. He retired Michael Brantley on a grounder to second.

Sabathia was then replaced by Jonathan Loaisiga who walked Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman.

With the left-handed Yordan Alvarez due up, Aaron Boone replaced Loaisiga with J.A. Happ, and the starting pitcher struck out the rookie. Happ then fell behind, 3-0, to Yuli Gurriel, but retired him on a fly ball to left to end the threat.

There has not been a hit in this game since Brett Gardner’s infield single in the top of the sixth, which resulted in a runner being thrown out at home.

David Waldstein: Sabathia pitched in relief in Game 5 of the 2011 American League division series against the Detroit Tigers. He went one and one-third innings and gave up a run on two hits in the middle of that game, which the Tigers won, 3-2, at Yankee Stadium. Max Scherzer also pitched in relief in that game for Detroit.

9th Inning: We’re Headed to Extra Innings

Roberto Osuna did his part in the top half of the inning. He got Brett Gardner to ground out to first, struck out Gary Sanchez and then got Gio Urshela to fly out to shallow center.

Aroldis Chapman was then summoned for the Yankees for the bottom half of the inning. He struck out Carlos Correa and Robinson Chirinos, but walked Aledmys Diaz, who had come in to pinch-hit for Kyle Tucker. That brought up George Springer, who struck out on a 100-mile-an-hour fastball to end the inning.

David Waldstein: In 32 regular season games against the Yankees, most of them while he pitched for the Toronto Blue Jays, Roberto Osuna has only allowed 3 earned runs in 34 innings, for a 0.79 E.R.A.

8th Inning: Bullpens Thriving

There was not a lot to show for the eighth inning.

Will Harris struck out D.J. LeMahieu to start the inning but after he walked Aaron Judge, A.J. Hinch came out to the mound to make a change. He delighted stat-heads everywhere by going straight to his best reliever, Roberto Osuna, in a high-leverage situation. And Osuna delivered, retiring Gleyber Torres on a fly ball to right and striking out Edwin Encarnacion with a 97-mile-an-hour fastball.

Yankees reliever Zack Britton came out for the bottom half of the inning and immediately got Jose Altuve to ground out to second. He walked Alex Bregman but recovered to strike out Yordan Alvarez, who showed some impressive strength by reducing his bat to splinters as he slammed it to the ground after the at-bat. Yuli Gurriel then lined out to center to end the inning.

David Waldstein: Alvarez’s frustration is starting to bubble over. Alvarez hit 27 home runs during the regular season, and his longest stretch without a home run was eight games. But including the postseason, the rookie has not homered in 12 games. When he struck out flailing at a Zack Britton breaking ball that was way out of the strike zone in the eighth, he slammed down his bat, which broke, and Alvarez snapped it in two as he walked back to the dugout.

7th Inning: Verlander’s Day Is Done

The Yankees finally got rid of Justin Verlander, but the game remains knotted, 2-2.

Verlander started the inning by striking out Gary Sanchez. He needed only one pitch to dispatch Gio Urshela, who flied out to center, but then he walked Cameron Maybin, pushing his pitch count for the night to 109. He did not get to 110, as A.J. Hinch replaced him with Will Harris, who is tough on lefties, to face Didi Gregorius. The move worked, as Harris struck out Gregorius to end the inning.

Tommy Kahnle, who had already recorded four outs, was back out to start the seventh inning. He struck out Kyle Tucker, with the rookie flailing fairly haplessly at a changeup. George Springer hit a towering pop-up that D.J. LeMahieu handled easily at first, and Kahnle got out of the inning when Michael Brantley grounded out to second.

Springer limped into the clubhouse after his at-bat. The extent to which the center fielder was injured was not immediately clear. He took his position in center to start the eighth inning.

6th Inning: Carlos Correa Saves a Run

There wasn’t any scoring in the sixth, but that doesn’t mean the inning wasn’t interesting.

The Yankees made Justin Verlander throw a lot of pitches through five innings, and in the sixth it briefly felt as if that might bear fruit. D.J. LeMahieu and Gleyber Torres singled on either side of an Aaron Judge flyout to right, putting runners on first and second for Edwin Encarnacion with one out. The big right-handed batter, who typically thrives with runners on base, flied out to center.

From there things got a little weird. Brett Gardner hit the ball sharply to Jose Altuve at second, who was unable to field the ball cleanly, and as it shot out of his glove to his right, LeMahieu rounded third and tried to score. Carlos Correa crossed over the field from shortstop, picked the loose ball up and threw home, easily nailing LeMahieu at the plate for the third out.

In the bottom half of the inning, Tommy Kahnle got some serious defensive help as well, with Gio Urshela climbing the ladder at third base to make a leaping grab of a hard liner by Yuli Gurriel that seemed destined for extra bases. Correa then hit a 400-foot out to center, possibly robbed by the dimensions of Minute Maid Park. Kahnle then ended the inning by getting Robinson Chirinos to fly out to right.

5th Inning: George Springer Ties Game

A questionable pitching change by Aaron Boone has this game tied after five innings.

After Justin Verlander pitched a quiet top half of the inning, Chad Green started the bottom half by striking out the rookie Kyle Tucker, who had come in as a pinch-hitter for Jake Marisnick. That made Green perfect through six batters, but with George Springer coming up, Boone brought in Adam Ottavino in hopes that the veteran’s wicked slider could neutralize Houston’s slugger.

It did not work. Springer homered to left-center field on the first pitch Ottavino threw — a slider.

After Springer’s homer, there was a brief delay in the game when a foul ball off the bat of Michael Brantley struck a member of the security staff in Houston’s dugout. Brantley, who looked stricken after the incident, proceeded to strike out but reached first when Gary Sanchez could not corral the wild pitch in the dirt.

With Brantley running on the pitch on the first pitch of the next at-bat, Jose Altuve hit a sharp grounder to Didi Gregorius’s right that the shortstop was able to knock down but was unable to make any sort of play on, putting runners at first and second for Alex Bregman, with the crowd exploding with “M.V.P.!” chants. Ottavino struck out Bregman, but then was pulled in favor of Tommy Kahnle, who struck out Yordan Alvarez to end the inning.

David Waldstein: Michael Brantley hit a hard foul ball into the Astros dugout and it hit someone, apparently a security guard. Several of the Astros players, including Brantley, were visibly shaken by it and A.J. Hinch had to come out and reassure Brantley as the guard was attended to by the Astros’ medical staff. Eventually, the guard was able to walk out of the dugout, escorted by one of the trainers.

Brantley still appeared to be shaken while he was on second base and during a pitching change he was called over to the Astros dugout, where Gerrit Cole came out and chatted to him briefly. Whatever Cole told Brantley — hopefully it was that the guard will be fine — it seemed to cheer Brantley up a bit because he patted Cole on the back and jogged back to second base.

4th Inning: Judge’s Homer Gives Yankees the Lead

Things had looked dire for the Yankees through three innings, but they are now leading, 2-1, after four.

They finally got their first base runner off Justin Verlander when D.J. LeMahieu walked to start the top half of the fourth and Aaron Judge made Verlander pay for that mistake by blasting a slider over the center-field fence for a 423-foot home run. It was Judge’s first home run of the postseason.

Verlander settled down after the homer. He got Gleyber Torres to fly out to right and then struck out both Edwin Encarnacion and Brett Gardner to end the half-inning.

Staked to a lead, Chad Green was back for more work in the fourth and got through things quickly, retiring Yuli Gurriel on a liner to center, striking out Carlos Correa and getting Robinson Chirinos to line out to left.

David Waldstein: So much for Verlander’s slider being good. He left one up and over the plate for the Judge homer. Verlander has given up 70 earned runs this season, including the postseason, and 39 have come on home runs (36 in the regular season).

The Astros have had seven base runners and scored only one run through three innings. The Yankees have had two and both scored. They will need to do more damage when they have the chances.

3rd Inning: Yankees Go to the Bullpen Early

With Justin Verlander dealing and the Yankees already in a hole, Manager Aaron Boone went to a reliever with just one out in the third inning, meaning this will be a long night for the Yankees’ bullpen.

It’s hard to blame Boone for feeling desperate, as Verlander has yet to allow a base runner. In the top half of the inning, he retired Gio Urshela on a fly ball to right, struck out Cameron Maybin on three pitches, and got Didi Gregorius to fly out to right. He’s up to four strikeouts and has seemed even more dominant than that.

James Paxton, on the other hand, was good, but not quite good enough. He started the bottom of the third by striking out George Springer but then allowed a bloop single to right-center by Michael Brantley. With relievers already warming up in the bullpen, Paxton allowed a sharp liner to right from Jose Altuve and with that his day was done.

Chad Green came on in relief and while Alex Bregman smoked another ball to the outfield, this one ended up in the glove of Cameron Maybin, who appeared to be struggling with the glare of the lights at Minute Maid Park. He then ended the inning by getting Yordan Alvarez to pop out to short.

David Waldstein: Justin Verlander looks completely different than the pitcher who was rocked in Game 4 of the division series. Verlander was pitching on short rest in that game and said he did not have command of his slider. But he looks locked in and effective tonight, and the slider is sharp.

2nd Inning: Astros Take the Lead

The Astros got on the scoreboard first when Carlos Correa doubled on a grounder that shot through the infield, making it 1-0 Houston. But James Paxton stranded a pair of runners who had been threatening to make things worse.

Justin Verlander had made things look exceedingly easy in the top-half of the inning; he has needed only 28 pitches to erase all six batters he’s faced. Edwin Edwin Encarnacion appeared to pop out before it was determined that the ball ricocheted off a girder and then came back into play, making it a dead ball. Given a second life, he struck out instead. Brett Gardner was frozen for strike three on a vicious slider and Gary Sanchez flied out to shallow center.

Leading off the bottom half of the inning, Alex Bregman hit an absolute rocket that came off his bat at 107 miles per hour on its way to the wall — so fast that the Houston third baseman managed only a single. Paxton walked Houston’s power-hitting phenom, Yordan Alvarez, putting runners on first and second, which turned to first and third when Yuli Gurriel lined out to right.

That brought up Correa, who smoked a grounder past Gio Urshela at third that rolled all the way to the wall for a double, scoring Bregman for the 26th postseason R.B.I. of the shortstop’s career (a club record). Paxton struck out Robinson Chirinos and got out of the inning when he struck out Jake Marisnick.

David Waldstein: Some interesting numbers on the history of Game 2: Since the league championship series went to the best-of-seven format in 1985, only 3 of 30 teams have come back from 0-2 deficits in games to win the series: The last was the Boston Red Sox, who erased a 0-3 deficit against the Yankees in 2004. In1985 the Kansas City Royals did it against the Toronto Blue Jays and the same year the St. Louis Cardinals did it against the Los Angeles Dodgers.

But according to Major League Baseball, teams that have won Game 2, regardless of the outcome in Game 1, have gone on to advance to the World Series 19 of the last 21 times, and 28 out of 34 times over all, or 82 percent.

1st Inning: No Action as of Yet

It was an exceptionally quiet first inning.

Justin Verlander made quick work of the Yankees in the top half of the inning. The first batter he faced, D.J. LeMahieu, lined the second pitch of the game right into the glove of Carlos Correa, and his next three pitches all found their way past Aaron Judge for a strikeout. By comparison he labored in a four-pitch at-bat to Gleyber Torres in which he fell behind, 2-0, but recovered to get the red-hot Torres to fly out to center.

James Paxton responded by opening the bottom half of the inning by walking the ice-cold George Springer. He made up for his mistake by inducing a 4-6-3 double-play from Michael Brantley. Paxton then ran the count full against Jose Altuve but got out of the inning when the former M.V.P. lined out to short.

Maybin Replaces Stanton in Yankees’ Lineup

Cameron Maybin will start in left in place of Giancarlo Stanton in Game 2.

According to James Wagner of The Times: “Giancarlo Stanton injured his quad running down the line on his infield hit but was O.K. enough to play further into the game, per Aaron Boone. He received an MRI and a strain was revealed. Boone hopes Stanton will return this series.”

James said Boone told reporters that Stanton was available off the bench or in emergency situations, but given Stanton’s injury it is more likely the Yankees will not use him.

Keys to the Game

Justin Verlander is an intimidating presence on the mound and is easily on the short list for the best pitcher in the majors over the last four seasons alongside Max Scherzer, Jacob deGrom and Chris Sale. His lone weakness is the long ball; Verlander has allowed 121 home runs over those four years, compared with 94 for Scherzer, 86 for Sale and 72 for deGrom. That weakness could seem glaring against a Yankees lineup that hit 306 home runs this season — just one fewer than the Twins, who set a major league record — and added three more in Game 1.

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[eastbridge-sb]

MLS Asian Handicap Match Previews – 8th September Sunday

New York City FC v New England Revolution

Both of these teams have been in great form the last few weeks. New York City FC have won 6 of their last 8 matches and are now just one point off the top of the Eastern Conference. They have games in hand on everyone around them and right now have to be the favourite to win the East. Only Philly or Atlanta could prevent that anyway. The big prize is a first round bye in the post season playoffs. With the new playoff  system being just one legged games, this could be crucial and something that NYC will be aiming strongly for. The staggering thing about Dom Torrent’s men is how few games they’ve lost this season (5). Only LAFC with four defeats are anywhere near them in this category. At Yankee Stadium just one solitary loss vs Portland Timbers is a blemish on the card. Key players for NYC have been Heber, Castellanos, Moralez & Mitrita. This is generally a well balanced team though, even if some think the lack of a true high class #9 striker will ultimately cost them.

New England Revolution have been transformed under the management of Bruce Arena. They’ve gone from no hopers with Brad Friedel at the helm to what is now a potential playoff team. In fact, it’s more than likely  that the Revs will be entering the postseason. With a strong finish to the campaign it’s possible even 4th spot with be within their grasps. The Revolution are hard to beat, losing just 1 of their last 16 games in MLS. That is a really strong run in a league like this with only runaway Supporters Shield winners LAFC beating them during this period. New England haven’t lost on the road since 5th May although this trip to New York will severely test them. This is a team that on paper isn’t anything remarkable. But Arena has ‘coached up’ a number of players to a high level. Playmaker Carles Gil is the standout man and new midfield signing Gustavo Bou has been impressive. The hire of Arena is a good example that the most important appointment a club can make is the manager spot.

It’s still staggering how MLS continues on regardless during international breaks. This is where New England are very lucky in that they have nobody called up for their respective countries. NYCFC aren’t so fortunate though. They are going to be missing defenders Cannot, Callens, Mattarita & first choice keeper Sean Johnson. It’s a blow that top scorer upfront Heber is also ruled out because of injury. Considering these absentees then perhaps it’s a surprise to see the home side odds-on favourites. I really don’t think I could be trusting NYC on a -0.5 Asian Handicap. It’s not as if they are facing easy opponents and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Revolution won here. In terms of betting, the pick that stands out to me is over 3.25 goals. Both teams are usually very proactive and involved in high scoring matches. With NYC missing a bunch of defenders this could accelerate goal production even more. I’m fairly sure at least four goals can be scored here and at worst three for a half loss scenario.

Asian Total Goals Betting Recommendation: Over 3.25 at 1.990

FC Cincinnati v Toronto FC

There is a limited amount of fixtures this week so I am going back to the good old reliable Cincinnati over bet in this MLS preview column. For regular readers you will know backing their overs is a big money winner in recent months. A massive 14 of their last 17 fixtures have end over 2.5 with many of those contests also going over the 3.5 mark. There’s not too much I’m going to add. FCC have now lost 18 of their last 22 matches and know they’ll be picking up the wooden spoon this season. It’s all about pride now for Ron Jans’ men and they have absolutely nothing to lose. Cincinnati will ‘have a go’ trying to score goals but can’t defend properly and leave themselves far too open. Defensive duo Alvas Powell & Kendall Waston are both on international duty along with mifielders Allan Cruz and Derrick Etienne Jr.

This is a far more important match for Toronto FC. They are hanging on to a playoff spot down in 7th and desperately need 3 points out of this match. Anything less would be classed as major failure and put a big dent in their postseason aspirations. TFC haven’t been in bad form of late only losing 2 of their last 9. However, they haven’t been particularly fluent either and a number of draws have kind of stagnated their campaign. One good piece of news for them is that key striker Jozy Altidore hasn’t been included in the US squad for this international break. They will be missing the duo of Jonathan Osorio and Richie Laryea to the Canadian National team though. The previous meeting between the two sides ended in a 2-1 victory for TFC but it was a nervous win and not particularly convincing. 

It’s no real surprise to see Toronto FC odds-on favourites here. But can you trust them on the road? Cincinnati’s form is so bad in terms of results and defeats that the most likely outcome is an away win. However, the hosts have shown in patches they can compete well and I could see TFC given a few scares. If FCC avoided defeat I wouldn’t be totally shocked. The best bet as ever in a Cincinnati match appears to be over 3 goals. I have mentioned the statistics and styles of play and I don’t expect anything to change here. At some stage they will have another under 2.5 match but it would likely entail a bunch of missed chances and unusual circumstances. Hopefully that won’t be the case here and the goal train continues. 

Asian Total Goals Betting Recommendation: Over 3.00  at 1.850

Colorado Rapids v Seattle Sounders

The Rapids aren’t going to be making the playoffs this season and the highest finish for them would appear to be 9th or 10th in the West. However, they have been ending the campaign quite well, even stunning the New York Red Bulls away from home last week (2-0). Colorado have played four consecutive road games so will be pleased to be back on their own field here. Their last two matches at this stadium ended in a 6-3 win vs Montreal and 2-1 success vs San Jose. The pressure is off and they can just go and enjoy their football. Leading scorer Kei Kamara is on duty with Sierra Leone but for the most part their squad is in good condition and they aren’t affected by many international call ups. 

Seattle Sounders have some massive squad issues heading into this contest. They are missing a whopping TEN (10) players to international duty and will be totally down to the bare bones. Add in Romain Torres’ continued suspension, the long term injury of Will Bruin and other fitness doubts to Victor Rodriguez + Alex Roldan and it’s clear Brian Schmetzer’s men have issues. They will do well to field more than three proper substitutes here and it might be one of those matches they have to simply ‘write off’ and forget. Seattle still have guys like Nicolas Lodeiro and Harry Shipp who might give them something here but with the core of their squad all missing it will be difficult at this venue. Nobody likes to travel to Colorado at the best of times, especially in this sort of situation. I expect the Sounders to be very defnsive and maybe lineup with five at the back looking to earn a 0-0 draw. This could be a low scoring contest but surely Colorado have enough to win. They look a big price to me on a -0.25 Asian Handicap when you consider the Seattle absences.

Asian Handicap Betting Recommendation: Colorado Rapids -0.25 at 1.980

Preview by: @meatmansoccer.

Access these prices from Steve Wyss’ selections for this weekend’s MLS match through Skype Betting now.

The post MLS Asian Handicap Match Previews – 8th September Sunday appeared first on Eastbridge.

source https://eastbridge-sb.com/mls-asian-handicap-match-previews-080919/

[robbieinterviews]

Tarzan’s Margot Robbie on Why She’s No Damsel in Distress, 2016

When Margot Robbie popped up in The Big Short last year for a 60-second cameo—by definition, playing herself—to explain what “shorting” a bond means while drinking Dom Pérignon in the bathtub of a billionaire’s Malibu condo, I subconsciously shorted her. Here, it seemed, was that girl who invites you to stare and then tells you to fuck off if you stare for too long. The fact that just two years prior she so ferociously inhabited the role of the hottest gold digger in the history of cinema in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, permanently lodging herself in the collective male libido, served only to reinforce my concern that she might be some new breed of high-maintenance superpredator. Thankfully, the cameo turned out to be a clever little lie in a movie all about big fat ones. This was Margot Robbie playing her caricature—the retrograde Playboy fantasy in permanent soft-focus.

It comes as a surprise, then—a relief, even—to meet Robbie in April on the Santa Monica Pier and discover that she’s not remotely like the manipulative sex kittens she’s been so eerily good at portraying on the screen. It’s Robbie’s idea that we take a trapeze class together, and so here we are, smack dab in the middle of an amusement park over the water. Robbie, in yoga pants and a white tank top, her hair pulled up into a messy ponytail, goes entirely unrecognized, which has something to do with the fact that, dressed for a workout with no makeup, she looks like every third person you pass in Southern California—but prettier. She is smaller and more compact than I had imagined, and has the athletic mien of someone who played sports in high school, along with the graceful gait and natural poise of a woman who’s used to moving through the world on the balls of her feet like a dancer.

I assumed Robbie had taken up the trapeze for one of the very physically demanding roles she plays in two big studio movies coming out back-to-back this summer—Jane in The Legend of Tarzan, costarring Alexander Skarsgård and directed by David Yates, in July, followed by the cultishly beloved psychopath Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad, based on a task force of characters from DC Comics and directed by David Ayer, which comes out in August and seems bound to turn her into a household name—but I had assumed wrong. When Robbie was growing up in Australia, her mother sent her off to circus school—she received her “trapeze certificate” when she was eight. She hadn’t given it a thought in years, though, until she began having a recurring dream not long ago in which she was flying through the air, high above the net under the big top. “I couldn’t stop thinking about that stupid dream,” she says, and so she found this place and took a few classes. “I feel like I missed my calling.” She chalks her hands and gets ready to climb up to the platform.

One of our instructors, Kenna, a daffy redhead wearing comically large yellow sunglasses, remembers Robbie from her last visit. As Kenna is buckling us into our safety harnesses, she asks Robbie what part of Australia she’s from. “Gold Coast in Queensland,” says Robbie, her accent thickening at the mere mention of her homeland. “I watch a lot of really trashy TV,” says Kenna, “including Australia’s Next Top Model, and the girls from Gold Coast are definitely not respected by girls from Sydney and Melbourne.” Robbie laughs knowingly and says no, but because she has just slipped into full-on Australian-accent mode, it comes out as neeerrroh! “I had no idea I was living in a state that gets laughed at until I moved to Melbourne,” says Robbie, “and then someone was like, ‘Ohrrr, yar from Queensland, eh? You put “Eh?” on the end of your sentences because you’re all a bit slow.’ And I was like, ‘Is this a thing? That Queensland is the dumb state?’ It’s so embarrassing.”

At that, another instructor, CR, appears to teach us the finer points of trapeze. There are moments of weightlessness at the peak of each swing from the bar, which is when you want to change positions, or “throw the trick.” “As long as you make the change at the right time,” he says, “you hardly have to break a sweat. It’s all about timing.”

Robbie (precisely, elegantly) throws one trick after another—the set split, the set straddle, the penny roll—with what looks like little effort. “She’s disgustingly good at it,” says Kenna as we stand on the pier watching her above us, and I cannot help thinking that these exact skills apply to Robbie’s life down here on the ground: She has consistently displayed a knack for making her moves at exactly the right moment, no sweat. At seventeen, with very little acting experience to speak of—a few school plays, some commercials, a low-budget flick she describes as “barely even a student film”—she moved to Melbourne and landed a part on the Australian soap opera Neighbours, the longest-running drama in the country’s history, a gig she had for three years. In 2011—after working very hard with a dialect coach to perfect an American accent—she moved to Los Angeles and immediately got a part on the short-lived TV series Pan Am. A supporting role in Richard Curtis’s coming-of-age rom-com About Time followed, and then she was cast as Naomi—that minx from Bay Ridge—in The Wolf of Wall Street. It was a career-defining performance, one that left people agape: Who’s that?

As Jared Leto, her costar in Suicide Squad, puts it, “She took a role that other people would have had a very difficult time with and elevated it to something spectacular. To be able to stand alongside Leo [DiCaprio], one of the titans of the industry, and be there face-to-face, blow for blow, and not only hold her ground but really shine, was kind of a rare, explosive discovery. It reminded me of Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface.”

At first, Robbie wasn’t even sure she wanted to play such a shrewd ballbuster. “When I first read it, I thought, I have nothing in common with her. I hate her. It was a really tricky one to get my head around. But her motivation was ‘You guys are doing it—why shouldn’t I? It’s this man’s world, and I’m going to get mine.’ And I understand that.”

The things she was doing herself as far as stunts, you wouldn’t believe. There’s only a handful of actors who do that sort of work

David Ayer

Now, two years later, at 25, she’s the girl of the moment, on the cusp of a very big summer. The Legend of Tarzan, as directed by Yates, who brought us the best of the Harry Potter movies, is an A-movie reboot of a B-movie franchise, one that the filmmakers hope will lift the character up out of the swamp of kitsch and into the twenty-first century. When Warner Bros.—having kept a close eye on the dailies while Robbie was shooting Focus with Will Smith in late 2013—approached her about playing Jane, her first reaction was: Not for me. “There’s no way I was going to play the damsel in distress,” she says. But then she read the script. “It just felt very epic and big and magical in some way. I haven’t done a movie like that. The Harry Potter films could have been really cheesy, but David Yates made them into something dark and cool and real—plus it was shooting in London, and I, on a whim, had just signed a lease on a house there.” For Yates, “an unpretentiousness, a real pragmatism, was evident from the moment I met her. There’s something very true about her, and those qualities were very important for Jane—someone who’s open to experience the beauty of the world.”

Naturally, sooner or later, Tarzan meets Jane. “I met her in L.A. about a year before we shot the movie,” says Skarsgård, “just before The Wolf of Wall Streetcame out. She lived in this tiny studio apartment in Hollywood. We were supposed to just have coffee and talk about the project, but we spent the entire day together. I remember being blown away by how cool and down-to-earth she was. And then Wolf came out, and she went from relative obscurity to being the hottest actress in Hollywood.” When Tarzan finally started shooting in London, “she was living in a house with six other people,” says Skarsgård, “kind of a frat-house vibe, and on weekends she would go to Amsterdam and sleep in bunk beds in a youth hostel with Canadian backpackers, or to some music festival in Northern England and sleep in a tent. She’s not precious at all.”

The story of Suicide Squad, meanwhile, is that all of the bad guys in the superhero world who are locked up in prison are offered a chance to do some good—a suicide mission, if you will—to get their sentences reduced. Harley Quinn is both the shrink and the girlfriend of the Joker, played by Leto. “She doesn’t even have superpowers,” says Robbie. “She’s just a psychopath who runs around gleefully killing people—she finds joy in causing mayhem, which makes her weirdly endearing and fun to watch.”

The role, says Ayer, demands “a lot of heavy lifting for an actor. But she’s a tough girl, and she’s incredibly smart and mature beyond her years. She has ridiculous depth, and she’s never been coddled, so she’s very physically courageous. The things she was doing herself as far as stunts, you wouldn’t believe. There’s only a handful of actors who do that sort of work themselves.”

Robbie was filming the underappreciated Whiskey Tango Foxtrot with Tina Fey in New Mexico just before she went off to Toronto to shoot Suicide Squad. “She had a personal trainer literally following her around the set so she could be ready for Suicide Squad,” says Fey. “She’s very strong. There’s a scene in Whiskey Tango where she punches me and says, ‘We’re going out tonight!’ I had this huge bruise on my arm for days.” Fey is crazy about Robbie. “She doesn’t take herself too seriously,” she says. “And she has that soap-opera background, which I think is great. Those people just make a choice and don’t overthink it. They don’t think that acting cures world hunger in and of itself.”

When our trapeze class comes to an end, we find Robbie’s driver. As we head back to her hotel in West Hollywood, her phone rings. It’s Robbie’s boyfriend of two years, Tom Ackerley, the assistant director she met in 2013 on the set of the World War II drama Suite Française. “Hi, darling,” she says into the phone. “Just mastered a new trick. . . . Yes, I’m very chuffed with myself.” (Later, when I ask about Ackerley—whom she describes as “the best-looking guy in London”—she says, “I was the ultimate single gal. The idea of relationships made me want to vomit. And then this crept up on me. We were friends for so long. I was always in love with him, but I thought, Oh, he would never love me back. Don’t make it weird, Margot. Don’t be stupid and tell him that you like him. And then it happened, and I was like, Of course we’re together. This makes so much sense, the way nothing has ever made sense before.”)

Ackerley is actually calling to talk business: He and Robbie—along with Ackerley’s friend Josey McNamara, who is also an AD, and Robbie’s childhood best friend, Sophia Kerr—started a production company, LuckyChap, a year ago. The four of them all live together in that house in London and are planning to move to Los Angeles later this year. They have already acquired five projects, one of which is the script for I, Tonya, the highly anticipated Tonya Harding biopic that Robbie will star in. (Robbie is a decent skater—she played on an amateur ice-hockey team when she moved to New York City in 2011 to shoot Pan Am.) Their first film, Terminal, a dystopian noir thriller, has just started shooting in Hungary. Robbie plays a waitress whose story line ties all the others together. “We chose the most challenging indie film imaginable—it’s not commercially viable from a financier’s point of view,” says Robbie. “It’s shaving years off my life. It’s really hard work, but so rewarding and much more empowering than just acting. I was starting to feel like a little pawn getting moved around the board: Go here! Do that! Be her!” “This is a very smart thing for her to do,” says Fey, “because otherwise, as a piece of casting, she’s always going to have someone saying, ‘You look amazing—but we’d love for you to weigh less.’ Already at 25 she’s like, You know what? I’m going to opt out of that fuckery and be on my front foot with my career.”

It’s early evening when we finally arrive at Robbie’s hotel. We walk past the bar, and bump into Sandy Powell, the legendary costume designer, who’s having a drink with a friend. As it happens, Powell did the costumes for The Wolf of Wall Street, and Robbie tells me that most of those tight, come-hither getups she wore were Powell’s actual clothes from the nineties. “I would say, ‘Where did you get that?’ and she would say, ‘It’s mine. I used to wear it all the time.’ ”

We pass the swimming pool, and there’s not a person in sight. “I so badly want to go for a swim,” she says. “Do you mind if I jump in the pool?” She runs off to her suite while I make myself at home on a chaise and order a drink. When she reappears, she’s wearing a white one-piece bathing suit with a vaguely suggestive cartoonish illustration of a half-peeled banana emblazoned on the front, and short-short denim cutoffs. She seems blissfully unaware that the suit looks like something that, say, Pamela Anderson would have worn in the nineties. This reminds me of something Cara Delevingne—who plays Enchantress in Suicide Squad—told me about Robbie. “I was having a conversation with her the other night at the MTV Movie Awards,” Delevingne said. “In this world of celebrity and Hollywood, so many people act like they’re being watched all the time—but Margot doesn’t act like that at all. She’s constantly dancing like no one’s watching.”

The whole fake-it-till-you-make-it thing has really worked out for me. You can apply that to anything—you just have to hustle

Margot Robbie

She peels off her Daisy Dukes and knifes into the water. At one point, she submerges herself just to the bottom of her nose. Suddenly, with her hair slicked back, I realize who she reminds me of: Margaux Hemingway, in a famous shoot from the seventies by Douglas Kirkland. Robbie gets out of the pool and lies down on the chaise next to me. I mention the resemblance, and she Googles her. “Wow,” she says. “What a stunner.”

Owing mostly to her surf-tastic teenage years, Robbie seems to prize a kind of athletic comfort above all else (though she does love the red carpet—“I think I enjoy the getting ready part more than the actual event, to be honest”). But her penchant for dressing down is also a tactical measure. Here at the hotel, as at the pier earlier, she goes completely unnoticed. “If I dress like this, people don’t look twice. It’s as soon as I put on makeup and a dress and have my hair done—I can’t get ten meters without being recognized.”

I bring up the various spellings of her name—Margaux, Margo, Margot. “I always said, ‘Mom—there was a really cool way of spelling my name, and you picked the boring way that gets everyone confused. They forget the T or call me Mar-got,’ ” she says, laughing. (Her childhood nickname was Maggot.) “Now everyone’s finally spelling my name right—that’s how I knew I’d made it.”

Robbie was raised with her three siblings by a single mother, Sarie Kessler, a physiotherapist, in a very small house (her parents divorced when she was young). “I adore my mother,” says Robbie. “She’s the most pure-hearted, divine human being.” We get to talking about the similarities in our childhoods: lots of kids, raised in a house with only one bathroom, everyone working to help make ends meet—the kind of setting that can scald one’s heart with ambition. “I went to a school where all of my friends were very well-off,” she says, “and I went to their houses a lot, and so I knew what it looked like to be rich but I didn’t have it, so I was like: OK—I know exactly what I want.” She worked several odd jobs—tending bar, making sandwiches, selling surfboards—which gave her a lot of confidence at a young age. “The whole fake-it-till-you-make-it thing has really worked out for me. The more times you do that, the more you realize that no one really knows what they’re doing; everyone’s kind of figuring it out or pretending they know until they do know. And you can apply that to anything—you just have to hustle.”

Robbie’s hustle—her resourcefulness, mixed with ambition and a little naïveté—has defined her career since before it even started. “I was watching TV one day—maybe I was fifteen,” she says. “There was a girl my age doing a scene, and she said her line, and it was just not that good. And I remember thinking, I could have done it better. And then I thought, Well, why is she doing it? Why isn’t it me?”

To a one, every person I spoke to about Robbie pointed out two things: her willingness to try anything and her uncanny ability to be good at everything. A couple of years ago, when there were still eight people living in that house in London, Robbie made a rule: No one can move in unless they get the house tattoo. So they found an artist named Pedro with a shop nearby, and one day, while Pedro was tattooing Ackerley, Robbie begged to have a go at it. “I have a bit of a morbid fascination with needles,” she says. “There’ve been a few instances when I’ve given piercings.” Pedro eventually handed over the gun, Ackerley relented, and, well, she got hooked. As a wrap gift after Tarzan, Sophia—her best friend/housemate/business partner—bought her a tattoo gun on eBay, and soon, between scenes while shooting Suicide Squad, says Robbie, “people would come into my trailer: ‘Hey, Margs—can I get a tattoo?’ ‘Sure—sit on down!’ ” She even gave Delevingne something she dubbed “toemojis”—five emoji faces on the bottoms of her toes. “And then we all decided to get Squad tattoos, David Ayer included,” says Robbie. Now she travels with her tattoo kit everywhere she goes.

We head up to her hotel suite, where Sophia is hard at work on LuckyChap, and before long Robbie has set up her tattoo emporium on the dining-room table. The Rolling Stones are blaring from a laptop, and she’s giving me my very first tattoo. We had discussed it earlier—in theory—and settled on the Roman numeral five (V) because my birthday is May 5 and the V stands for my last name. And, well, why not—anything for a story, no? She sketched out a few ideas in my notebook, and then on my arm, and then, after few false starts, in a matter of minutes, it’s done. I love it, I say. “I’m so happy,” she says. Suddenly, Sophia shouts, “Oh, my God! Look at the moon!” and we both jump up and join her at the sliding glass doors. The three of us stare in silence for a moment at the biggest, brightest, orange-est moon any of us have ever seen. And then Margot Robbie, whose own star is burning awfully bright right now, says, “The moon is glistening. Literally. We’re listening to the Rolling Stones. And I just gave you a tattoo. So perfectly Hollywood!”

[flauntpage]

Playing Well Enough to Win, then Blowing It – Observations from Bucks 128, Sixers 122

Let’s make it happen.

Let’s find a way to get seven games of Sixers/Bucks in the playoffs, because that was some of the most compelling basketball I’ve seen in a long time.

In fact, I’m all about a Giannis vs. Embiid pay-per-view event in the near future. It’ll be like Tiger vs. Phil, but actually entertaining, and the winner gets $1 million donated to a charity of their choosing while automatically becoming a captain for the 2020 All-Star Game.

Unfortunately the Sixers lost last night, their first three-game losing streak of the season. They didn’t play poorly, but the 4th quarter defense really let them down, as did the final three possessions of a tight contest. With the game tied at 119 with 1:07 on the clock, JJ Redick missed a 23-footer, Embiid got blocked by Giannis and turned the ball over, then Tobias Harris clanked an elbow jumper.

That was pretty much it, right there.

Beyond the late-game execution, you just can’t give up 46 fourth quarter points on your home floor and expect to shoot your way out of it. That’s the real shame, the fact that the Sixers shot 18-36 (50%) from three last night, scored 122 points, and still lost. They only turned the ball over 13 times (below season average) and won the total shots battle 95 to 93, so they did well enough in their auxiliary categories to win this game. The late-stage defense and shot making just wasn’t there.

I’m kind of exhausted talking about macro-level “do the Sixers have what it takes” concepts, since we’ve discussed that ad nauseam. I really just care about the playoffs this point, and I’ve been on the record saying that I think this team loses to Toronto in round two. Write that down somewhere, then we’ll revisit in May when you accuse me of being a homer, because I don’t think I’m a homer. I think they bow out in the second round.

But last night we got some good X’s and O’s basketball quotes, so let’s focus on that on a Friday morning.

Giving up the three and playing the second side

Milwaukee is a team that will sit back and allow three-pointers from less-than-efficient shooters.

If you recall the last Bucks game, Joel Embiid shot 4-13 from three, good for just 30.7%. Milwaukee is going to take that all game long, so they did the same thing last night, crashing down on Ben Simmons to deny him the paint, which left Embiid wide open for that trailing three that he really likes to shoot. He tried nine threes last night and hit three, finishing at 33%, but you could see at times where he was really fighting himself, really debating whether to take that shot or bring the ball down, run the offense, and get his teammates involved.

I asked Brett about that after the game, what he said to Joel and how he coached him through it:

Brown: We talked about it a lot on the bench and we anticipated that. It’s what (the Bucks) do. I said two things, I said, ‘if you feel it’ – because ultimately a coach can say it but the player has to feel it – ‘shoot it every time.’ If we come in and say ‘Joel shot 15 threes,’ I’m saying hes gonna shoot 36 to 38 percent and that’s a decent (mark), you’d live with that if I’m right on that percentage. Or, if you don’t feel comfortable, which he didn’t oftentimes there, you saw it, then play the second side. Your man is so far back. You can play the dribble-handoff game with JJ, as an example. JJ is coming into daylight, which I thought we did a pretty good job of.

Crossing Broad: And a lot of that was taking place in early shot clock situations, wen Ben was pushing the pace, driving, and then kicking out.

Brown: Yeah. When you ask ‘what do you do?‘, those two things to me are most prominent. Shoot it, you three (teammates) are offensive rebounding guys. He’s gonna make it or not, you guys crash, you guys are back, ‘go’ guys and ‘get back’ guys, that type of stuff. And otherwise just play that second side of the floor and whoever your DHO is or whoever is playing get ball or screening, they’re coming off into nothing. I thought we did okay executing that environment early, but those were the two things on my mind when you get that sagging five-man guarding Joel like that.

I went looking for examples, and I think this is a perfect video clip to show one of those instances where Milwaukee invited the three, but Joel instead held the play up and got Redick involved by playing the second side of the floor, which is what Brown is talking about:

Embiid on the perimeter, invited to shoot, but instead Brook Lopez is sagging so far off of him that Redick can simply DHO his way into empty space by running Pat Connaughton off Ben and Joel’s staggered screens, as you see right here:

There were at least two other instances last night where the Sixers worked this stagger in early shot clock situations.

This was the first one I saw, where they ran George Hill into the same gauntlet that Connaughton was subjected to above:

Again, if Lopez (and Giannis) sag to the foul line there to block off Simmons and invite Embiid to shoot, just put the stress on Redick’s man to fight through a pair of tough screens. That’s what the Sixers did nicely right there.

There was another instance where Embiid actually waved off Simmons and brought the ball up himself, running the exact same early shot clock stagger with a different wrinkle:

See George Hill’s body language there?

No guard wants to run through those staggered screens from Embiid and Simmons. If Milwaukee is gonna sit there, just play the other side of the floor and spring Redick into empty space over and over again until they adjust. Think about sending Simmons or a wing to the boards and drop 3-4 in transitional defense.

Here’s what Embiid said about his threes:

Everybody just kept telling me to shoot it. If I shot every time I was open I would have put up at least 25 threes. But I know how to pick and choose my moments. Sometimes I shot it and sometimes I went to find JJ, so you just gotta mix it up and leave them guessing.

Correct, and if these teams meet in the playoffs, it’s something to really focus on.

“12” pick and roll

I’ve written a lot about ’12’ this season. I did an entire sidebar on it a while back.

It’s a Ben Simmons/JJ Redick high/low pick and roll, and with Jimmy Butler unavailable last night, Brown went to this play call on the third-last possession, a possession that normally would go to closer Butler. JJ got off a 23-footer, front-rimmed it, and Milwaukee ran out the rebound and got an easy bucket.

After the game, Redick said this about the sequence:

That’s a play we’ve had some really good success with lately, when the big, when (Ben’s) man just kind of sags, and me coming up the gut and getting a hand off from him. It was a little short. If we could have done it differently I probably would have played that rifle action with Jo and just did a little continuation. Just knowing that his guy was going to be so far back, it probably would have been a bit of a cleaner look. But going over my left shoulder, going to my right, that’s a look for me. That’s how I’ve made a career, so I’ll live with it.

Here’s the clip of that play:

It’s a shot he’s hit plenty of times before. And he’s right, if Giannis is going to sit even deeper than the elbow and prevent the Simmons drive, then the onus is on Hill to climb around that screen and contest the shot.

Redick does have the continuation option here with Embiid, but you’ve seen JJ hit this shot plenty of times before:

Really good film game. I could sit here and watch that tape over and over again.

Other notes:

I saw a fan at the game take a selfie with Howard Eskin.

Zhaire Smith did not look afraid out there, not at all. It’s a shame he missed that dunk, but the guy hasn’t played a lot of basketball this year. He’ll be a good player in the future. I liked how he stepped into that first three-pointer with a lot of confidence.

Giannis is a a beast. I don’t know what to say. He made Ben Simmons look small last night, and there really aren’t any other guys who can do that to him. If Ben is your second-best defensive option on Giannis, and he’s getting bullied at the rim, you’re just gonna have to try to trap Giannis or double him or something else, because schematically that’s going to be unsustainable in a seven-game playoff series. You can’t have Joel out there for all 48 minutes.

When Ben’s ability to push in transition and get to the rim is denied, he becomes an offensive liability against good teams. He didn’t score his first basket until deep into the 2nd quarter last night. He finished with 6 points on 5 shots and did not go to the free throw line.

Mike Scott was excellent last night, 6-8 from three, but I feel like every time he shoots well, the team loses. He needs to be big in the playoffs with James Ennis’ absence crushing an already thin bench.

Boban played three minutes. Just can’t play him against the Bucks.

Jonah Bolden I thought looked pretty good out there. No fouls, a couple of big threes, and some energy off the pine.

This team still can’t guard guards.

Tobias Harris is beginning to worry me as a guy who isn’t present enough during the fourth quarter. He has so much potential to have a breakout, All-Star type of season in 2019-2020, but someone needs to yank it out of him. Maxing him is a risk.

The Sixers got a couple of foul calls last night on plays where Milwaukee tried to top-lock Redick while he was setting back screens. I like every set they run where Redick is the screener. Milwaukee tried to top lock that ’12’ pick and roll right at the end of the 3rd quarter and Simmons simply passed the ball to Scott for an easy catch and shoot three.

Enjoy your weekend.

The post Playing Well Enough to Win, then Blowing It – Observations from Bucks 128, Sixers 122 appeared first on Crossing Broad.

Playing Well Enough to Win, then Blowing It – Observations from Bucks 128, Sixers 122 published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/

[andrewuttaro]

New Look Sabres: GM 29 - TOR - 2.7 Seconds

I have been accused of hating the Toronto Maple Leafs more than I love the Buffalo Sabres. Really, I’m leading off with that? YES I AM; because once upon a time I thought this made up hatred with this team that hardly existed in my hockey lexicon (Yes, I only trace my Sabres fandom back to about 2011 so give me a break here) was all hype from a bygone era that never actually happened according to the actual history books. Then my hatred for the Leafs came alive in 2016. If you want that spiel go back to Preseason Game 4. No, today I want to meet that truly pretentious chirp with more relevant, contemporary thoughts. Although all the Leafs other rivals are either kicking their ass in the playoffs or in the dumpster (blink twice if you’re reading, Steve), Buffalo is now here to make life difficult for the lesser blue and white team in this division. All you Leafs fans up in your high tower have benefited from drafting on easy mode for a few years now The Sabres just caught up. Rasmus Dahlin and the New Look Sabres are coming to get you! Hell, we might even meet in the playoffs this year. Oh God have mercy upon this earth! Even I would drive up to your overpriced City for that series! AAAAAAGGGGGHHHH I AM SO READY! I came in person to this game to be at least one voice against the invasion of would-be NHL Hamilton Hockey fans at this game. It had been on my bucket list for five years and finally the day hath come! ITS TIME FOR THE TIM HORTONS RIVALRY MATCHUP!

Oh, I almost forgot: I turned on the roast but forgot to crack open the Burn Book! That’s right, forget reasonable word counts, it’s time for: Why do we hate this Atlantic Division team!? With no further ado: let’s crack open that burn book. Toronto: You pioneered cheating with the salary cap and everyone still lets you. Sure you basically pay for this junk league to exist but you’re not the center of the hockey universe no matter how many plush Auston Matthews dolls you sell! Toronto Fans seem to think we eat their trash here in Buffalo but your greatest player in decades is Made in America, baby! It’s easy to overshadow a city that is smaller in every metric but that just makes you assholes. We relish beating you and reminding you all how bad the traffic is on the bridge afterward. Original Six Stanley Cups don’t count and if you really think this is your year than maybe give Morgan Reilly some help back there. Speaking of the big dance: the only playoff battle between these two Tim Horton’s loving cities ended with the Sabres going to the Stanley Cup Final! It is almost with pity us here in Buffalo smile on this new Leafs squad: Buffalo may have no Cups yet but Toronto suffering is long having not seen a Cup Final since Gilbert Perrault was playing after-school shinny in Quebec you snooty assholes! I suppose I better stop there. I think we can agree the shit-talking has gone too far when French Canada is brought up. That said who in the US hates the Leafs more than Sabres fans? Boston? Sit down you drunkards; you can’t hate a team you beat every friggin year. Well anyway, onto the matchup.

In spite of having a positively brutal stretch of games recently (most of which the won fyi) the Sabres came out in this game with a vendetta. No penalties were called in the first while the boys in the darker blue peppered Fredrick Anderson with shots in the first. As the period dragged on there were some Leafs chances as well but Anderson really got peppered and according to the Leafs fan next to me when he’s warm he’s at his best. Linus Ullmark faced only the token efforts of what is supposedly the best offense in the Eastern Conference. There must have been a grand total of five maybe six Leafs shots that first period. It ended up really just being a great conversational period. That Leafs fan sitting next to me was actually a really nice man. He had enough kids that looked like him that they may have been the stunt doubles for the Weasley family in Harry Potter but hardly a chirp out of this dude. Apparently Kitchener, Ontario has some pretty wicked hockey.

The second period is when the temperature began to rise. 8:33 in Auston Matthews gets a charitable pass behind the net and bounces it in past Ullmark off the back of his leg. The thunderous applause of the Leafs invasion was surprised because if you watch that play it didn’t seem likely it was going in. You really can’t blame Linus on that one. It was long before I got to jump around: six minutes later that beautiful top line with Jack and Sam were on the ice and Samson Reinhart roofed it on an arch shot that probably doesn’t go in if the Leafs defenders weren’t screening Anderson. The biggest criticism of this Toronto team is always a bad D-Corps. I say the D-Corps is supposedly bad but the guy named Par Lindholm who screened Anderson is a forward evidently. He better be a decent golfer at least with a name like that. One of the other guys on the ice for that goal, Jake Gardiner, got the Leafs back on top 2-1 with a shade over ten seconds left in the second period. That goal stung a little going into the 2nd intermission but if there is any place the third period Sabres show up, it’s in third periods against the Leafs. Twitter predicted it and it came true the third period was fun.

Before that though can we talk about the officiating in this game? I am not going to go into how many times Eichel was slashed or Casey Mittelstadt being dragged down because that’s the low hanging fruit. At one point in the second period the Leafs net was off its moorings. I am no ref but I really thought it was officiating 101 that you blow the play dead when that happens. One use for the refs that was never needed weirdly enough was for a fight. Rasmus Ristolainen was tearing it up and getting shots like a frat brother in this game but he never fought which is surprising for him against the Leafs. I’ll take it. I’d rather have the Risto that shoots for the net than the Risto that shoots at Leafs faces although both are fun. 2:39 into the third frame and our sweet ginger boy Jack Eichel evened it up after a quick feed from Ristolainen. You won’t see his name on the score sheet but let me tell you Rasmus Dahlin was ludicrous in this game. He must have been responsible for half of the times the Leafs turned over the puck, especially in the second and third periods. He very nearly got a goal here in the third too. But no, it was Captain Jack again at 12:57 to put Buffalo on top. These games against the Leafs never feel totally like a home game with all Leafs fans that come into town but that goal sounded like it was just us and it was beautiful. The Sabres took the game back now, it was a rare Leafs setup in the Sabres zone that yielded the puck bouncing charitably off the boards to Patrick Marleau who evened it up. That guy is 38 now from what Leafs fans told me. If that’s true god bless the guy for still be this decent at hockey. This one went to OT where the Sabres dominated possession and once again outshot the Leafs. It was their last ditch effort with the shootout practically a formality when somehow, Auston Matthews got a pass from Kapanen and ended it. For those of us who were there it was probably the second most painful way this game could have ended right behind a regulation blowout: there were literally 2.7 seconds left in overtime. I have photographic proof of that. This game ended 4-3 Leafs and the Sabres really nearly got two points in this game but they’ll walk out with only one.

You don’t want the loser point in rivalry games like this, you want both winner points. Maybe I’m not as grumpy as I could be because all the Leafs fans around me were sober and personable. You tell me your experience of the rougher variety and I’ll be hard pressed to not see where you’re coming from. The Sabres played the better game. Nathan Beaulieu, remember the guy who fought Leafs Matt Martin and talked afterward about how much he hated the Leafs? Yea, he may be one of the most improved Sabres players this season, particularly in this game. Captain Jack played with the hate he professes for the Leafs and very nearly won the game with a hat trick a few times. He certainly played better than the other two-goal scorer in this game: his good American friend Auston Matthews but I won’t be throwing stones at a guy who’s scoring at a tad over a goal a game. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if he’s not wearing a Leafs jersey, Auston Matthews is probably my favorite non-Sabre in this league. I already talked about Rasmus Dahlin but it’s worth noting he passed Drew Doughty’s 2008 record for most time on ice for an 18 year old defenseman with 29:15 in this game. He’s still 18 and he is already dominating opponents. I really look forward to Rasmus Dahlin torturing Leafs for years to come.

Gee, this one is getting long in the teeth. The Sabres had a brutal stretch going into this game. They won most of those games and got so far ahead that if you’re going to go on a four game losing streak this is possibly the best way to do it… yea I just can’t say that with a straight face after losing with 2.7 seconds left in OT. Holy shit, I hate the Leafs. Anyway, if the team with these stats was not named the Leafs and we played this game against them this is probably the closest thing you can get to one of those non-existent moral victories considering injuries, schedule and… just how well you controlled play through this game. Linus Ullmark looked like a starter in this game and you will not change my mind! This matchup still has three games this season and maybe a playoff series. Tell me that series wouldn’t be absolutely bonkers. A series loss would sting an awful lot but if the Sabres could win in 7 and prevent this Leafs team from a series win for their third straight year… I wouldn’t know how to put that kind of pleasure into words. Like, comment and share this blog around, even if you’re Leafs fan. I get the feeling this rivalry is going to finally be the war we’ve been waiting for and if 2.7 seconds is the only thing that’s going to separate the two teams that oh holy hockey gods is it going to be fun.

Thanks for reading.

P.S. Credit to Steve Dangle for the “Tim Horton’s Rivalry” moniker. He’ll probably tell you he wasn’t the originator of that title but I heard from him first so there you go.

[flauntpage]

Still Not Good Enough – Observations from Celtics 112, Sixers 109

Talk about blowing an opportunity.

The Sixers had a nice little run going, with big moves at the trade deadline followed by a quality win against Denver and a national television drubbing of Los Angeles on Sunday afternoon. They were 7-4 through their last 11 games, a gauntlet that included Golden State, Toronto, and multiple playoff teams over multiple weeks.

But instead of finishing on a high note, they stumbled again to Boston, this time at home. They blew another opportunity against another top Eastern Conference team, falling to 1-7 this season against the Celtics, Bucks, and Raptors. Most importantly, they took all of the goodwill built up over the last few days and deposited it right into the trash can.

We’re right back at square one, which is this:

“The Sixers can’t beat the Celtics.”

Truly, it’s opening night and Christmas evening all over again. It’s like Groundhog Day without the overgrown rat from Western Pennsylvania.

As Metallica once said, “Nothing Else Matters,” and you know what? James Hetfield was right. Lars Ulrich was right. Nothing else matters besides beating the Celtics. That’s all anybody is talking about, and they’re justified in doing so. You can go out and beat the Knicks by 40 tonight and fans would not and should not care, because it’s not about beating the Knicks or Hornets or Hawks by 40, it’s about beating Boston by any amount of points at all.

The Sixers were not horrible last night. We are, after all, talking about a three-point loss. But the myriad issues throughout the game were similar to what we’ve seen before. They cobbled together too many mistakes to really get into a shooting or defensive rhythm throughout.

They only shot 71% from the foul line, which is way down from a 77% season average. The turnovers, 14, were manageable, but Boston only coughed it up six times, so that’s another loss. The three-point shooting was below average, the shot selection was junky and poor in the first half, and they just looked tight to start. Boston looked loose and played within themselves. The Sixers played like they knew they’ve only beaten this team twice in the last two years.

Defensive miscues

Late in the fourth quarter, Boston was just seeking out mismatches over and over again. There was a chunk of plays around the five minute mark, I believe, where they just went after JJ Redick on every single play and the Sixers did a really lackluster job of addressing it. There were other situations where Redick and T.J. McConnell were on the floor together and having trouble on the defensive end.

Said Brett Brown post game:

There’s a physicality that you have to play with to beat them and you’re reminded of that. They do a really good job of going at mismatches, we could all see the difficulty at times that we had guarding some of the physicality of them trying to post us with different mismatches, those types of things I think are. There’s a physicality that you learn from… To Rich’s [Hofmann’s] point, they go at mismatches hard, they duck in, they’re physical with that philosophy.

They seek out mismatches pretty much every time down the floor in crunch time situations.

Case in point:

Those plays are killers, because when Marcus Smart can post up JJ Redick and drive the lane, the rest of the defense collapses, the Celtics swing the ball around the perimeter while the Sixers scramble to recover, and Jayson Tatum eventually knocks down a wide open three.

More Brown:

I think you have to find some level of better ball pressure; you have to find some level of better resistance, sort of staggered steps, there’s some technique things that we can do better and I think most importantly that at times you can’t overreact. If tough twos for a while are the palatable shot and, admittedly, you can’t live like that, but periods of the game you can, then we have to be disciplined to do that. To start running around the gym and getting into scramble mode, isn’t in my interest, our interest either.

Yes, if you’re going to leave JJ on the floor, make it harder for them to pick on him. Deny that entry pass into the post. Re-evaluate how you switch if they put him in a pick and roll. Maybe you have to blitz or throw a second guy into the equation, or maybe Redick just cannotbe on the floor in these situations. Maybe you play Jimmy Butler as a two-guard and bring in James Ennis or Jonathon Simmons to close out games instead.

Joel Embiid on this:

We need to do a better job of denying the ball and pressuring the ball. At the end of the day, it comes down to guarding your own man and that’s what we have to do. These guys, they take advantage of when we do help, and they move the ball pretty well. So, we just need to do a better job of guarding our own man.

Boston just kept hunting all throughout the 4th quarter, and the Sixers weren’t able to get enough stops to build any kind of respectable lead or keep pace when it really mattered.

Joel’s night

He struggles against Al Horford, who defends him better than anybody in the league.

Embiid was asked what the veteran center is doing to frustrate him:

He’s not doing anything, it’s just on me. I was sleepwalking for three quarters and that’s on me. Like I said, that’s on me. It has nothing to do with anybody.

I’m not a big fan of that answer. Sure, you can put it on you and take responsibility for your performance, but Horford is not “not doing anything.” His resistance points are sound, he does a good job of keeping his arms down, and he stands Joel up right on the low block in a position where Embiid is too far to power through him for a layup but too far for a comfortable turn around or floater. It’s a weird middle area between Embiid’s catch point and the rim, and for whatever reason, Joel just comes up short when he’s 1v1 with Horford. The Celtics are doing anything special. They’re not doubling or digging, they’re just letting Horford use low leverage and solid technique to defend a bigger guy.

I think Gordon Hayward actually did a decent job of explaining it after the game:

Al’s a smart defender, so I think he’s able to use spacing and angles and really kind of knows when to gap him, when to get up to him. He’s also just a tough defender, like taking bumps, able to not get backed all the way down and then still being long enough to contest his jump shots. Embiid’s a monster, so for Al to play like that is really encouraging. We’ve seen him do it in the past too. That was a good job by Al.

It was a really nice job, and in these cases Joel just has to keep going at Horford until he wears him down. He’s a bigger guy, he’s younger, and he’s always going to win a four-quarter war of attrition. Horford finished with five fouls last night, and if Joel is down there working him throughout the game instead of taking an inexplicable eight three-point tries, then maybe the result is different.

There’s just no reason your 7’2�� center should ever take eight three-pointers in a game. Redick and Tobias Harris are the only players who should be taking that many three-pointers.

Joel was also complaining about the no-call vs. Horford at the end of the game, and he’ll get fined for saying “the refs fucking sucked” at his press conference. Here’s the play:

Embiid No Call pic.twitter.com/YuYaDrTpZV

— The Render (@TheRenderNBA) February 13, 2019

Yes, it’s probably a foul, but Joel is playing for contact there. He’s not using his body to drive Horford back and he’s leaning into him. Joel is going to get cheap rip-through contact fouls against JaVale McGee and Jarrett Allen in the first quarter of meaningless games, but he’s not getting them against Al Horford in the fourth quarter, not after Horford does a solid job against him for the first three quarters. Either way, that no-call isn’t why they lost the game. It was just one play.

Embiid came out tight, he played another lackluster game against the Celtics before finally showing up in the fourth quarter, and then came across as fairly petty and maybe just outright immature in his press conference.

Ben Simmons

Same thing as always.

Boston does a nice job sealing off his transition movement by sliding a second guy to the elbow and meeting him right at the top of the foul line. Ben picks up his dribble, kicks the ball back out, and the Sixers are then playing half court offense.

Sure, there were some blown assignments by Boston, and Ben got free a couple of times. That huge dunk was one play, and he did finish 7 of his 9 looks last night, so he was really efficient when he did get to his spots. The two misses were actually ugly jump shots, so if you take those away, he had an excellent 7-7 night from his preferable range:

More important than his individual shooting, it felt like he just couldn’t get the rest of the offense into a rhythm throughout. He only finished with five assists vs. three turnovers, and said this after the game:

I don’t think we were putting the ball to the rim. I think we slowed down a lot in transition and tried to call a few too many sets, which we got a little bit of a flow. But that’s just how the game went.

They slowed down in transition because Boston did the slowing, which is one of their strengths. The Sixers scored only 12 fast break points last night against a season average of 15.7, and those first quarter baskets, the ones where Ben is pushing and everybody is running the floor, those get them loosened up as much as anything.

When Boston sits back and plays for the transition denial, you’re running your half-court base and whatever other sets, which is not what the Sixers would prefer to do coming out of the gates. They did turn that into some successful isolation and pick and roll for Jimmy Butler late in the game, and Butler is a huge help in those situations, when the rest of the team is stuck and they need somebody to create in other ways. If these teams meet again in the playoffs, Butler really could have a big series. He scored 22 points on 12 shots last night, it was just those missed free throws at the end that were a killer.

One more note about Ben – his defense on Jayson Tatum was good. Tatum was at his best when Boston was getting switches and moving the ball around, but in 1v1 situations with Ben, he wasn’t great, shooting just 3-9 against him:

Good job right there.

Tobias Harris

Bad shooting night. If he’s even slightly better than 4-14 and 0-6 from three, then the Sixers probably win by 4-5 points.

Tobias post game:

I thought that in the first half we really never got to our pace of how we kind of wanted to play. Usually that comes from being able to take the ball out, a majority of the time. So we weren’t really able to get out in transition as we wanted. They got on the glass, got a lot of second-chance points. But I just thought overall in the game, it was tough for us to get to our type of flow and our type of rhythm out there, which is going to happen. But I think it’s something that we have to identify early on and try to get some things ready for us. Overall, I still thought that we gave ourselves a legitimate chance to win that game, but it just went the other way.

11 second chance points for the Celtics last night on the strength of four Horford offensive rebounds.

That’s not a ton, but it’s disappointing when you think about the fact they’re getting second chance opportunities while also getting enough bodies back to defend in transition. A lot of teams will simply punt the offensive board to drop multiple players into defense, so in the course of a game you’re usually limiting fast break points at the expense of hitting the offensive glass. Boston was able to wriggle in there and get some offensive boards they had no business getting last night.

Rotation stuff

Jonathon Simmons was first off the bench while James Ennis and Jonah Bolden were DNPs, and I have no idea why. Brown again linked Simmons and Harris’ minutes together with Boban Marjanovic, giving us a grouping that looked like this:

B. Simmons

J. Simmons

Furkan Korkmaz

Harris

Boban

And then we saw a little bit of the same unit beyond that: Joel Embiid, Mike Scott, Jimmy Butler, JJ Redick, and T.J. McConnell. So the splits from the Laker game were more or less similar last night. There was also a point in the game where we got a Ben/JJ/Simmons/Mike Scott/Boban lineup, which played a pretty ineffective chunk of minutes.

But this was a Jonah Bolden game. When you have bigs like Al Horford and Daniel Theis who can space the floor and shoot from the perimeter, then Bolden as the first five off the bench makes more sense than Boban, in my mind. Boban is gonna have to be a situational guy moving into the playoffs.

Other notes:

The early Horford foul leading to the technical… I dunno. He played pretty good D there but might have been a little handsy right before the whistle was blown.

I swear I saw a Spain pick and roll at the beginning of the second half. I forgot to DVR the game, so I’m gonna have to go look back and see if I can find it.

Boban’s size results in some totally bizarre and usually hilarious on-court optics. There was a point in the 1st quarter, around the 5:00 mark, where he reached up and snagged a weakside rebound without even leaving his feet. In the 3rd quarter, he had a post up on Horford where he didn’t even move his feet or back him down, he simply just turned and flicked the ball over his head for a bucket.

It felt like Hayward was wide open on every single shot he took last night.

When Embiid got the and-1 bucket against Horford late in the 4th quarter, it was the loudest I’d heard the WFC this season.

Butler has been doing a great job lately of getting to the line. He was fouled twice last night on three point attempts.

The Celtics are probably better without Kyrie Irving. Same thing as last season. When he’s on the floor, they need to hide his defensive shortcomings, but last night, as you’ve seen before, Terry Rozier and Marcus Smart are defensive upgrades that present more matchup issues for the Sixers, more than if Kyrie was out there.

People will complain and say I didn’t criticize Brett Brown enough, but obviously the head coach plays a role in addressing all of the things I just wrote about, does he not?

The post Still Not Good Enough – Observations from Celtics 112, Sixers 109 appeared first on Crossing Broad.

Still Not Good Enough – Observations from Celtics 112, Sixers 109 published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/

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Still Not Good Enough – Observations from Celtics 112, Sixers 109

Talk about blowing an opportunity.

The Sixers had a nice little run going, with big moves at the trade deadline followed by a quality win against Denver and a national television drubbing of Los Angeles on Sunday afternoon. They were 7-4 through their last 11 games, a gauntlet that included Golden State, Toronto, and multiple playoff teams over multiple weeks.

But instead of finishing on a high note, they stumbled again to Boston, this time at home. They blew another opportunity against another top Eastern Conference team, falling to 1-7 this season against the Celtics, Bucks, and Raptors. Most importantly, they took all of the goodwill built up over the last few days and deposited it right into the trash can.

We’re right back at square one, which is this:

“The Sixers can’t beat the Celtics.”

Truly, it’s opening night and Christmas evening all over again. It’s like Groundhog Day without the overgrown rat from Western Pennsylvania.

As Metallica once said, “Nothing Else Matters,” and you know what? James Hetfield was right. Lars Ulrich was right. Nothing else matters besides beating the Celtics. That’s all anybody is talking about, and they’re justified in doing so. You can go out and beat the Knicks by 40 tonight and fans would not and should not care, because it’s not about beating the Knicks or Hornets or Hawks by 40, it’s about beating Boston by any amount of points at all.

The Sixers were not horrible last night. We are, after all, talking about a three-point loss. But the myriad issues throughout the game were similar to what we’ve seen before. They cobbled together too many mistakes to really get into a shooting or defensive rhythm throughout.

They only shot 71% from the foul line, which is way down from a 77% season average. The turnovers, 14, were manageable, but Boston only coughed it up six times, so that’s another loss. The three-point shooting was below average, the shot selection was junky and poor in the first half, and they just looked tight to start. Boston looked loose and played within themselves. The Sixers played like they knew they’ve only beaten this team twice in the last two years.

Defensive miscues

Late in the fourth quarter, Boston was just seeking out mismatches over and over again. There was a chunk of plays around the five minute mark, I believe, where they just went after JJ Redick on every single play and the Sixers did a really lackluster job of addressing it. There were other situations where Redick and T.J. McConnell were on the floor together and having trouble on the defensive end.

Said Brett Brown post game:

There’s a physicality that you have to play with to beat them and you’re reminded of that. They do a really good job of going at mismatches, we could all see the difficulty at times that we had guarding some of the physicality of them trying to post us with different mismatches, those types of things I think are. There’s a physicality that you learn from… To Rich’s [Hofmann’s] point, they go at mismatches hard, they duck in, they’re physical with that philosophy.

They seek out mismatches pretty much every time down the floor in crunch time situations.

Case in point:

Those plays are killers, because when Marcus Smart can post up JJ Redick and drive the lane, the rest of the defense collapses, the Celtics swing the ball around the perimeter while the Sixers scramble to recover, and Jayson Tatum eventually knocks down a wide open three.

More Brown:

I think you have to find some level of better ball pressure; you have to find some level of better resistance, sort of staggered steps, there’s some technique things that we can do better and I think most importantly that at times you can’t overreact. If tough twos for a while are the palatable shot and, admittedly, you can’t live like that, but periods of the game you can, then we have to be disciplined to do that. To start running around the gym and getting into scramble mode, isn’t in my interest, our interest either.

Yes, if you’re going to leave JJ on the floor, make it harder for them to pick on him. Deny that entry pass into the post. Re-evaluate how you switch if they put him in a pick and roll. Maybe you have to blitz or throw a second guy into the equation, or maybe Redick just cannotbe on the floor in these situations. Maybe you play Jimmy Butler as a two-guard and bring in James Ennis or Jonathon Simmons to close out games instead.

Joel Embiid on this:

We need to do a better job of denying the ball and pressuring the ball. At the end of the day, it comes down to guarding your own man and that’s what we have to do. These guys, they take advantage of when we do help, and they move the ball pretty well. So, we just need to do a better job of guarding our own man.

Boston just kept hunting all throughout the 4th quarter, and the Sixers weren’t able to get enough stops to build any kind of respectable lead or keep pace when it really mattered.

Joel’s night

He struggles against Al Horford, who defends him better than anybody in the league.

Embiid was asked what the veteran center is doing to frustrate him:

He’s not doing anything, it’s just on me. I was sleepwalking for three quarters and that’s on me. Like I said, that’s on me. It has nothing to do with anybody.

I’m not a big fan of that answer. Sure, you can put it on you and take responsibility for your performance, but Horford is not “not doing anything.” His resistance points are sound, he does a good job of keeping his arms down, and he stands Joel up right on the low block in a position where Embiid is too far to power through him for a layup but too far for a comfortable turn around or floater. It’s a weird middle area between Embiid’s catch point and the rim, and for whatever reason, Joel just comes up short when he’s 1v1 with Horford. The Celtics are doing anything special. They’re not doubling or digging, they’re just letting Horford use low leverage and solid technique to defend a bigger guy.

I think Gordon Hayward actually did a decent job of explaining it after the game:

Al’s a smart defender, so I think he’s able to use spacing and angles and really kind of knows when to gap him, when to get up to him. He’s also just a tough defender, like taking bumps, able to not get backed all the way down and then still being long enough to contest his jump shots. Embiid’s a monster, so for Al to play like that is really encouraging. We’ve seen him do it in the past too. That was a good job by Al.

It was a really nice job, and in these cases Joel just has to keep going at Horford until he wears him down. He’s a bigger guy, he’s younger, and he’s always going to win a four-quarter war of attrition. Horford finished with five fouls last night, and if Joel is down there working him throughout the game instead of taking an inexplicable eight three-point tries, then maybe the result is different.

There’s just no reason your 7’2″ center should ever take eight three-pointers in a game. Redick and Tobias Harris are the only players who should be taking that many three-pointers.

Joel was also complaining about the no-call vs. Horford at the end of the game, and he’ll get fined for saying “the refs fucking sucked” at his press conference. Here’s the play:

Embiid No Call pic.twitter.com/YuYaDrTpZV

— The Render (@TheRenderNBA) February 13, 2019

Yes, it’s probably a foul, but Joel is playing for contact there. He’s not using his body to drive Horford back and he’s leaning into him. Joel is going to get cheap rip-through contact fouls against JaVale McGee and Jarrett Allen in the first quarter of meaningless games, but he’s not getting them against Al Horford in the fourth quarter, not after Horford does a solid job against him for the first three quarters. Either way, that no-call isn’t why they lost the game. It was just one play.

Embiid came out tight, he played another lackluster game against the Celtics before finally showing up in the fourth quarter, and then came across as fairly petty and maybe just outright immature in his press conference.

Ben Simmons

Same thing as always.

Boston does a nice job sealing off his transition movement by sliding a second guy to the elbow and meeting him right at the top of the foul line. Ben picks up his dribble, kicks the ball back out, and the Sixers are then playing half court offense.

Sure, there were some blown assignments by Boston, and Ben got free a couple of times. That huge dunk was one play, and he did finish 7 of his 9 looks last night, so he was really efficient when he did get to his spots. The two misses were actually ugly jump shots, so if you take those away, he had an excellent 7-7 night from his preferable range:

More important than his individual shooting, it felt like he just couldn’t get the rest of the offense into a rhythm throughout. He only finished with five assists vs. three turnovers, and said this after the game:

I don’t think we were putting the ball to the rim. I think we slowed down a lot in transition and tried to call a few too many sets, which we got a little bit of a flow. But that’s just how the game went.

They slowed down in transition because Boston did the slowing, which is one of their strengths. The Sixers scored only 12 fast break points last night against a season average of 15.7, and those first quarter baskets, the ones where Ben is pushing and everybody is running the floor, those get them loosened up as much as anything.

When Boston sits back and plays for the transition denial, you’re running your half-court base and whatever other sets, which is not what the Sixers would prefer to do coming out of the gates. They did turn that into some successful isolation and pick and roll for Jimmy Butler late in the game, and Butler is a huge help in those situations, when the rest of the team is stuck and they need somebody to create in other ways. If these teams meet again in the playoffs, Butler really could have a big series. He scored 22 points on 12 shots last night, it was just those missed free throws at the end that were a killer.

One more note about Ben – his defense on Jayson Tatum was good. Tatum was at his best when Boston was getting switches and moving the ball around, but in 1v1 situations with Ben, he wasn’t great, shooting just 3-9 against him:

Good job right there.

Tobias Harris

Bad shooting night. If he’s even slightly better than 4-14 and 0-6 from three, then the Sixers probably win by 4-5 points.

Tobias post game:

I thought that in the first half we really never got to our pace of how we kind of wanted to play. Usually that comes from being able to take the ball out, a majority of the time. So we weren’t really able to get out in transition as we wanted. They got on the glass, got a lot of second-chance points. But I just thought overall in the game, it was tough for us to get to our type of flow and our type of rhythm out there, which is going to happen. But I think it’s something that we have to identify early on and try to get some things ready for us. Overall, I still thought that we gave ourselves a legitimate chance to win that game, but it just went the other way.

11 second chance points for the Celtics last night on the strength of four Horford offensive rebounds.

That’s not a ton, but it’s disappointing when you think about the fact they’re getting second chance opportunities while also getting enough bodies back to defend in transition. A lot of teams will simply punt the offensive board to drop multiple players into defense, so in the course of a game you’re usually limiting fast break points at the expense of hitting the offensive glass. Boston was able to wriggle in there and get some offensive boards they had no business getting last night.

Rotation stuff

Jonathon Simmons was first off the bench while James Ennis and Jonah Bolden were DNPs, and I have no idea why. Brown again linked Simmons and Harris’ minutes together with Boban Marjanovic, giving us a grouping that looked like this:

B. Simmons

J. Simmons

Furkan Korkmaz

Harris

Boban

And then we saw a little bit of the same unit beyond that: Joel Embiid, Mike Scott, Jimmy Butler, JJ Redick, and T.J. McConnell. So the splits from the Laker game were more or less similar last night. There was also a point in the game where we got a Ben/JJ/Simmons/Mike Scott/Boban lineup, which played a pretty ineffective chunk of minutes.

But this was a Jonah Bolden game. When you have bigs like Al Horford and Daniel Theis who can space the floor and shoot from the perimeter, then Bolden as the first five off the bench makes more sense than Boban, in my mind. Boban is gonna have to be a situational guy moving into the playoffs.

Other notes:

The early Horford foul leading to the technical… I dunno. He played pretty good D there but might have been a little handsy right before the whistle was blown.

I swear I saw a Spain pick and roll at the beginning of the second half. I forgot to DVR the game, so I’m gonna have to go look back and see if I can find it.

Boban’s size results in some totally bizarre and usually hilarious on-court optics. There was a point in the 1st quarter, around the 5:00 mark, where he reached up and snagged a weakside rebound without even leaving his feet. In the 3rd quarter, he had a post up on Horford where he didn’t even move his feet or back him down, he simply just turned and flicked the ball over his head for a bucket.

It felt like Hayward was wide open on every single shot he took last night.

When Embiid got the and-1 bucket against Horford late in the 4th quarter, it was the loudest I’d heard the WFC this season.

Butler has been doing a great job lately of getting to the line. He was fouled twice last night on three point attempts.

The Celtics are probably better without Kyrie Irving. Same thing as last season. When he’s on the floor, they need to hide his defensive shortcomings, but last night, as you’ve seen before, Terry Rozier and Marcus Smart are defensive upgrades that present more matchup issues for the Sixers, more than if Kyrie was out there.

People will complain and say I didn’t criticize Brett Brown enough, but obviously the head coach plays a role in addressing all of the things I just wrote about, does he not?

The post Still Not Good Enough – Observations from Celtics 112, Sixers 109 appeared first on Crossing Broad.

Still Not Good Enough – Observations from Celtics 112, Sixers 109 published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/

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Still Not Good Enough – Observations from Celtics 112, Sixers 109

Talk about blowing an opportunity.

The Sixers had a nice little run going, with big moves at the trade deadline followed by a quality win against Denver and a national television drubbing of Los Angeles on Sunday afternoon. They were 7-4 through their last 11 games, a gauntlet that included Golden State, Toronto, and multiple playoff teams over multiple weeks.

But instead of finishing on a high note, they stumbled again to Boston, this time at home. They blew another opportunity against another top Eastern Conference team, falling to 1-7 this season against the Celtics, Bucks, and Raptors. Most importantly, they took all of the goodwill built up over the last few days and deposited it right into the trash can.

We’re right back at square one, which is this:

“The Sixers can’t beat the Celtics.”

Truly, it’s opening night and Christmas evening all over again. It’s like Groundhog Day without the overgrown rat from Western Pennsylvania.

As Metallica once said, “Nothing Else Matters,” and you know what? James Hetfield was right. Lars Ulrich was right. Nothing else matters besides beating the Celtics. That’s all anybody is talking about, and they’re justified in doing so. You can go out and beat the Knicks by 40 tonight and fans would not and should not care, because it’s not about beating the Knicks or Hornets or Hawks by 40, it’s about beating Boston by any amount of points at all.

The Sixers were not horrible last night. We are, after all, talking about a three-point loss. But the myriad issues throughout the game were similar to what we’ve seen before. They cobbled together too many mistakes to really get into a shooting or defensive rhythm throughout.

They only shot 71% from the foul line, which is way down from a 77% season average. The turnovers, 14, were manageable, but Boston only coughed it up six times, so that’s another loss. The three-point shooting was below average, the shot selection was junky and poor in the first half, and they just looked tight to start. Boston looked loose and played within themselves. The Sixers played like they knew they’ve only beaten this team twice in the last two years.

Defensive miscues

Late in the fourth quarter, Boston was just seeking out mismatches over and over again. There was a chunk of plays around the five minute mark, I believe, where they just went after JJ Redick on every single play and the Sixers did a really lackluster job of addressing it. There were other situations where Redick and T.J. McConnell were on the floor together and having trouble on the defensive end.

Said Brett Brown post game:

There’s a physicality that you have to play with to beat them and you’re reminded of that. They do a really good job of going at mismatches, we could all see the difficulty at times that we had guarding some of the physicality of them trying to post us with different mismatches, those types of things I think are. There’s a physicality that you learn from… To Rich’s [Hofmann’s] point, they go at mismatches hard, they duck in, they’re physical with that philosophy.

They seek out mismatches pretty much every time down the floor in crunch time situations.

Case in point:

Those plays are killers, because when Marcus Smart can post up JJ Redick and drive the lane, the rest of the defense collapses, the Celtics swing the ball around the perimeter while the Sixers scramble to recover, and Jayson Tatum eventually knocks down a wide open three.

More Brown:

I think you have to find some level of better ball pressure; you have to find some level of better resistance, sort of staggered steps, there’s some technique things that we can do better and I think most importantly that at times you can’t overreact. If tough twos for a while are the palatable shot and, admittedly, you can’t live like that, but periods of the game you can, then we have to be disciplined to do that. To start running around the gym and getting into scramble mode, isn’t in my interest, our interest either.

Yes, if you’re going to leave JJ on the floor, make it harder for them to pick on him. Deny that entry pass into the post. Re-evaluate how you switch if they put him in a pick and roll. Maybe you have to blitz or throw a second guy into the equation, or maybe Redick just cannotbe on the floor in these situations. Maybe you play Jimmy Butler as a two-guard and bring in James Ennis or Jonathon Simmons to close out games instead.

Joel Embiid on this:

We need to do a better job of denying the ball and pressuring the ball. At the end of the day, it comes down to guarding your own man and that’s what we have to do. These guys, they take advantage of when we do help, and they move the ball pretty well. So, we just need to do a better job of guarding our own man.

Boston just kept hunting all throughout the 4th quarter, and the Sixers weren’t able to get enough stops to build any kind of respectable lead or keep pace when it really mattered.

Joel’s night

He struggles against Al Horford, who defends him better than anybody in the league.

Embiid was asked what the veteran center is doing to frustrate him:

He’s not doing anything, it’s just on me. I was sleepwalking for three quarters and that’s on me. Like I said, that’s on me. It has nothing to do with anybody.

I’m not a big fan of that answer. Sure, you can put it on you and take responsibility for your performance, but Horford is not “not doing anything.” His resistance points are sound, he does a good job of keeping his arms down, and he stands Joel up right on the low block in a position where Embiid is too far to power through him for a layup but too far for a comfortable turn around or floater. It’s a weird middle area between Embiid’s catch point and the rim, and for whatever reason, Joel just comes up short when he’s 1v1 with Horford. The Celtics are doing anything special. They’re not doubling or digging, they’re just letting Horford use low leverage and solid technique to defend a bigger guy.

I think Gordon Hayward actually did a decent job of explaining it after the game:

Al’s a smart defender, so I think he’s able to use spacing and angles and really kind of knows when to gap him, when to get up to him. He’s also just a tough defender, like taking bumps, able to not get backed all the way down and then still being long enough to contest his jump shots. Embiid’s a monster, so for Al to play like that is really encouraging. We’ve seen him do it in the past too. That was a good job by Al.

It was a really nice job, and in these cases Joel just has to keep going at Horford until he wears him down. He’s a bigger guy, he’s younger, and he’s always going to win a four-quarter war of attrition. Horford finished with five fouls last night, and if Joel is down there working him throughout the game instead of taking an inexplicable eight three-point tries, then maybe the result is different.

There’s just no reason your 7’2″ center should ever take eight three-pointers in a game. Redick and Tobias Harris are the only players who should be taking that many three-pointers.

Joel was also complaining about the no-call vs. Horford at the end of the game, and he’ll get fined for saying “the refs fucking sucked” at his press conference. Here’s the play:

Embiid No Call pic.twitter.com/YuYaDrTpZV

— The Render (@TheRenderNBA) February 13, 2019

Yes, it’s probably a foul, but Joel is playing for contact there. He’s not using his body to drive Horford back and he’s leaning into him. Joel is going to get cheap rip-through contact fouls against JaVale McGee and Jarrett Allen in the first quarter of meaningless games, but he’s not getting them against Al Horford in the fourth quarter, not after Horford does a solid job against him for the first three quarters. Either way, that no-call isn’t why they lost the game. It was just one play.

Embiid came out tight, he played another lackluster game against the Celtics before finally showing up in the fourth quarter, and then came across as fairly petty and maybe just outright immature in his press conference.

Ben Simmons

Same thing as always.

Boston does a nice job sealing off his transition movement by sliding a second guy to the elbow and meeting him right at the top of the foul line. Ben picks up his dribble, kicks the ball back out, and the Sixers are then playing half court offense.

Sure, there were some blown assignments by Boston, and Ben got free a couple of times. That huge dunk was one play, and he did finish 7 of his 9 looks last night, so he was really efficient when he did get to his spots. The two misses were actually ugly jump shots, so if you take those away, he had an excellent 7-7 night from his preferable range:

More important than his individual shooting, it felt like he just couldn’t get the rest of the offense into a rhythm throughout. He only finished with five assists vs. three turnovers, and said this after the game:

I don’t think we were putting the ball to the rim. I think we slowed down a lot in transition and tried to call a few too many sets, which we got a little bit of a flow. But that’s just how the game went.

They slowed down in transition because Boston did the slowing, which is one of their strengths. The Sixers scored only 12 fast break points last night against a season average of 15.7, and those first quarter baskets, the ones where Ben is pushing and everybody is running the floor, those get them loosened up as much as anything.

When Boston sits back and plays for the transition denial, you’re running your half-court base and whatever other sets, which is not what the Sixers would prefer to do coming out of the gates. They did turn that into some successful isolation and pick and roll for Jimmy Butler late in the game, and Butler is a huge help in those situations, when the rest of the team is stuck and they need somebody to create in other ways. If these teams meet again in the playoffs, Butler really could have a big series. He scored 22 points on 12 shots last night, it was just those missed free throws at the end that were a killer.

One more note about Ben – his defense on Jayson Tatum was good. Tatum was at his best when Boston was getting switches and moving the ball around, but in 1v1 situations with Ben, he wasn’t great, shooting just 3-9 against him:

Good job right there.

Tobias Harris

Bad shooting night. If he’s even slightly better than 4-14 and 0-6 from three, then the Sixers probably win by 4-5 points.

Tobias post game:

I thought that in the first half we really never got to our pace of how we kind of wanted to play. Usually that comes from being able to take the ball out, a majority of the time. So we weren’t really able to get out in transition as we wanted. They got on the glass, got a lot of second-chance points. But I just thought overall in the game, it was tough for us to get to our type of flow and our type of rhythm out there, which is going to happen. But I think it’s something that we have to identify early on and try to get some things ready for us. Overall, I still thought that we gave ourselves a legitimate chance to win that game, but it just went the other way.

11 second chance points for the Celtics last night on the strength of four Horford offensive rebounds.

That’s not a ton, but it’s disappointing when you think about the fact they’re getting second chance opportunities while also getting enough bodies back to defend in transition. A lot of teams will simply punt the offensive board to drop multiple players into defense, so in the course of a game you’re usually limiting fast break points at the expense of hitting the offensive glass. Boston was able to wriggle in there and get some offensive boards they had no business getting last night.

Rotation stuff

Jonathon Simmons was first off the bench while James Ennis and Jonah Bolden were DNPs, and I have no idea why. Brown again linked Simmons and Harris’ minutes together with Boban Marjanovic, giving us a grouping that looked like this:

B. Simmons

J. Simmons

Furkan Korkmaz

Harris

Boban

And then we saw a little bit of the same unit beyond that: Joel Embiid, Mike Scott, Jimmy Butler, JJ Redick, and T.J. McConnell. So the splits from the Laker game were more or less similar last night. There was also a point in the game where we got a Ben/JJ/Simmons/Mike Scott/Boban lineup, which played a pretty ineffective chunk of minutes.

But this was a Jonah Bolden game. When you have bigs like Al Horford and Daniel Theis who can space the floor and shoot from the perimeter, then Bolden as the first five off the bench makes more sense than Boban, in my mind. Boban is gonna have to be a situational guy moving into the playoffs.

Other notes:

The early Horford foul leading to the technical… I dunno. He played pretty good D there but might have been a little handsy right before the whistle was blown.

I swear I saw a Spain pick and roll at the beginning of the second half. I forgot to DVR the game, so I’m gonna have to go look back and see if I can find it.

Boban’s size results in some totally bizarre and usually hilarious on-court optics. There was a point in the 1st quarter, around the 5:00 mark, where he reached up and snagged a weakside rebound without even leaving his feet. In the 3rd quarter, he had a post up on Horford where he didn’t even move his feet or back him down, he simply just turned and flicked the ball over his head for a bucket.

It felt like Hayward was wide open on every single shot he took last night.

When Embiid got the and-1 bucket against Horford late in the 4th quarter, it was the loudest I’d heard the WFC this season.

Butler has been doing a great job lately of getting to the line. He was fouled twice last night on three point attempts.

The Celtics are probably better without Kyrie Irving. Same thing as last season. When he’s on the floor, they need to hide his defensive shortcomings, but last night, as you’ve seen before, Terry Rozier and Marcus Smart are defensive upgrades that present more matchup issues for the Sixers, more than if Kyrie was out there.

People will complain and say I didn’t criticize Brett Brown enough, but obviously the head coach plays a role in addressing all of the things I just wrote about, does he not?

The post Still Not Good Enough – Observations from Celtics 112, Sixers 109 appeared first on Crossing Broad.

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Still Not Good Enough – Observations from Celtics 112, Sixers 109

Talk about blowing an opportunity.

The Sixers had a nice little run going, with big moves at the trade deadline followed by a quality win against Denver and a national television drubbing of Los Angeles on Sunday afternoon. They were 7-4 through their last 11 games, a gauntlet that included Golden State, Toronto, and multiple playoff teams over multiple weeks.

But instead of finishing on a high note, they stumbled again to Boston, this time at home. They blew another opportunity against another top Eastern Conference team, falling to 1-7 this season against the Celtics, Bucks, and Raptors. Most importantly, they took all of the goodwill built up over the last few days and deposited it right into the trash can.

We’re right back at square one, which is this:

“The Sixers can’t beat the Celtics.”

Truly, it’s opening night and Christmas evening all over again. It’s like Groundhog Day without the overgrown rat from Western Pennsylvania.

As Metallica once said, “Nothing Else Matters,” and you know what? James Hetfield was right. Lars Ulrich was right. Nothing else matters besides beating the Celtics. That’s all anybody is talking about, and they’re justified in doing so. You can go out and beat the Knicks by 40 tonight and fans would not and should not care, because it’s not about beating the Knicks or Hornets or Hawks by 40, it’s about beating Boston by any amount of points at all.

The Sixers were not horrible last night. We are, after all, talking about a three-point loss. But the myriad issues throughout the game were similar to what we’ve seen before. They cobbled together too many mistakes to really get into a shooting or defensive rhythm throughout.

They only shot 71% from the foul line, which is way down from a 77% season average. The turnovers, 14, were manageable, but Boston only coughed it up six times, so that’s another loss. The three-point shooting was below average, the shot selection was junky and poor in the first half, and they just looked tight to start. Boston looked loose and played within themselves. The Sixers played like they knew they’ve only beaten this team twice in the last two years.

Defensive miscues

Late in the fourth quarter, Boston was just seeking out mismatches over and over again. There was a chunk of plays around the five minute mark, I believe, where they just went after JJ Redick on every single play and the Sixers did a really lackluster job of addressing it. There were other situations where Redick and T.J. McConnell were on the floor together and having trouble on the defensive end.

Said Brett Brown post game:

There’s a physicality that you have to play with to beat them and you’re reminded of that. They do a really good job of going at mismatches, we could all see the difficulty at times that we had guarding some of the physicality of them trying to post us with different mismatches, those types of things I think are. There’s a physicality that you learn from… To Rich’s [Hofmann’s] point, they go at mismatches hard, they duck in, they’re physical with that philosophy.

They seek out mismatches pretty much every time down the floor in crunch time situations.

Case in point:

Those plays are killers, because when Marcus Smart can post up JJ Redick and drive the lane, the rest of the defense collapses, the Celtics swing the ball around the perimeter while the Sixers scramble to recover, and Jayson Tatum eventually knocks down a wide open three.

More Brown:

I think you have to find some level of better ball pressure; you have to find some level of better resistance, sort of staggered steps, there’s some technique things that we can do better and I think most importantly that at times you can’t overreact. If tough twos for a while are the palatable shot and, admittedly, you can’t live like that, but periods of the game you can, then we have to be disciplined to do that. To start running around the gym and getting into scramble mode, isn’t in my interest, our interest either.

Yes, if you’re going to leave JJ on the floor, make it harder for them to pick on him. Deny that entry pass into the post. Re-evaluate how you switch if they put him in a pick and roll. Maybe you have to blitz or throw a second guy into the equation, or maybe Redick just cannotbe on the floor in these situations. Maybe you play Jimmy Butler as a two-guard and bring in James Ennis or Jonathon Simmons to close out games instead.

Joel Embiid on this:

We need to do a better job of denying the ball and pressuring the ball. At the end of the day, it comes down to guarding your own man and that’s what we have to do. These guys, they take advantage of when we do help, and they move the ball pretty well. So, we just need to do a better job of guarding our own man.

Boston just kept hunting all throughout the 4th quarter, and the Sixers weren’t able to get enough stops to build any kind of respectable lead or keep pace when it really mattered.

Joel’s night

He struggles against Al Horford, who defends him better than anybody in the league.

Embiid was asked what the veteran center is doing to frustrate him:

He’s not doing anything, it’s just on me. I was sleepwalking for three quarters and that’s on me. Like I said, that’s on me. It has nothing to do with anybody.

I’m not a big fan of that answer. Sure, you can put it on you and take responsibility for your performance, but Horford is not “not doing anything.” His resistance points are sound, he does a good job of keeping his arms down, and he stands Joel up right on the low block in a position where Embiid is too far to power through him for a layup but too far for a comfortable turn around or floater. It’s a weird middle area between Embiid’s catch point and the rim, and for whatever reason, Joel just comes up short when he’s 1v1 with Horford. The Celtics are doing anything special. They’re not doubling or digging, they’re just letting Horford use low leverage and solid technique to defend a bigger guy.

I think Gordon Hayward actually did a decent job of explaining it after the game:

Al’s a smart defender, so I think he’s able to use spacing and angles and really kind of knows when to gap him, when to get up to him. He’s also just a tough defender, like taking bumps, able to not get backed all the way down and then still being long enough to contest his jump shots. Embiid’s a monster, so for Al to play like that is really encouraging. We’ve seen him do it in the past too. That was a good job by Al.

It was a really nice job, and in these cases Joel just has to keep going at Horford until he wears him down. He’s a bigger guy, he’s younger, and he’s always going to win a four-quarter war of attrition. Horford finished with five fouls last night, and if Joel is down there working him throughout the game instead of taking an inexplicable eight three-point tries, then maybe the result is different.

There’s just no reason your 7’2″ center should ever take eight three-pointers in a game. Redick and Tobias Harris are the only players who should be taking that many three-pointers.

Joel was also complaining about the no-call vs. Horford at the end of the game, and he’ll get fined for saying “the refs fucking sucked” at his press conference. Here’s the play:

Embiid No Call pic.twitter.com/YuYaDrTpZV

— The Render (@TheRenderNBA) February 13, 2019

Yes, it’s probably a foul, but Joel is playing for contact there. He’s not using his body to drive Horford back and he’s leaning into him. Joel is going to get cheap rip-through contact fouls against JaVale McGee and Jarrett Allen in the first quarter of meaningless games, but he’s not getting them against Al Horford in the fourth quarter, not after Horford does a solid job against him for the first three quarters. Either way, that no-call isn’t why they lost the game. It was just one play.

Embiid came out tight, he played another lackluster game against the Celtics before finally showing up in the fourth quarter, and then came across as fairly petty and maybe just outright immature in his press conference.

Ben Simmons

Same thing as always.

Boston does a nice job sealing off his transition movement by sliding a second guy to the elbow and meeting him right at the top of the foul line. Ben picks up his dribble, kicks the ball back out, and the Sixers are then playing half court offense.

Sure, there were some blown assignments by Boston, and Ben got free a couple of times. That huge dunk was one play, and he did finish 7 of his 9 looks last night, so he was really efficient when he did get to his spots. The two misses were actually ugly jump shots, so if you take those away, he had an excellent 7-7 night from his preferable range:

More important than his individual shooting, it felt like he just couldn’t get the rest of the offense into a rhythm throughout. He only finished with five assists vs. three turnovers, and said this after the game:

I don’t think we were putting the ball to the rim. I think we slowed down a lot in transition and tried to call a few too many sets, which we got a little bit of a flow. But that’s just how the game went.

They slowed down in transition because Boston did the slowing, which is one of their strengths. The Sixers scored only 12 fast break points last night against a season average of 15.7, and those first quarter baskets, the ones where Ben is pushing and everybody is running the floor, those get them loosened up as much as anything.

When Boston sits back and plays for the transition denial, you’re running your half-court base and whatever other sets, which is not what the Sixers would prefer to do coming out of the gates. They did turn that into some successful isolation and pick and roll for Jimmy Butler late in the game, and Butler is a huge help in those situations, when the rest of the team is stuck and they need somebody to create in other ways. If these teams meet again in the playoffs, Butler really could have a big series. He scored 22 points on 12 shots last night, it was just those missed free throws at the end that were a killer.

One more note about Ben – his defense on Jayson Tatum was good. Tatum was at his best when Boston was getting switches and moving the ball around, but in 1v1 situations with Ben, he wasn’t great, shooting just 3-9 against him:

Good job right there.

Tobias Harris

Bad shooting night. If he’s even slightly better than 4-14 and 0-6 from three, then the Sixers probably win by 4-5 points.

Tobias post game:

I thought that in the first half we really never got to our pace of how we kind of wanted to play. Usually that comes from being able to take the ball out, a majority of the time. So we weren’t really able to get out in transition as we wanted. They got on the glass, got a lot of second-chance points. But I just thought overall in the game, it was tough for us to get to our type of flow and our type of rhythm out there, which is going to happen. But I think it’s something that we have to identify early on and try to get some things ready for us. Overall, I still thought that we gave ourselves a legitimate chance to win that game, but it just went the other way.

11 second chance points for the Celtics last night on the strength of four Horford offensive rebounds.

That’s not a ton, but it’s disappointing when you think about the fact they’re getting second chance opportunities while also getting enough bodies back to defend in transition. A lot of teams will simply punt the offensive board to drop multiple players into defense, so in the course of a game you’re usually limiting fast break points at the expense of hitting the offensive glass. Boston was able to wriggle in there and get some offensive boards they had no business getting last night.

Rotation stuff

Jonathon Simmons was first off the bench while James Ennis and Jonah Bolden were DNPs, and I have no idea why. Brown again linked Simmons and Harris’ minutes together with Boban Marjanovic, giving us a grouping that looked like this:

B. Simmons

J. Simmons

Furkan Korkmaz

Harris

Boban

And then we saw a little bit of the same unit beyond that: Joel Embiid, Mike Scott, Jimmy Butler, JJ Redick, and T.J. McConnell. So the splits from the Laker game were more or less similar last night. There was also a point in the game where we got a Ben/JJ/Simmons/Mike Scott/Boban lineup, which played a pretty ineffective chunk of minutes.

But this was a Jonah Bolden game. When you have bigs like Al Horford and Daniel Theis who can space the floor and shoot from the perimeter, then Bolden as the first five off the bench makes more sense than Boban, in my mind. Boban is gonna have to be a situational guy moving into the playoffs.

Other notes:

The early Horford foul leading to the technical… I dunno. He played pretty good D there but might have been a little handsy right before the whistle was blown.

I swear I saw a Spain pick and roll at the beginning of the second half. I forgot to DVR the game, so I’m gonna have to go look back and see if I can find it.

Boban’s size results in some totally bizarre and usually hilarious on-court optics. There was a point in the 1st quarter, around the 5:00 mark, where he reached up and snagged a weakside rebound without even leaving his feet. In the 3rd quarter, he had a post up on Horford where he didn’t even move his feet or back him down, he simply just turned and flicked the ball over his head for a bucket.

It felt like Hayward was wide open on every single shot he took last night.

When Embiid got the and-1 bucket against Horford late in the 4th quarter, it was the loudest I’d heard the WFC this season.

Butler has been doing a great job lately of getting to the line. He was fouled twice last night on three point attempts.

The Celtics are probably better without Kyrie Irving. Same thing as last season. When he’s on the floor, they need to hide his defensive shortcomings, but last night, as you’ve seen before, Terry Rozier and Marcus Smart are defensive upgrades that present more matchup issues for the Sixers, more than if Kyrie was out there.

People will complain and say I didn’t criticize Brett Brown enough, but obviously the head coach plays a role in addressing all of the things I just wrote about, does he not?

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