Official Game Thread: Cavaliers at Hawks

[Nash]

11 hours ago, AHF said:

So you think the Cavs missing 3 starters are contenders because they are better than Boston?  Who gives a **** what they do on a given night.  That team is a lottery team.  Lottery talent can win against anyone on a given night.  
 

The Raptors were near the top of fthe lottery and beat the greatest team in NBA history over Jordan’s Bulls.  It happens.  Nothing is guaranteed in the NBA but if you are playing a stretch of lottery talent opponents that is not a useful measuring stick.  

don’t disagree about learning to win more consistently even against bad teams but we have been playing bad and broken teams and will do so again against the Grizzlies.  Looking at how our metrics compare in those games against full season metrics for other teams is both too small a sample and apples to oranges.  That has been my point.

When you play a weak sauce opponent you still need to do what is necessary to win and even really good teams can stop doing that and then lose when a team gots scorching hot from 3pt range.  We would have lost if the Cavs had been that hot too.  Isn’t like we shut down them getting good looks but that weak sauce broken team isn’t good enough to hit them consistently.  
 

My point is not that these wins aren’t good (ignoring draft position) but that they don’t give you a lot of information from which you can draw meaningful conclusions about improvements or degradation of team play when the competition is that lowly.

No I just said they beat Boston. You can't downgrade it by just who cares. We all know that regular season doesn't matter in general. But winning is fun and losing sucks

[TheNorthCydeRises]

We're losing to JJJ and the Memphis Hustle.

[TheNorthCydeRises]

Murray needs to have the mentality that he needs to score 40 - 50 points to win.

He's red hot.

Keep shooting the damn ball.

[AHF]

10 hours ago, terrell said:

11 games without Trae this year we are giving up 112.4 points per game. That would be 9th best in the league in scoring defense. Those are the numbers in a good sample size of games.

Please control the results for quality of opponent and I’ll be more interested.  We should be better with DJM at PG which improves our defense at two positions but playing teams like NY missing 4 starters, Memphis tanking, Cleveland missing 3 starters, Orlando missing Banchero, and Detroit is like half of that sample and are closer to G-League quality than they are to contenders.  That level of competition is not what our full year schedule has looked like.  The Grizzlies score less than 100 points almost 50% of the time (5 of their last 11) and have been in the 80’s multiple times.  They are nothing like that squad healthy and actually trying to win.  It is good to beat those teams - we still won some games when we tanked - but beating squads like that doesn’t make for meaningful results to project against playoff level competition.