Z-man: Even your “I wish Jowles still posted, bc I know he’s laughing at this bullshit” comment backfired.

No, I was laughing. Just too busy to sift through a 400-comment fight. And unfortunately I’ll be back in NY from Wednesday through Sunday, but not back in NYC until Saturday night to watch Thibs single-handedly win Game 6 : (

Hubert: as for the “better personnel” argument, the Hawks only have better offensive personnel.

Even if true, the gap on offense is greater than the gap on defense. Capela is substantially better than Noel as an overall defender because he rebounds better and is just as good of a shot blocker. Randle, Rose, IQ and especially Obi are average or below. And like us, they are well coached on defensive schemes.

Clearly their offense is much harder to disrupt than ours, and it’s not because Nate is some kind of offensive savant as a coach relative to Thibs. They are much hardr to defend than we are.

Thibs came into this year totally blind to what he had, with a shortened preseason and condensed regular season, and passed every reasonable test of coaching efficacy with flying colors. That will be true no matter what happens this series. The real test of who Thibs is in the continuum of building a true contender starts when this season is over. Same for Leon Rose. Miami, Boston, and possibly Charlotte, Chicago and Indiana, will be far better prepared to challenge us next year, we’re not catching teams by surprise, there will be packed arenas and ample recovery time…not like last year after the bubble. There’s a lot of holes left to fill…personnel, strategy, tactics…and I don’t care how good of a coach he is, this group has no shot of anything beyond a 6-7 seed and a quick first round exit next year.

It’s a fair critique that Thibs should have tried it a few times during the regular season, but on the other hand, nearly every game was so closely contested

And that’s always been my rub with Thibs, that I think winning each specific game shouldn’t always be his top priority, but clearly it was and doing it his way added twenty wins to their total from last season (in ten less games!), so it is hard to argue with his approach.

Some really easy things we can do that we haven’t seen:

– play IQ with Randle
– have Reggie Bullock (or whoever Trae is guarding) set screens to get Young switched onto a ballhandler.
– Use Randle as a screen setter to either get him the ball in a better position or take advantage of the defensive focus on him.

You can make a good case about not playing Randle or Obi at the 5, but it’s hard to defend our choice to avoid doing any of those three simple things.

swiftandabundant: Game three we lost bc of Randle and RJ missing shots. I’m not underplaying how well Atlanta played but we missed open shots and passed on others bc we got in our heads.

cybersoze: with joy and relentlessness.

This. We’ve accurately shat on Julius and RJ for shooting poorly, but it’s like a virus that spread the last game, infecting Bullock, Burks, and Quick. Only Rose had antibodies. I was watching Bullock repeatedly choose not to shoot when he was open — a few times he’d duck the close-out, dribble into two-point territory, and despite being wide open hesitate and then pass. Those were money shots earlier, and often seemed to warm him up so he’d start hitting threes. A lot of folks seemed to be second-guessing themselves shot-wise. We need to get back to a relaxed, natural flow. But not sure they can, given playoffs pressure.