Re: Our dumb team will never learn!!

[Kestutis.Kveraga@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Kestutis Kveraga)]

--- You wrote:
Good wins, bad losses, they come and go, but what really bothers me the most
about this team is that we are dumb. Plain & simple, dumb.  Maybe it is the
players, maybe its the coach or both, but we are a dumb, street ball team.
--- end of quote ---

Yeah, they'll never beat the Spurs while Toine and Duncan are playing for their
respective teams, at least not in SA. What a study in contrasts - one a smooth,
cool, efficient superstar, the other a hot-headed, wasteful, inefficient
superstar-wannabe. The whole game is always about Toine trying to show up
Duncan and this will persist while the team is run by Toine.  How many times
did Toine try to take on Duncan? He got his pocket picked by Duncan, he heaved
an off-balance 3 with Duncan all over him, he drove and threw up short-armed
garbage on one of the last possessions, missing badly. When Toine was
attempting to guard Duncan (after TD had fouled out Battie and Baker), Duncan,
despite the huge mismatch, sought out a better option, nonchalantly throwing an
alley-oop to Robinson for a flush + 1.  Somehow I never really doubted that SA
would come back and win, even predicted on the last possession that it would be
on a 3 by Jackson (how come we can't get players like that? or Bruce Bowen, for
that matter?). 

As for Obie, he'll again cover up for Toine and Pierce and blame himself for
their 2-13 performance from the 3-land. You know, playing them too many minutes
and all that stuff, but it was he who told them to shoot all those 3s, that was
his game plan all along and if you got a problem with that, talk to him. He
figured out back in the Pitino era who decides what goes and what doesn't on
this ream and said to himself, "hey, if you can't beat them, join them!".  The
kids' college tuition is a lot easier to handle on an NBA  head coach's salary.   

Oh well. This was a very, very frustrating loss. There were some positives: 
Bremer apparently can D up and shoot a little, even with live defenders
guarding him. (That's a first for our deep-bench corps. Kedrick, Wolko, and
especially Sundov are amazing shooters when guarded by chairs, cardboard
cutouts, and even live, real ball boys, I hear). 
Kedrick's block on Duncan was a beauty, as were some of his high-flying
rebounds. If he could only be taught to play basketball...  
The Celtics didn't get Dallased. They came back in a game that was getting away
from them. They outrebounded and outshot SA (!!!)

All that said... it's painful to watch players like Parker and Ginobili, with
the French "Toine" soon to join them, and know that the Spurs' (and most
everybody else's scouts) are scouring Europe for more talents like these while
Wallace is smugly "educating" sportswriters about how all this brouhaha over
foreign  players is just so much hot air. Why, look at how worthless the
Celtics' two foreigners are! Who needs foreigners when you can get
uber-athletes out of JuCo (sans basketball skills) and emotionally unstable
has-beens with max contracts!  And so it goes. Tomorrow night Antoine will be
trying to show up Yao, eat a lot of leather, throw up a lot of threes, Pierce
will scowl and drive on 4 defenders w/no call, and our so-called point guards
will be eaten alive by Stevie Franchise and his merry band of Rockettes. Put me
down for another blowout after this heart-wrenching loss. 
Kestas