Opening Night Thoughts

Lakers-Suns

Wow. Wow. I'm shocked at what I just saw. The Lakers, down 15 after the first quarter, came roaring back to outscore the Suns by 23 the rest of the way and take a 114-106 victory--without Kobe!--as well as starting C/PF Chris Mihm & Kwame Brown.

Andrew Bynum's performance was astonishing. This is a guy who turned 19 a few days ago, and he's out there putting up 18 & 9 -- with five assists -- in just 23 minutes! And at least two of those assists were just brilliant passes. Bynum has a ton of talent and his potential is through the roof. I don't want to get ahead of myself here, something tells me he'll be lucky to average half those numbers the rest of the year, but look, he's ginormous, he has the best hands of any young big man in the league since Shaq, he has great court vision and is a gifted passer, and now even has a few post scoring moves, including a Kareem-inspired and -taught baby hook on the baseline. He still has a lot of work to do, especially on defense, and I have a feeling this game will look like a real anomaly by the end of the year, but I saw enough to be extremely excited about this kid's potential.

The flip side of Bynum's performance is Phoenix's utter and complete inability to defend post scorers. We saw it last year in the playoffs with Kwame Brown, and then moreso with Brand and Kaman, now they're getting punished by someone a year and a day out of high school. They need Amare, I think that's pretty clear now. Not necessarily to score--although you could see last night they don't have many options when their shooting goes cold; luckily it doesn't happen very often--but on the boards and on the defensive end. Amare isn't a great defender, but he at least puts some fear into a legit big man, which Diaw certainly does not (although he does as well as you could reasonably expect from a 6'8 skinny Euro). I mean, they had to double Bynum in the post--double *Andrew Bynum*. That's a problem. Imagine if Kobe had been in the game...if you're doubling Bynum, Kobe's going for 60.

Lamar Odom was a warrior, going to the basket at will, controlling the boards, playing great transition defense, and running the offense like a general. I just don't understand why he's not this aggressive when Kobe's in the game. Sure, Kobe takes a million shots, but it's not like Odom never has the ball, or is never isolated on a defender--it happens *all the goddamn time*. There's no reason he can't do exactly what he did tonight for the rest of the season. But it won't happen, you can absolutely etch that in stone. No way. Great, great player, but he just doesn't have a great player's mentality. Deferring to an even greater player is one thing, scoring 15 a game is another. Like Charles Barkley said last night, Lamar Odom is too good of a player to have 34 be his career high. He just has to be more aggressive for the Lakers to be an elite team, and I don't see it happening.

Maurice Evans with 17 & 4 with 3 steals in 29 minutes, on 8-13 shooting too. He obviously won't keep that up the whole year or anything, but I liked what I saw of him in Detroit and I like what I've seen of him so far in LA in preseason and game one. He's an athletic, active player who has a nice shooting stroke and rebounds and defends well. Very nice pickup for them, very nice.

Radmanovic wasn't great, like he's been the entire preseason. His hand injury is really affecting his shot--he was 4-7 from the floor, but had several layups. His outside shots were all way, way off. He did have a few rebounds and made some nice touch passes in traffic. He's a surprisingly good all-around player, he just needs to get his hand back to normal and regain his shooting stroke.

Jordan Farmar played well in limited minutes, scoring 6 on 3-3 shooting, including a couple tough finishes at the basket. He probably won't be a huge factor this year, but if he can keep giving them a strong 10-15 minutes, it'll help a lot.

On the other end, the problem for the Suns--besides their terrible defense--was that their outside shooting went stone cold after the first quarter and they didn't seem to have any other options. I don't know why they didn't go to the pick-and-roll with Diaw and Stoudemire...Diaw took 2 shots for the entire game. That doesn't make any sense to me.

Amare looked pretty decent in his limited action, picking up 6 points in 11 minutes, including a damned fine looking highlight reel dunk in the first quarter on which he looked a lot like the old Amare. Be patient, Suns fans--they need Amare to be as healthy as he can possibly be when the playoffs roll around, even at the cost of losing games now. And this game as an anomaly, we know from experience the Suns are good enough to win 55 games without Amare. Some issues were raised in this game, but your team always looks like shit when nobody can hit an open jumper.

Nobody, that is, except Barbosa. Last night was a great demonstration of why I consider Barbosa one of the most entertaining players to watch in the entire league. He went for 30 in 37 minutes with 6 threes and a variety of blow-by moves. He's just an amazing player, an unstoppable scoring machine. If the Suns hadn't had that kind of performance out of him, the game would have been a complete blowout.

Nash & Marion were both subpar, but no big deal, you know full well they'll be back to their usual selves by tonight (they better be, with the Clippers in town). Nash still reeled off 13 assists, but didn't shoot the ball well. Marion had just 16 & 7, and while he did get 4 blocks, spent the night getting mostly destroyed by Lamar Odom on both ends of the floor.

Pussy flopper Raja Bell* couldn't hit the broadside of a barn all night. I wondered why they didn't bring in James or Jumaine Jones to see if they could get something going. The shots were there, as they always are against the Lakers, they just didn't have anyone besides Barbosa knocking 'em down.

*And Speer, my problem with Bell isn't the clothesline on Kobe. Nothing wrong with a little hard foul in the playoffs. My problem is the guy flops more than anyone in the league--by far, and still constantly bitches to the refs even though he somehow gets superstar defensive calls all of a sudden. I mean, he's a good defender, but how the fuck did he start getting Artest/Bowen/Kobe calls? He's nowhere near their level, IMO.

Marcus Banks looked like he'll be a great fit there. He ran wild in the open floor and put up 8-3-2 in 19 minutes. He did turn the ball over 4 times, he needs to settle down out there a bit.

Chicago-Miami

What can you say, sometimes shit happens. If I'm a Miami fan, I'm not *too* worried. Sure, it looks like all your old players simultaneously got shitty, the same way it happened to the 2002-2003-2004 Lakers, but I really think this was just one of those things, where shittiness keeps piling up and building on itself until you find yourself on the other end of a 40 point asswhipping.

Now if I'm a Chicago fan, I'm pretty damn excited. Their defense was just unreal, and they absolutely dominated the boards. The rookies played great, getting minutes mostly when the game was out of hand. Tyrus Thomas was super-active, like you'd expect, picking up 4-5-2 with a steal and 2 blocks, and Thabo Sefolosha went for 11 in 10 minutes on 4-4 from the floor, and demonstrated a very nice shooting stroke. I saw a play late in the game where he had a defender all over him with the shotclock running down, he just rose up from about 17 feet and drained a jumper--it was Kobe-esque. I did a total double take. He probably won't do much this year at all, but it looks like Chicago might have yet *another* good young player on its hands.

Nobody on Miami got into double figures other than Wade, who went for 25 in 34 minutes on 10-15 shooting...includign 2-3 from three. As I've said before, it seemed from last year's playoffs and the World Championships that he was really shooting the three much better. If he can start knocking that down consistently, my god, how are you going to defend him? Of course, if the rest of the team shoots the way they did last night (1-14 from three), you can just gear the entire defense up to stop Wade. But I think they'll get it together. The team has talent, they'll be fine.

Shaq was terrible, but he's the kind of guy who really takes the night off when a blowout seems to be in the works. Still, he stunk it up in the early going when the blowout wasn't obvious. I had heard all about how (relatively) skinny and in shape he was--looked exactly the same to me as he did last year.

The Bulls got a huge game from Hinrich, who went for 26, and *Duhon*, with 20 in 16 minutes (which included some garbage time) on 7-8 shooting. Deng and Nocioni had solid production, and Wallace and PJ Brown controlled the paint. Ben Gordon stunk, but you know he can fill it up, he just had an off night.

Very nice all-around performance from the Bulls. I still don't think they can win a championship--not this year, at least...but I'm a hell of a lot less sure about that then I was yesterday. Their defense is really amazing, and you Pistons fans know what can happen when you get 7-8 talented and athletic guys all buying into the system and busting their ass on D. This team is young, athletic, talented, and hungry as hell. Nice combo to have.