No Subject

[Hironaka <j.hironaka@unesco.org>]

Geez, you wonder how a team of professionals can be shooting .380 from
the field over four games. And that's BTW with Waltah on the DL and with
Antoine hitting over .450 from the field!

To the degree that there is thus the likelihood of improvement, I guess
we can't complain at all about a .500 record at this stage. Eric
Williams is hitting .304 from the field and .200 from the line in four
starts. Griffin is shooting .286, Randy Brown .294 and Kenny Anderson
.258. Our two rookie "steals" Moiso and Blount are both shooting .200
from the field, even though they barely need to jump to dunk the ball.
I'd preach patience if those two tall rookies were batting .200 in
baseball, but Moiso is basically Pierce's age and played Pac 10 ball.
You usually see awesome hints of future performance levels as a rookie
over small stretches or a game or two (and I'm not talking about future
All Stars but more like from Samaki Walker, Keon Clark, Lorenzen
Wright-type future bench contributers with great athleticism and no
clue), so hopefully we'll see all that later in the season if Moiso even
gives a damn about his present El Busto to the nth degree performance.
If you "can't teach height" then you also can't really un-teach court
cluelessness or lack of desire, which despite his hubris Poultrino
should have picked up on when watching game videos of the kid. But I'm
jumping to conclusions, I know. This was a make-or-break lottery pick
for El Pollo Loco.

I projected we would be 2-2 at this stage, but still felt that 14-11 or
even 15-10 was and is still possible over the first 25 games. We'll need
a start like that to have playoff aspirations, IMO. I do believe the
Celtics will get on track before you know it, so I'm not that down right
now. I believe they can go on a 6-3 run over the next two weeks, even if
they don't split the next back-to-back at home against the Knicks and
away at Philly. They will fight like hell versus New York on Friday, and
I actually believe they will bounce back strong and hopefully be in a
position to win. Rebounding and assists are two other stats that are
heavily skewed against us right now, but these might be harder to bring
back into balance over the coming weeks. Herren really could be a spark,
but again let's not jinx him or put unfounded pressure on him. If
Griffin is only good for .286 shooting, then Herren will probably shoot
.086 until Kenny comes back if history is any guide.

Pitino needs to come up with a gameplan to make the offense click.
Tuesday might have been the perfect opportunity to run Antoine at the
point against a slow, geriatric point guard, but it either backfired
completely or wasn't tried. Toronto can frustrate Antoine down low with
Oakley but no way can Oakley or any other Craptor challenge him bringing
the ball up the wings. Antoine needs to be able to surprise opponents in
his preparation by showing up to games having run mucho practice reps as
a point guard or power forward depending on who we are playing, and in
this case we had a lot of time to prepare not that I'm in any position
to second guess.

Anyway, I miss Bill Cooper's summaries because he'd make em through
thick or thin. Someone must know his e-mail address. Maybe we can
petition him to come back to our list.

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