As was addressed by Dave in the most recent mailbag and repeatedly recently and not so recently throughout the site, LaMarcus Aldridge has clearly not been a big 4th quarter weapon for us, despite being our 2nd leading scorer for the past two years.  Despite averaging 18.1 ppg last year, LaMarcus averaged a measly 2.9 ppg in the 4th quarters as compared to 6 ppg in the 1st quarters of games.  However, it's been pointed out in responses that big men have a harder time scoring the 4th, so LaMarcus's 4th quarter production (or lack thereof) should be expected.  This explanation just smacked too much of truthiness to me, so I figured it was worth investigating just how unusual LA's dip in production in the 4th is.

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It seems that ever since a certain former European league MVP stormed into the Blazer team this past year, that we've been constantly bombarded with comparisons to another former European league MVP who plays for the San Antonio Spurs.  These comparisons drive me insane, because, aside from being white SGs who played in Europe, there is almost no similarity to either their games, or their situations.  In hopes of lessening the onslaught of these comparisons, I thought I'd take a second to punch holes in some of the most common axioms in this debate.

First off, though, I want to explicitly say that I don't mean to argue that Manu or Rudy are better than the other, just that they are two completely different players in two completely different situations.  Saying they're very similar or in similar siutations would be no different than saying that Reggie Miller and Clyde Drexler were very similar players.

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Well, after 1200 comments or so in the last two trade drawers, largely dominated by discussions of a certain Grizzlies point guard, I thought we should mix it up a little bit.  For everyone dying for more Conley-Bayless debate, I suggest going here, but let's try and limit this to non-Conley related topics for this post, at least.

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I might need a little leeway here, because I'm a little buzzed in my attempt to drown my sorrows away from this last Blazer loss.  I've been thinking this ever since about the second quarter of the game, though, so bear with me, and hopefully the spelling will be tolerable.

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After reading through a fanpost about the Blazers road record against the top west team being roughly equally as bad as every other team at the top of the west, I thought I'd investigate it further.  For me, the problem hasn't seemed to be that we've just been losing, but that we've been getting regularly blown out early in non-competitive games, as opposed to keeping it close throughout, which I'd assume the other "vet" teams have done.  Along those lines, using the game flows at popcornmachine.net, I decided to waste an hour going through each western conference team's road games and look at the max lead, max deficit, and final point differential, to get an idea of whether we've been more or competitive than other team's on the road.  Here's the data, with some snap analysis.  Enjoy.

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   Ever since reading the CelticsBlog thread that Norsktroll linked to in one of the posts yesterday and reading basically all of the Celtics fans call everyone who questions KG's behavior a sniveling whiner, I've been trying to grasp what bothered me so much about the barking incident.  For the most part, I have no issue with KG being fired up, talking trash, etc., but the Bayless incident is just such a different beast from that, and then it hit me as to the huge double standard being applied to KG right now in terms of the "taunting" technical call and the parallels of what's going on with him right now and what happened to Sheed around the turn of century.

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You knew this was coming, just thought I'd jump the gun on it.  Let me preface it by saying a couple things.  First off, the feasibility of this trade rests entirely on two assumptions: 1. Toronto continues to implode this year and misses the playoffs, causing Bosh to publicly say something about being traded or leaving in 2010, and 2. LMA manages to explode over the rest of the season, getting his number up to something like 20 and 8 (so he'll be more valuable to Toronto).  Anything less than those two happening would make this pretty one-sided.

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With all these "toughness" and "experience" posts up recently, I'm surprised no one's mentioned this yet.  I ran into it on basketbawful a couple days back and Henry reposted it, so I assume a fair number of you have seen it.  It's an article Bill Russell wrote for SI in 1965 about the psychology of basketball.  It's long, but it's a fascinating read.  Here's the link:

http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1077812/index.htm

He talks about a lot of veteran tricks, but specifically, I think a couple things he touches on have really impacted us in the past couple years.  First is his point about playing and staying on an even keel regardless.  He mentions a lot of little tricks he used to pull to throw guys off their game in some way that he accumulated over the years.  Here is where a lack of experience hurts us.  Watching the blazers last year, it only really felt like a few guys were absolutely sure that they belonged on an NBA court at all times: Roy, Joel, Blake and Jones.  The rest of the team, in particular Webs and TO definitely seemed to go through stretches where they were working hard out there, but maybe just were lacking that belief in themselves.  Watching both of their body language when they were hitting was so markedly different from their bad games.  Both guys clearly reveled in their good games, and kinda moped a little in their bad games.  I love seeing these guys display emotion when they're playing well, but it seemed at times like if they weren't on fire, they could allow themselves to get taken out of the game.  I'd just like to see both of them not let their confidence get so affected if their first few shots don't go down.  More of a problem for Webs, but TO definitely had some of those games.  Jack looked similar at times, which I think led to him pressing and hence the turnovers.   Sergio was so clearly distraught with his shot throughout the season that he wasn't even willing to take layups when he got the chance.

The other guy who I think this really applies to is LA, although more to do with his evolution as a player throughout the season.  At the start of the year, it was pretty clear that guys were willing to let him shoot 18 footers a fair amount of the time, and while LA shoots a great % on those, it would give opposing bigs a couple advantages.  First, they'd have to work way less on defense since they weren't banging, and second, it kept them out of foul trouble.  It felt like the shots came so easy of Lamarcus that he'd allow some early physicality in the paint to keep him mostly shooting jumpers outside, and no matter how good a shooter he is, layups, short hooks and FTs will always be higher % than 18 footers.  He improved tremendously on this by the end of the year, essentially, as Russell says in the article, playing his game without letting the opposing defenders dictate where he would get his shots from.  I have high hopes for Lamarcus next year because of this progression.

Finally, a little OT for the rest of the post, but going to something Russell says in the article, there's really only one definition of toughness: playing to win as hard as you can regardless of what's going on in the game or what your opponent is doing.   Not falling for mind games, not letting physical play throw you off your game, not getting drawn into stupid mano a mano pissing contests with a player on the other team.  This is why, in my eyes, the spurs are one of the toughest teams in the league.  Yeah, they flop, they complain to the refs, but no matter how many calls manu and parker are or aren't getting, they're still taking it to the rack, and when the ball's in play, they're focused on nothing but basketball, how it should be.

EDIT: To clarify, I never meant to say that any of our guys wasn't playing hard in the season, just that as an NBA player, if doubt creeps into your mind, your entire game will be off.  The best players never have this doubt.  Webster, TO, and LA just seemed to have a smidgen of doubt in their games at times last year.