Garza was very good, moves better and continues to shoot it well.
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Not being able or willing to shoot seems like a problem.
Your point about relative age stands sort of - Cade is about as old as he can be in his class without having been held back.
Houston had a good draft. Sengun looks like Frank Kaminsky versus the Big Ten. And Garuba was a defensive savant in the Olympics.
Not sure why everyone is down on Killian. Heās a lockdown defender. Great passer. So much better scoring in the paint with his added strength. Heās been automatic these two games. The only thing he needs to work on is shooting from the outside.
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I think the shooting concern is glaring. Arguably the most important skill in todayās NBA. Honestly still hurts that the Pistons passed up Haliburton and went with Hayes.
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You know, itās funny to me that this is the reality about Haliburton (although it seems to be the reality) because when UM played Iowa State in Hawaii, Haliburton was good, but his shot mechanics looked terrible to me in that game. I didnāt think heād be nearly as good as heās been in the NBA. . . which is why I am not a NBA GM nor play one on television.
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His mechanics are weird, but heās been a very good shooter on solid volume for some time now at many different levels.
As I look at it now, his release is fine and everything from the arms up is totally normal. But he barely jumps, shoots with his feet sometimes extremely close together, and kicks his bu*tt out a little. Definitely takes some getting used to
True. I (think I) remember that he hit a late 3 in that game to make it a little dicey, and when I watched him take it I thought āWhat a funky shot. Thatāll never go in.ā And it went in.
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Here is my anecdotal explanation for why you see such a variety of methods/mechanics of long-range shooting in all levels of basketball. (Okay, stand back and give me some air.)
When kids are young and down at the park, in the gym, or on the driveway, there is probably these days a three-point line on the basketball court. And of course, that line is like a dare - āPlease shoot from behind meā. So, your 50 pound kiddo (who has watched a great assortment of skilled shooters effortlessly flicking a basketball into a hoop from great distances) is doing whatever they can to heave a 1.4 pound spheroid in the general direction of a hoop 10 feet off the ground from 18+ feet, but they canāt shoot it (yet) with a simpler āwrist flickā. Physics and kinesiology then take over, and wa la, you get a player who has grown into acquiring a habit of, letās say, unconventional shooting mechanics. Now for some, they grow adept at actually consistently making shots with these mechanics, but for a lot of kids, there are too many moving parts to their shot which makes it too inconsistent.
Thank you for taking a valuable two minutes of your life to read this.
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You are 100% correct and the Steph Curry generation has only magnified that. I can also say that in this era of ātravel sportsā that teams/kids are playing a lot more games but not practicing as much as they used to. My son has played travel/aau/feeder hoops on some pretty good teams (my son isnāt that good, but the team has some elite talent) and they practiced once a week for 90 minutes but often played 5 games. In that 90 minutes the coaches are working on plays, defense, full court, half court, etc. and thereās very, very little time worked purely on shot mechanics. If you want to work on that, you have to get private lessons outside of the team structure. There are kids that do that, but when you overlap some economics on top of it you can see why there are challenges.
Case in point - thereās a kid who is now a sophomore whoās been in this program. Elite athlete, elite scorer, good size/athleticism, has appeared on youtube playing against some of the youtube hoops stars (that Iām too old to understand)ā¦but his shot sucks. His form is clunky. Heās now having to get lessons to rebuild it.
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Iāve been encouraged by his play in the summer. Shot still isnāt there but he wasnāt drafted to be a 40% shooter. Still plenty of time to get him to the low 30s. His vision is out of this world. He sees passing lanes I canāt even see with a whole court view on TV.
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I think thereās certainly truth to some of what you and the previous post are saying. Kids shoot on 10 foot hoops far too early in my opinion. We shouldnāt tell kids they canāt shoot 3s, cause then kids wonāt be having fun and then kids wonāt want to play basketball. So the rim and ball should grow with the players to allow that to happen without kids just straight heaving the ball.
But Iām usually loathe to then extend blame on AAU or travel ball or whatever. An athletic, great young player that canāt shoot is certainly not a new phenomenon. The fact is that shooting has never been better in the league, so hard for me to then say that the problem is that players donāt practice enough and thus are bad shooters. I mean this discussion stemmed form Haliburton who is a very good shooter
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In Europe they donāt shoot on 10 foot hoops until theyāre like 12
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Yeah Iāve actually really come around on AAU ball and appreciate that the emphasis is playing a lot in relatively low stakes conditions. You just need to make sure that, truly, everybody gets a chance if they want it to play on and off ball and be the different parts of the team. I think that really is the sweet spot as opposed to e.g. drill work of the kind you see on insta and whanott, which I suspect is largely useless. Shooting is probably the major exception and def think @AC1997 is right that you need way more reps than can ever be had in games.
Also, Iām not sure itās obvious what the height of the hoop should be when. E.g. the biomechanics folks in baseball emphasize throwing lots of distances and slightly different sized balls for both velocity and command. There are general skills to learn about how to create efficient movements and imposing various stresses and constraints I think help create these general skills.
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I think the prevailing thought today is, āGive a great athlete and we can teach them to shootā, and there is a lot of validity in this as you can probably get an overall better, more elite basketball player when you take a great athlete and āteach them to shootā than taking a great shooter and āmake them a great athleteā.
I think thatās a fascinating thought. Soccer and baseball scale their fields, goals, fences, dimensions to the age of the player and basketball, with the exception of very young, doesnāt. Part of that is simple logistics - you can lower rims but you canāt repaint lines on the floor easily. But I do see a lot of kids, especially those that hit their growth spurt later, develop some bad mechanics trying to overcome for their lack of size/strength. I think the elite players overcome this one way or another, but it is an interesting debate. (The #1 seventh grader in the state plays with my son two years up in age and is still the best player on the team and shoots from deep with ease.)
It is also true that shooting has never been better at the highest levels so how do you reconcile that? Interesting topicā¦
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Exactly. I donāt know why people are like this with 19 year olds. Heās TERRIFIC on defense. Great size, great passer. Heās got a great future.
I have no idea how you can watch these last 2 games and say heās just bad. Thereās been stretches where heās been our best player.
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FWIW I think most kids mostly adapt well regardless of ball/court/hoop dimensions and that the kids who are otherwise capable basketball players but end up w/ missing skills, itās more because they arenāt getting enough reps as opposed to the kinds of reps theyāre getting. But I can definitely imagine there being a best practice.
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Also pretty much zero off-season happened this year due to the wonky schedule. How much is he supposed to have improved in the month since the playoffs ended after being injured for most of last year? Iāll give him another year even if this one is kinda mediocre.
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Iāll just be looking for him to cut TOs and get to 30% from 3
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A lockdown defender that gave up 24 points on 11 shots to Green as the primary defender.
The youth thingā¦LaMelo, Wiggins were both younger.
I could be wrong obviously, but his shot is busted, and heās never shown any indication heāll be able to shoot.
Also - I donāt know if you watched last night, but he was pretty bad!
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