lipoli390 wrote:khans2k5 wrote:It's not laughable to criticize a guy who let his man go 8/8 for 20 points at one point in the game. 4 blocks doesn't cover that up. 33 points is great. Doesn't look as great when you give 20 of them back to a guy who would normally be scoring 10-12. KAT deserves credit for stepping up in the 4th quarter, but it makes you realize how much easier these games would be if he could do that for 4 quarters. The more times his defense is completely absolved because of his offense, the less likely he'll care to fix it.
It's OK to criticize a player, even if he has a great night. But the level of negativity did make me laugh -- hence it was laughable to me. KAT's 33 points, 19 rebounds, 4 blocks and a +17 for the night (highest among the Wolves players) makes the level of criticism aimed at KAT last night look silly to me. I got a special kick out of Drew's post at the end of the game about KAT being oblivious about how to box out and giving Adams too many rebounds in the face of KAT's 19 boards and the fact that Adams had 8 boards, which is slightly under his average so far this season. KAT has frustrating lapses defensively at times, which is really all Drew was getting at. But obviously KAT did a lot of boxing out and actually dominated Adams on the boards. That's what made me laugh.
I hadn't checked the boxscore and didn't realize how many boards KAT had, so that's admittedly my bad. But I stand by my general point that KAT still failed to control Adams down low defensively as well as he should have. Part of it really is not holding position very well against him, but after skimming through the game again on League Pass, what I noticed is that Adams most often beat KAT when KAT was watching the ball handler and anticipating or reacting to a pick. The last couple games, the major problem I saw was that KAT wasn't showing at all on the pick, basically just letting the ball handler drive the lane. Last night, it's like he was aware he needed to show more, but hesitated, and then got caught between committing to stopping the ball handler and staying with Adams, and that's when the ball handler often found Adams open or successfully drove around KAT. You can see this happen a few times in the highlights, particularly in the second half.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmvXsps12hw
Don't get me wrong, these highlights also hammer home how skilled Towns is at scoring, particularly off the dribble. And there's no way anybody is going to stop all of these plays. Westbrook or George and Adams in a pick and roll is hard to stop. But I think it's fair to expect better defense from him on more than a couple of these plays. He's got to commit. Show hard and stop the ball handler and prevent him from hitting the rolling big, or stick with the big and make the ball handler finish in traffic at the rim. But getting caught in the middle just gives the opponents too many opportunities to score, particularly by hitting the rolling big.
