173. What another brutal loss exposed about the Lakers

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a good start. Another mostly predictable Lakers disaster tonight. We're gonna spend a few minutes talking about that game. I don't want to spend too much time on it, just simply because the Lakers do not deserve to be discussed at length with the product they're putting on the floor. But we are going to touch on that for a little bit. I wanted to dive into the Yokichen bead battle tonight, which I thought was super interesting on a bunch of different levels. And then if you guys stick

around for the end. I have some thoughts on the Milwaukee Bucks and some really interesting stats from this them this year that concerned me about whether or not they can repeat as champions. So let's start with the Lakers. So again, there's a huge difference between like being big and playing big, because we've talked about at length that the Lakers don't have size at any of the positions

that they needed to succeed at the NBA level. It's hilarious tonight to watch the Raptors bully them physically and to have their big audible to be Here comes DJ Augustine, Here comes Avery Bradley, Here comes Carmelo Anthony. This is how we're gonna throw the curveball to try to hang with your freakishly athletic lineups. But that's the reality of their predicament. But it goes deeper than that, because you know, the Lakers are obviously not able of They're not capable

of hanging with the Raptors physically. That goes without saying. However, they're capable of hanging with them more than they did in the early phases of that game, which brings me to an ancient basketball idea that is debated at all levels. It's the concept of being big versus playing big, because there's a way to play bigger than your size, and

it has a lot to do with your physicality. We've all seen this if you've been involved with sports at any level, even if it's baseball, if it's football, if it's basketball, you've all seen that freakishly large athlete that looks like a grown men amongst boys. That doesn't make any sense, but for whatever reason, he's just not as good as he's supposed to be. Maybe he's passive, maybe he doesn't like the physicality. I played high school football and basketball. I saw a little bit of both. I

saw it in the college level as well. You'd see guys that have great physical tools, but for whatever reason, there's just something missing with their aggression and it leads to them playing smaller than they are. And then you'll see the exact opposite. You'll see a guy like Draymond Green or a guy like p J. Tucker. You'll see a guy like past like Fred van Fred van Fleet is an awesome example of this, a guy who's incredibly undersized and lacks almost everything that you would consider to

be NBA tools for the position. But he's a great defensive player and a great offensive player in the NBA. It's a testament to the fact that he plays bigger than he actually is and his work ethic and everything that comes along with that. But the Lakers are have a team full of guys that, in addition to being small, also play small. You know, like Malik Monk. He's six three and he's very athletic, but he's thin and wiring, and he doesn't do great in how eye contact situations.

You know, Carmelo Anthony, because of his lack of foot speed, he's gonna struggle against bigger athletes as well. Even though he has some size, he's going to struggle in a lot of those matchups because his lack of foot speed causes him to play small. They went with when in Gabriel as an audible at one point in the game to try to get some size and athleticism on the court. He played really hard, he battled, but he's thin and wiry and he's not a super physical player, so he's

gonna struggle in a lot of those settings. And so what you saw there was a combination of a massive physical match, physical mismatch in conjunction with the Lakers team that has really shied away from the physical areas of the game all season long. It's been a huge problem for them. It's manifested in a ton of different ways. They've had rebounding issues all season. They've had defensive issues all season, even when they've had their bigger personnel on

the floor. It's something we've all been critical of with Anthony Davis from time to time. He can float in and out of games and not play as big as he is. It's been an issue with the roster, and I'm not surprised at all that it manifested the way

it did tonight with the Raptors. The other thing I wanted to talk about with the Raptors that I think is really interesting, and this is an issue that goes deeper because it has a lot to do with the problems that I have with advanced metrics and the way that the very very smart statistical analysts that work in the league, the way that they try to portray data to us. Because what you saw tonight from the Raptors was one of the most impressive bits of defensive pressure

that I have ever seen. And they've always been like this. They've been like this for as long as I can remember, with Nick Nurse at the Helm and with and with Massi Eugeria as the general manager, with the guys that he's brought into this franchise, and the way that that's led to a specific type of on court product. But from the time the ball is thrown up in the air, they are in your jersey. There is nothing that is easy. No one is ever comfortable. And that's that's what I

always talked about. There's a difference between being on a player and having your arm extended and playing a little bit of defense. But there's a difference between that and literally making that person uncomfortable, getting into getting up underneath underneath them, making every single dribble, every single swing pass, even just bringing the ball up the floor becomes a royal pain in the ass. And when you set that

tone from the opening tip, it makes everybody uncomfortable. It causes teams to not shoot well, it causes teams to have turnovers, it causes a dip in confidence. It's a huge part of what has made the Raptors so successful over the years, and it's a credit to them. You know, Laker fans all the time will say things like, oh, so and so is come into town, he's gonna shoot, He's gonna shoot better than he has all season, or like that. You know, every star plays their best game

against the Lakers, and that's not a coincidence. A lot of times fans have a way of convincing themselves that is related to luck, like oh we got bad luck Gary Trent Jr. Shooting really well tonight, or oh we got really bad luck, Kyle Lowry's going off again, or whatever it might be. It's never that it's not luck.

The reason why players have good games has a lot to do with how comfortable they are, and if you come out with a lack of defensive pressure, if they bring up the ball, if they bring the ball up the floor with no ball pressure, if they throw swing passes with no resistance, if there's very little physicality, if there if you can run a if you can set a down screen or cut through the lane and there's nobody throwing a forearm shiver in your chest as you're

coming through the lane, or if no one's really fighting through the screen, you just operate at a level of comfort and confidence in the game that leads to you having a big night. Those things are very much related

to each other. And what Toronto did tonight is make the Lakers feel really uncomfortable from the start and exposed them as a team that had a lack of fundamentals, which is something I talked about last night, because how do you handle that When a team comes at you with a ton of size and athleticism and a ton of defensive pressure. The only way to counter that is to play incredibly fundamentally sound basketball. Every past needs to involve a past fake. Every cut needs to involve a

V cut where you fake cutting the other direction. Every screen, you have to set your man up. Everything that you do on the floor has to be so fundamentally sound in order to counter what the super athletics, super high pressure team is doing. And the Lakers are not that team. They were obviously gonna fold under that kind of pressure.

It was a very predictable outcome. So bottom line, I just want to throw shout outs to the Toronto Raptors because they play basketball in a way that I think is highly It's it's very underestimated by NBA fans in a lot of different ways. People will look at that roster and be like, how does Pascal siakam and and Fred van Vleet hang with all of the best star duos that we have in the league. And that's the reason why they are a good basketball team from the

top to the bottom. From mass mass Eu Jerry bringing it. Look at their wings and all the guys they have between six seven and six nine that can run up and down floor compared to what the Lakers have, which is basically Lebron James. And when you and Gabriel and Stanley Johnson and Stanley Johnson's closer to six five and he is to six seven. So I the massugery has done a great job. Nick Nurse has done a great job. And then the players in that locker room are so

bought into that system. They compete and they deserve They went out there and they whoop the Lakers asked tonight and they very much deserved it. Last note on the Lakers before we move on. The Lakers are in a lot more danger than people realize of missing the plan. Now.

I know everyone wants to talk about, you know, Brandon Ingram's injury, and the Zion Williams situation is Zion Williamson situation and C. J. Mccollumn and the fact that the Pelicans are trending downwards and you look at a team like the Spurs and you're like, there's no way they're coming back, right, But the Lakers only have a two and a half game lead on the eleven seat, And if you look at their schedule and you look at the type of basketball they're playing, it's really difficult to

see where the winds are coming from. And so yes, they only have to be better than those teams, but those teams are probably more likely to manufacture wins over the course of the next month than the Lakers are. That's a real concern. They might by the time Anthony Davis comes back, they could very well be entirely out

of the playoff picture. Now. I would imagine if you gave a bunch of truth serum to those guys, they'd probably be fine with that, because I don't judging by the product that we're seeing on the floor night in night out, especially in this back to back, these two ugly, ugly losses, they don't seem to be very interested in being here to begin with. But there's real danger here.

There's a lot of like, there's a lot of I see a sentiment coming from Laker fans that they think, oh, the there's nothing that could happen that could cause them to miss the play, and I completely disagree. I think that the Lakers are very much headed in that direction. They only will continue to play better teams as time goes on, and they're not playing good enough basketball to even stay remotely competitive with these guys. Is and Lebron

just can't can't just drop fifty every night, Okay. As as a matter of fact, the Lakers are completely winless since the All Star Break and games where Lebron doesn't drop fifty, So that doesn't bode well for this whole scenario. That's all I have for the Lakers. They don't deserve to get any more discussion tonight. So let's move on to the Nuggets sixers. So there's a couple of different ways to look at this, and I want I want to be clear upfront because these topics get conflated often

when we're debating and beat verse Yokich. The m v P discussion is very separate from the discussion of which player is better. Okay, because the best player in the league doesn't win m v P every year. That's just never has been how it works. The m v P discussion is very different than what happened in this game. They're way too often in NBA history will take a head to head match up and use it to determine the outcome of a of a m v P race when that they play ad two games. That's really silly.

That's a silly way to do it. For instance, I thought Yoki was not I thought Ebat outplayed Kich tonight, but I think Yoki very much deserves should be the m v P. Will get to that in a second, But the point is is these these topics have to be approached separately. Yokis, to me, is the runaway m v P. If you look at those two teams and you look at the talent between the two of them, even though mb might be a better player, you could make that argument. I wouldn't make that argument, but you

could make that argument. In terms of what the m v P race always has entailed, Yokich is a much stronger MVP candidate the Nuggets this season. Coming into tonight, we're sixteen point eight points better with Yoki on the floor than with him off. Now that's not what happened tonight. Ironically, they were minus nine in the Yokich minutes, and they were plus thirteen in the minutes when Yokis was off. The floor is a weird game. Bones Highland got outrageously hot.

He hit three gigantic three's in the fourth quarter. All of them were tough. There was one that he hit from the logo, there was one he hid in transition, and then the one the the key one at the end of the game, the what amounted to the game winner.

He was literally up against the shot clock. He released it with about a tenth of a second left, just a huge shot from Bones Highland, and then uh Jamichael Green made a bunch of huge plays down the stretch at a couple of mid range jumpers that were huge. It was an interesting game in the sense that lesser players for the Nuggets made plays that shifted the outcome of the game, even though Embiid played better than your kids.

But it's funny to see those two teams juxtaposed against each other, to see the difference in the talent, because you can kind of see, like, you know, Aaron Gordon is a is a vaguely similar player to a Tobias Harris, right, like a highly paid wing that definitely is an offensively skilled enough to be a number one option, but brings defensive versatility and if you attack specific matchups with him, he's gonna have success and on any given night he

can give you a thirty. That's the Aaron Aaron Gordon versus Tobias Harris type of dynamic. But outside of that, it's a complete like train wreck of talent difference between the two teams. You've got James Harden on the perimeter, who's at a whole other stratosphere of a player than any of the guards who play for Denver. You've got Tyrese Maxie, who is like basically a much more developed

and established pro version of Bones Highland. You know, a young, super talented guard, but that's just further along in his development and much more consistent. You look at a guy like Matisse Thybel, he's a better defensive player than anybody on the Denver roster. You take him over Jeff Green

in a heartbeat. When you're really looking at it, there's a giant chasm and talent and when you look at what Yokich has been able to do this year with that team, he has to be the m v P in my in my opinion, there's no way around it at this point. And when you a factor in the hard and trade here at the end, I think that just kind of puts the nail in the coffin. Maybe not necessarily fair that and be getting more talent is it is a demerit to him, but that's just kind

of the way it works. Unfortunately, that's the way it works. I think Yokis deserves to win the m v P. What's so funny about it, though, is even though I very much think that Yokis deserves to be be the m v P, he's playing bad basketball right now by his standards relative to what he was playing the rest of the season. He is starting to really struggle in this recent stretch of games because he's been going against

more athleticism and better defensive teams. Dove into the tape of the his last two matchups against Toronto and against Golden State, and he really really struggled with the length that those teams have. Those teams are big, with the tons of athletic wings they fly around in rotations, they play passing lanes, and you're seeing a guy like Nicola Yokich, who's one of the best passers to ever set foot on an NBA court, who has incredible court vision, throwing

the ball away all over the place. It's like he couldn't even see matistible half the time on the floor tonight, he wasn't seeing the floor and it was bizarre. You could see Yokis get flustered by the size and athleticism of these teams. I saw, literally, I saw Kavan Looney completely locked Yokis down at the end of the Golden State Warriors game and forced him into a ton of turnovers and crunch time. You know, Yokich is still amazing. He's gonna make crazy shots. He made some crazy shots

at the end of the game against the Warriors. He made some He made an absolute wild falling out of bounds, leaning floater thing over and beat Today, yoki is incredible. I'm not trying to undercut him by any stretch of the imagination, but what you've seen in this last week is some limitations for him when he faces some real size and athleticism, which is exactly what happened in the bubble when he ran into Lebron and Anthony Davis and Dwight Howard and that Lakers team that was flying around

in rotation. All of a sudden, the same Yokich that was picking the Clippers apart was struggling against that Laker defense. And I think that's where I digress from most of the Yoki hype. I very much think he is the m v P, but I think we got way out in front of ourselves with this Yoki is the best player in the world business. I think I could say the same thing with them Beat. Both of those guys

have played well enough in the last two seasons. Both of them are I think Yokis was Yokis one MVP last year and Beat was an m VP candidate last year. Yoki is gonna win this year and Beat is an MVP candidate again this year. They both are playing some of the best regular season basketball that we can see. But I've seen a lot of limitations from them in in recent weeks that remind me of why I have guys like Janice, like Lebron, like Kevin Durant ahead of them.

A huge part of it is their foot speed all over the all over the court. In this last week, when Yokis R. And b get caught under the basket after some sort of miss, teams are making Philly and Denver pay just by sprinting down the floor and beating Yokis are too slow to hang in the foot race when the when the the collective foots beat of their opponent is fast enough to make them pay for having a slow player on the floor. You're not doing that

to Kevin Durant. You're not doing that to Janna's antenna compo. You're not doing that to Lebron James. Now, Nicola Yokich, he's this amazing playmaker, which is something that you guys know, I value so much, But he doesn't have that same level of individual offensive ability that you see from those top level guys, and and Bead has all that individual

offensive ability, but he doesn't have the playmaking side. These guys have some pretty gaping holes for guys that are being loosely thrown around in that best player in the World conversation. I love them both. I enjoyed watching that game tonight. It was it was like a vintage Battle of the Bigs. They both had success scoring on each other.

They both had defensive success on each other. But I think we need to remember that there's a difference between that type, that archetype of player, and that all world super versatile forward that Kevin Durant, the Lebron, the janna Us, the guy that can guard all five positions, that can initiate everything from the perimeter, that can hang in a foot race, and that can do all of the things

that those guys do. That will always. There may be a point in the future where the size advantages of those guys become so valuable that maybe it swings the pendulum. But for right now, you're best putting your money with those big wings. Those are the guys that are controlling the outcomes in the league today. I think we got a little ahead of ourselves with our you know, worshiping the bigs. Al Right, before we get out of here tonight, I wanted to talk about that Bucks game against the Jazz.

So first of all, I do not care that they beat the Jazz. As you guys know, I think the Jazz are frauds. The Jazz are the textbook example of a regular season win producing machine. They have a bunch of offensive minded perimeter players in one All World All Universe defensive player. So in the regular season, when teams can't game plan as much, you can run a basic scheme where you have your offensive minded players just chase guys off the three point line and funnel everybody to

Rudy Gobert and that works great. And then on the offensive end, because other defenses aren't as dialed in, those limited offensive players can create enough offense to be a productive NBA team, but they do not have that superstar offensive player and their defense gets utterly exposed in the postseason when they can game plan and expose them for being a weak perimeter defense team. This is what happened

with the Clippers in last year's playoffs. The The Clippers literally hung a one thirty offensive rating on the Utah Jazz despite them being one of the best defenses in the league, because they spread them out, got Rudy Gobert out of the paint. And they understood too that if Rudy helped, all they had to do was do one extra rotation with the ball and have Rudy rotate out to the perimeter. All of a sudden, no one was

under the basket. Guys could get to the paint Jordan Clarkson, Mike Conley, Boon Bogdanovich, these Bogdon Bodonovitch, these guys are not great defensive players and they don't have any were near as much defensive talent on the perimeter as any of the other contenders. I think they're fraud So good nice job for the Bucks tonight to get that win. But I just wanted to frame that with this because I'm worried about the Bucks on a couple of different levels.

The Bucks are eighteen in defense. Since the New Year, they had a defensive rating of one five point eight against Golden State one fifty six point five in the third quarter when Golden State went on their run to bump the lead from single digits up to twenty. And so we're starting to have some really big red flags surrounding their defense, which is something that is a perennial

all like. It's one of the most consistent themes in NBA history is if you're not a top ten defense, you cannot win an NBA championship unless you have an otherworldly talent advantage, meaning if you don't have Steph Clay, K D and Draymond, or if you don't have Shack and Kobe. You're not If you don't have a che malaje Uan at the top height of his powers with m J sitting on his couch, then you're not winning the title. If you don't have a top ten defense.

That is just an established truth in NBA history. And the Bucks do not have a top ten defense, and in fact, they're getting worse as time is going on. And before they went into Utah tonight, they laid another egg against Golden State. So I wanted to dig into their defense a little bit and see what's going on and see if it's something that I thought was rectifiable. So, first of all, they're great at defending the paint. They're one of the best paint defenses in the league. They're

great at rebounding. They're great at defensive rebounding, which is a huge part of defense. They're great in transition defense, they don't commit fouls. They do everything really well defensively, except they lead the league in three pointers made a loud per game. They give up twenty plus wide open threes per game according to NBA dot Com and what which leads the entire NBA. And this is what's crazy about that stats. So they're giving up more wide open threes,

meaning the defenders at least six ft away. They're giving up more wide open threes than anybody in the NBA. But amongst opponents wide open three point percentage, they have the third lowest, meaning even though they're giving up a ton of wide open threes, they're not even making them.

Opponents are shooting just thirty five point five per cent on wide open threes against the Bucks, So their defense is even worse than what the results would show you because giving up that many wide open threes, especially the NBA competition, allows teams to get in a rhythm and start making shots. But for whatever reason, they just haven't made shots against them this year. And there's a couple of things that come into that. Part of it is

defensive scheme. Budden holes has always been huge, unpacking the paint. This is what drives me nuts about everyone saying, oh, brook Lo Brook Lopez is coming back, that's gonna fix everything. The paint is not the issue. They're having no issues controlling the paint. Defensively, they are guarding the three point line. So some of this is championship hangover. It's normal after you get the trophy. To not want it as bad as the other twenty nine teams in the league. That

can lead to some slippage. That's that disease of more, that thing that pat Riley used always talking about. It's all the stuff that we've always talked about about defending champions That's why it's so hard to repeat in the n B. A part of it is the fact that they have the sixth fastest pace in the league, so they play so fast, and when teams play up and down the floor, defense is usually the first thing to go as they fatigue, they're struggling with rotations, they're not

getting around to the perimeter. So the question becomes, can this team win the championship? Now, I saw in that fourth quarter tonight them really lock in and make things extremely difficult on Utah. So we saw an example of the switch being flipped tonight. But like I always say, that's why defensive writing is a great indicator of a team's overall effort. Is the switch getting flipped the usual

occurrence or is it the outlier occurrence? And the numbers tell us that that fourth quarter against the Jazz tonight was an outlier more often than not this season, and They've tried to tap into that and it hasn't been there. So the Bucks have to understand the urgency of the situation.

They have about a month's worth of games here to try to establish the defensive identity that they let slip away, and if they don't, they're gonna lose, because if they give up twenty plus wide open threes to a team like the Miami Heat, or to a team like the Philadelphia seventy sixers, or god forbid, a team like the Brooklyn Nets, they're gonna lose. Even if Janice is Janice, even if Chris Middleton's Chris Middleton, and even if Drew Holidays Drew Holiday. They have to fix that. It's a

huge problem. Everything in NBA history tells us that that's a massive indicator of a team's limitation in their pursuit of a championship, and it's serious for them now. They have to solve this problem over the course of the next month. All right, guys, that is all I have for tonight. I sincerely appreciate your guys support as always, especially you like your fans, for hanging with us through this complete and utter travesty of a season. Your support

means the world to me. The Lakers play on Wednesday the I believe the game starts at five Pacific Standard time, so it's a little bit earlier, but we'll be going live right after the final buzzer. As always, I appreciate your guys sport, and I'll see you in a couple of days. The volume