bobinator said:
Still think it's wild that you bang that drum. Like at Christmas one morning Buzz woke up and was like 'oh s***, we should try letting Nebo play in the post.'
Not banging a drum at all - it was obvious if you watched the season play out. We wanted to move the ball quickly down the court and shoot a lot of 3's. Except we weren't getting good looks from 3 and were hitting at a damn near historically bad clip.
This idea that Nebo didn't "establish" himself until late in the season isn't supported by any of the game data. He was shooting 70+ % from the field through January. He was a force when he touched the ball from Game 1, he just wasn't fed the ball enough because we wanted to play a different style of offense.
Games when Nebo had 11+ shots: 4-0
Games when Nebo had < 5 shots: 2-6
Can all but guarantee that his touches reflect a similar result -- when we moved the offense through him we scored, when we didn't we struggled... and it took Buzz far too long to shift the offense to go through him.
Maybe the cause of that was planning for Starks (who could create his own shot) to be on the roster. Maybe the cause of that was Nebo's preseason injury that put into question his durability as the offensive centerpiece. But it was undeniably obvious we didn't go through him early, and started to go through him late and that's when the 3 point shooting stopped being embarrassing.