FICKS THE KNICKS
-VS-
Game Time Start: 7:00 PM EST
Where: The Fieldhouse, Indianapolis, IN
Officials: K. Mauer, K. Fitzgerald, O. Poole
Media Notes: Indiana Notes, New York Notes
Television: FOX Sports Indiana / MSG
Radio: WFNI 1070 AM / WEPN 98.7 FM
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PACERS Danny Granger - left knee tendinosis (soon, grasshopper, soon) KNICKS Marcus Camby - strained left plantar fascia (out) Rasheed Wallace - sore left foot (out) |
Mark Evans: The State of the Pacers’ Bench With no Danny Granger so far this season, the Indiana Pacers have been a little bit thinner than they originally expected. While Paul George has certainly emerged in Granger’s absence, the Indiana bench is undeniably weaker with Lance Stephenson having to fill a starting role. Despite the fact that much of the bench has been underwhelming for most of the season, the Pacers still have some time to figure out who can fit into the playoff rotation over the next couple of months. Perhaps the biggest disappointment has been Gerald Green, who was signed this offseason after providing a decent offensive spark for the Nets last season. In 31 games last year, Green averaged 18.4 points per 36 minutes on 48% shooting. Combined with his 39% from beyond the arc, a PER of 15.8 and freakish athleticism, it looked as if the Pacers were getting a nice bargain at $3.5 million per year for a backup wing who can provide some punch off the bench. Unfortunately for the Pacers, Gerald Green has regressed to resemble the player who played his way out of the league following a short stint with Dallas in 2008-09. In 43 games this season, his offensive rating is a horrendous 90, and his PER, at 7.6, is barely half of what you would expect out of an average player. He’s converting on less than 35% of his shots from the field, and a laughable 28% from three. Defensively, Green is grading slightly better than he normally does, but is still probably one of the weaker links on a strong defensive team. By no means did anyone expect Gerald Green to look like James Harden or Manu Ginobili off the bench, but hardly anyone thought he would struggle this much. It has been painful. After dealing Darren Collison, D.J. Augustin was brought into town to provide support to George Hill at point guard. While he hasn’t been as disappointing as Gerald Green, Augustin has been nothing special. Strangely enough, he is shooting almost the exact same percentage from three as he is from the field overall, at slightly over 33%. While 33% from the field is not good by any stretch, his offensive rating (106) slightly outweighs his defensive rating (104) in the limited 16 minutes per game he’s playing. His 10.5 points and 5.2 assists per 36 minutes don’t jump off the page, but he has been passable in the few minutes he gets. Plus, considering how wretched he played at the beginning of the season, the transition to mediocre has been a nice turn of events for Indiana. His size issues may always present a challenge—as we saw when Paul George fouled out against the Nets and George Hill was left helpless having to defend the bigger Joe Johnson—but the Pacers can probably get away with Augustin in the backup role when the playoffs come around. Although, if something happens to George Hill, it will be time to panic. On a more positive note, the Pacers have gotten decent work out of their two primary backup big men, Tyler Hansbrough and Ian Mahinmi. Both have embodied their starter equivalents in small ways; Hansbrough fills the rebounding void that occurs when David West leaves the floor, and Mahinmi provides rim protection when Roy Hibbert is on the bench. Both continue to be fairly limited offensively, with Hansbrough’s offensive rebounding and uncanny knack for getting to the line being the main offensive assets between the two of them. For his part, Mahinimi doesn’t do anything particularly well, but he can do a little bit of everything: finish at the rim, hit an open jumper and cut to the hoop. His bad hands continue to be his largest drawback. Basically, neither have been studs, but for a combined price of slightly over $7 million, Indiana has bigger concerns than two backup big men who have been fairly productive...CONTINUE READING AT 8p9s |
Jim Cavan: Why We Watch - Jason Kidd's Furrows Jason Kidd plays basketball with a generosity and grace that seems to elude him off the court. For all the legitimately “heady” moments strewn across 17 superlative seasons – the hundreds of big shots, a Nerds box of triple-doubles, innumerable passes threaded through vanishingly narrow angles—Jason Kidd’s game winning three- point-and-one against the Brooklyn Nets last month certainly didn’t seem to rate terribly highly. Lucky—that’s what it was. And pretty ******* stupid, too, considering that Kidd actually got away with not one, but twoleg-extending kicks on the shot— a mid-air split so graceless and ridiculous it was a wonder that his body managed to calibrate itself long enough to get off the shot—either of which could’ve easily been called the other way. Neither was, and Kidd’s illusionist gambit instead capped an 18-point, six-rebound, six-assist throwback performance that helped the Knicks remain atop the Atlantic fold and kept his onetime charges a byline below. The Nets haven't been quite the same since. So it was lucky, and stupid, but also: it was heady, and it was savvy. Jason Kidd has been at it hard enough, and has been paying his wary, laser-sighted attention long enough, to identify the rare moments when rules take a back seat to context. He understands because he’s been running these lacquer- sheen stages since a good grip of his opponents were rocking diapers and running head first into table corners. He also understands this because Jason Kidd is blessed with a real-time genius that’s both wild and weirdly structured. On the court, he thrives in the moment. Off it, those split seconds have betrayed him. Or maybe it’s the other way around. If the mercurial Melo is the Knicks’ undisputed MVP, then Jason Kidd has become arguably their most indispensable player. Game after game, the Bockers’ brow-furrowed maestro unfurls found money from his medic’s bag of tricks—pinpointperimeter swings, sneaky baseline boards, pump fake foul-draws seemingly owed to a magi’s spell. In and by so doing, he has resurrected a career that last year had become something of a gilt basketball hangover. It took him more than a decade to figure out how to shoot, which at first looked like a failure but wound up being perfectly timed to earn him five more years of NBA paychecks and springtime runs. His most oft-utilized sleight—a thespianic behind-the-arc pump fake—resulted in a scar and a fist-sized flesh knot in the span of a week earlier this year. He responded to the latter by lifting a helmet from the Rangers’ locker room and wearing it during halftime shoot-around—a kid’s reaction to the pitfalls of a kid’s game, enacted by a player more closely removed from his first Social Security check than many of his peers are from their hospital basinets. Viewers and pundits crack wise about old man moves, but their laughter, to borrow from Vonnegut, is conducted purely in self-defense. And Kidd genuinely seems to be enjoying himself, with a level of throwback production to match. If the season ended today, his 17.7 player efficiency rating (PER) would be his best in five seasons. He’s hitting at 44% from deep, one the better marks in the league and the best of his career. That .187 win shares per-48 would be his highest mark since Bill Clinton was President, and second-highest of his career. The season doesn’t end today, of course, and Kidd will have plenty of time to regress and tire and wonder if he really wants to spend the next few years getting his head caved in by Andre Drummond. For the moment, though, he is playing alarmingly and dazzlingly Jason Kidd- like basketball. It was just a few months ago, and just a few weeks after signing with the Knicks, that Kidd was been taken into police custody after getting snockered in the Hamptons and running his white, NBA-issue Cadillac Escalade straight into, wait for it, a (****ing) Cablevision telephone pole. No one was hurt, and Kidd was eventually released on his own recognizance. Rather than a public apology, all we received—NBA viewers, Knick fans, anyone who unknowingly shared those narrow roads with a blind-drunk basketball player that night— was a cynical, course-par press release stating, in so many words, “My B, y’all.” Three years and $9 million for a guy already settled into a post-retirement cocktail haze? To mentor Jeremy Lin on what, exactly, the fine points of power -guzzling Manhattans? But then the Knicks brought back Raymond Felton and Lin was cut loose and the incredulous rhetorical questions raised an octave: here was a backcourt with an eating problem and a drinking problem. Could we camp out in a Coleman tent for season tickets, or do we just have to keep fingering “refresh” on our iPhones? What had seemed a savvy and relatively low-cost signing looked abhorrent enough for Knick fans to wonder whether a Phantom-masked Isiah might be pulling strings in a Quaalude haze from a deep Garden bunker. But it wasn’t just this most recent, eminently stupid offense, committed before the ink on one of the most lucrative assistant player-coaching gigs in NBA history had soaked through James Dolan’s puffin skin paper. For Kidd’s is a past equal parts statistically quantum and personally checkered; as generous and giddily improvisational as he is on the court, Kidd has mostly been kind of a loutish wreck off of it...CONTINUE READING AT THE CLASSICAL |
Pacers Mike Wells @MikeWellsNBA Jared Wade @8pts9secs Tim Donahue @TimDonahue8p9s Tom Lewis @indycornrows |
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