What Luka Lacks & Other News
Luka Dončić is an amazing basketball player. No one would dispute that. But for as great of a shooter, passer, and rebounder he is, he still can't guard an orange parking cone. Let's put this one in here for posterity:
Jaylen Brown crossed over Luka so bad last night that Luka ended up a good 10 feet away from Jaylen when he went to shoot it. Let's take a look at the still frame:
Luka said afterwards he was "praying" the shot didn't go in, because he was clearly embarrassed to have been faked out so badly. It wasn't even an especially crafty move by Jaylen. If you watch the replay, you can see he almost loses track of the ball when he goes behind his back with it.
Luka had been working the refs pretty hard, but this was the beginning of the end for his patience, and those of the refs as well. On Boston's next possession, they went right back to Jaylen on Luka. Jaylen pump faked him and Luka jumped into him. It's a call you see five times a game, and one Luka would expect if he was the shooter. But when he was called for the foul, he walked over at the ref and pointed at him demonstratively, and that was that, he was given a technical foul, and he would have to subbed out for his own good.
While anyone would be embarrassed by being cooked that bad, ultimately Dončić isn't going to get anywhere until he can tighten up his defense. It's that lack of defense that makes me unable to take him seriously as an MVP candidate, and why I scoff at people who think he's better than Jayson Tatum. People want to credit Tatum for sacrificing his offense for his team, but often don't notice him taking on tough defensive assignments, but they also praise Luka's triple doubles in losses and hand waive his lackluster defense. You can't have it both ways. Both sides of the game count, and no one in their right mind would pick Dončić as even a top-100 or top-150 defender.
You can tell the players feel the same way in the way they answer things postgame. Talking about the sequence, Jaylen said, "Credit to him for attempting to play some sort of defense." Ha. He would go on to say "There’s two sides of the ball, so being able to apply pressure on both, you gotta be at a certain level of shape to do that." Read between the lines and he's basically saying Luka is out of shape and they can wear him down by making him try to play defense, which he sucks at. In a related story, Luka was a -13 last night, which was the worst mark of any of the 17 players who played last night.
The Heat Get Terry Rozier for Free
The Miami Heat did it again. Terry Rozier wanted to be traded to the Heat, and the Heat used that fact to extract him from the Hornets for free. There are plenty of contenders who could have used Rozier – the Lakers, Knicks, and Timberwolves at the very least. So there are only three possibilities for why Charlotte dealt Rozier – a borderline All-Star this season – for the corpse of Kyle Lowry and a protected first-round pick. The pick, mind you, is unlikely to do anything to help them with their current rebuild. One, it's a pick four drafts away. Two, it's a protected pick, which means there's very little chance of it being a top-10 pick. Three, the Heat are never bad – they've won at least 37 games in each of the last 15 seasons – again, making it unlikely to be a good pick. So, one of three things happened to make this trade a reality:
- Charlotte really wanted to do right by their guy, Rozier.
- Charlotte felt that they wanted off of Rozier's contract and no one else would take it on.
- Charlotte is run by fucking idiots, and chose to just get quick salary relief, even though no desirable free agents will want to sign with Charlotte this summer.
I'll allow for the small possibility that it's option 1, but the simplest explanation is usually the correct one, and so I think it's option 3. I don't think there's any case to be made that it was option 2, there would have been other teams interested in Rozier.
Assuming that Rozier fits in well in Miami, and I have absolutely no doubt that he will, the Heat are now every bit the full-on contender that Boston, Milwaukee, and Philly are. And they did it for free. Lowry had been bumped out of the starting lineup, and hadn't played 30+ minutes in a game since Christmas Day. He would score 12 points on 5-of-7 shooting that day. In the nine games since, he had averaged 4.4 points per game on 29.4% shooting, and had averaged 24.2 minutes per game.
What's more, they weren't playing him in crunch time, choosing to let Tyler Herro man the point at the end of games. It cost them in their loss to Atlanta on Udonis Haslem Night, as they had a four-point lead with 35 seconds left and choked it away. The Heat would have improved by playing anyone else, but because of Charlotte's generosity/stupidity, they get to play a really great player like Rozier who is going to fit like a glove with "Heat Culture." Good times.
Tough vs. Annoying
The night before, the Celtics played in Houston, and it was a visible example of tough vs. annoying. While Dillon Brooks played solid defense against Jayson Tatum for much of the night, the C's didn't really have to press on that matchup because they were able to turn to Kristaps Porzingis in the post. (Speaking of players who don't play defense, Alperen Şengün seems unlikely to ever make an All-Star team until he learns how to play some). But mostly, Brooks and his coach, Ime Udoka, just came off as annoying. So many of the things they did, right down to fouling in the final minute down nine points, were abjectly futile.
What's more, Udoka's insistence on playing "tough" led him to the wacky decision of playing backup Aaron Holiday (Jrue's brother) for the entire fourth quarter, and sitting Jalen Green for more than half of it. There might be a universe where Holiday is a better player than Green, but it isn't this one, and at 6'0", he was not able to affect anything the C's were doing defensively either.
We spent a lot of time last season lamenting where the C's could be if Udoka had remained the head coach, but in watching these two games vs. the Rockets, it became very clear that even if the C's take more threes than I would prefer now, they are far better off with Joe Mazzulla as their coach than they would be with Ime Udoka. Udoka should be sending gifts to the Jay's for every year he's under contract as a head coach in this league, because without him, he'd be very unlikely to have that job in Houston.