the KHLOE KARDASHIAN & LAMAR ODOM thread!
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Zach Lowe ‏ @ZachLowe_SI
Odom is famous and on reality TV and stuff, but he is a very minor symptom of a much larger issue in Dallas.
Zach Lowe ‏ @ZachLowe_SI
Dallas is not 23rd in points per possession because of Lamar Odom. He didn't help, but problems are just much deeper.
Zach Lowe ‏ @ZachLowe_SI
Odom is famous and on reality TV and stuff, but he is a very minor symptom of a much larger issue in Dallas.
Zach Lowe ‏ @ZachLowe_SI
Dallas is not 23rd in points per possession because of Lamar Odom. He didn't help, but problems are just much deeper.
I agree. Yes Lamar had a sucky season with the Mavs but Lamar doesn't make the team all by himself. From the few Mavs games I've seen all of the team is having issues, not just him. It's ridiculous that people are placing full blame on him.
Monday Musings: Mavericks’ failures this season go beyond Lamar Odom
The Mavericks essentially deactivated Lamar Odom for the rest of the season. (Glenn James/NBAE/Getty Images)
Lamar Odom is famous because he is on some awful reality show and once served as a hugely valuable member of multiple title teams. So his failure this season with the Mavericks, culminating with their’ decision Monday to essentially deactivate him, will be viewed as a crucial reason for their demise if they lose in the first round of the playoffs — assuming they even get there.
Odom was a disaster this season, out of shape and out of sorts, but he wasn’t even supposed to be part of the plan. He was a gift, a “what the heck?” bit of good luck on the trade market, and the attention to his failures has masked all the other reasons Dallas has regressed as a scoring team to the point that it ranks 23rd in points per possession — with no signs of improvement coming.
Last season, the Mavs made important structural changes to their offense, adjustments that fit their personnel and recognized the team’s age. They transformed themselves from a mid-range team into one that took a ton of three-point shots, open perimeter looks they got by running multiple pick-and-roll combinations, spacing the floor well and whipping the ball around the court with precision. They finished with the eighth-best offense in the league, and then, remarkably, they improved by about three points per 100 possessions in the playoffs — when offense generally drops — and blew the doors off everyone they faced.
No team assisted on a higher percentage of its field-goal tries. Only the Magic shot the ball more efficiently in the last eight seconds of the shot clock, per 82games.com, evidence of how well the Mavs moved the ball and players until a defense finally broke. Only five teams got a higher percentage of their shots in those final eight seconds, evidence of how important patience was to Dallas’ scoring success. Only San Antonio and New York attempted more corner three-pointers, a shot for which Dallas showed no real affection until last season.
The Mavs didn’t get to the free-throw line all that much, had little use for offensive rebounds and turned the ball over at an average rate. In short: Other than Dirk Nowitzki post-ups and the mid-range shots that remained (mostly for Dirk and Jason Terry), Dallas relied almost entirely on getting a good first look near the rim or from three-point range, and making it.
For reasons well beyond Odom’s failure, the Mavs have been unable to function this way in 2011-12. Even more damaging, there is no fall-back plan on an aging team with no consistent off-the-dribble creator on the perimeter. Odom is a decent creator and absolutely could have helped, had he showed up ready to compete at a high level. The Mavs, at the very least, need a backup power forward capable of keeping the offense afloat when Nowitzki sits, and coach Rick Carlisle showed creativity in fitting Odom amid intriguing super-big lineups in which he was essentially the small forward.
It was a risk worth taking, and it didn’t work. But the Mavs’ issues go far beyond Odom’s.
Rodrigue Beaubois was supposed to fill the role as a go-to perimeter creator. He has advanced in small increments, but he does not get to the rim as often as J.J. Barea did, he is not as accomplished a passer and his outside shooting — 28 percent from three-point range — remains a liability that hurts the Mavs’ precious spacing. Delonte West helped early, but injuries to his hand and ankle have stunted his progress, and his game has always featured more step-back 15-footers than at-the-rim drives and dishes. Pairing Beaubois and Jason Terry, intended to be a facsimile of the dangerous Barea/Terry little-man duo, improved Dallas’ offense in the 685 minutes they’ve shared, but it hasn’t been enough to change the larger picture. Using West and Terry together has been a disaster, and teaming Jason Kidd with just about anyone has been hard to watch.
Kidd long ago evolved into a spot-up shooter assigned to hit open three-pointers and pick apart defenses with passing from beyond the three-point arc. But that evolution might have passed a breaking point. Nearly 82 percent of Kidd’s field-goal tries this season have been threes, up from about 65 percent last season. His assists per minute have reached a career low by a huge margin, and his increase in turnovers has sabotaged what remains of Dallas’ transition game. The Mavs rank 29th in points per possession on fast-break chances, per Synergy Sports. Kidd was at least a nominal threat to do something other than shoot threes last season, but he has not been this season. His passing, always a step ahead of rotating defenses, is less valuable now that Dallas’ spot-up shooting game is less dangerous.
The Mavs have redistributed a significant chunk of their three-point attempts — about 1.5 per game — from the corner to other areas, and they miss the spot-up brilliance of Peja Stojakovic and the version of DeShawn Stevenson that showed up last season.
Teams can generate good looks without an All-Star type on the perimeter if they have an explosive big-man finisher to use on pick-and-rolls, but Brendan Haywood is not in Tyson Chandler’s league in that sense. Dallas has suffered more on offense for its decision to let Chandler go and stock up on cap space this summer. Chandler shot nearly 70 percent on three attempts per game last season out of pick-and-rolls and cuts, and when defenses fouled him, he made them pay by morphing into a league-average foul shooter. Haywood has attempted only about 1.5 shots per game from pick-and-rolls and cuts, and he is simply not a threat to catch the ball from 10 feet out and do something productive with it. He is slow and needs time to gather himself after catching, and in that time, his defender can recover well enough to either contest a shot effectively or foul. Haywood has shot just 46 percent from the line, and that’s actually an improvement over last season.
The Mavs feasted last season by using Chandler on the pick-and-roll and stationing Nowitzki along the perimeter as an outlet. Such action removed a big man (Nowitzki’s defender) from the paint and spared Nowitzki some of the shot-creation burden. Though Dallas has tried to approximate it using Brandan Wright and Ian Mahinmi along with Haywood, it cannot approximate last season’s results.
Nowitzki is still hugely effective in the post and as a pick-and-pop threat so dangerous that defenders often stay glued to him, opening driving lanes for the Mavs’ guards. But those guards haven’t been able to do as much with those driving lanes this season, and even when they can, the shooting around them is not as deadly. Even Shawn Marion’s off-ball cutting, an alternative way of creating space for a non-shooter (see Avery Bradley in Boston), has dropped off over the course of the season, along with his post game, perhaps the result of cumulative fatigue from defending so many star point guards early.
Bottom line: The video tape and numbers — literally almost any kind of numbers you might choose — indicate a total system failure. The Mavs have dropped from first in assist rate to middle of the pack, suggesting that the easy buckets at the rim and the open threes just aren’t there. They still get a disproportionate number of field-goal attempts in the last four seconds of the shot clock, but they rank as one of the league’s dozen worst-shooting teams on such attempts, per 82games.com. And try as he might, Carlisle just hasn’t been able to find enough lineups and player pairings — super-big, super-small, whatever — that work consistently.
Mixing and matching is key on an aging team, especially one that has suffered short-term injuries to so many key players this season. Only the Nets, Bobcats, Nuggets, Hornets and Raptors have played their most common five-man unit fewer minutes than Dallas has played its No. 1 minutes-logging group. Few teams have played so many units at least 30 minutes combined, suggesting that Carlisle and his staff have tinkered more than most.
The Mavs will probably make the playoffs because the hardest part of their schedule is over and they have tiebreakers already in hand over all four teams right around them in the Western Conference standings (Utah, Phoenix, Denver and Houston). Things could get very dicey if the Mavs don’t do well in their next three games, against the Warriors, Kings and Trail Blazers, but they should still sneak in as the No. 7 or No. 8 seed.
That will be disappointing for the defending champions, especially because it would mean a meeting with either San Antonio or Oklahoma City. Odom’s play didn’t help, but it is just one of many factors contributing to the root cause of Dallas’ decline.
http://nba-point-forward.si.com/201...amar-odom-for-mavericks-failures-this-season/
The Mavericks essentially deactivated Lamar Odom for the rest of the season. (Glenn James/NBAE/Getty Images)
Lamar Odom is famous because he is on some awful reality show and once served as a hugely valuable member of multiple title teams. So his failure this season with the Mavericks, culminating with their’ decision Monday to essentially deactivate him, will be viewed as a crucial reason for their demise if they lose in the first round of the playoffs — assuming they even get there.
Odom was a disaster this season, out of shape and out of sorts, but he wasn’t even supposed to be part of the plan. He was a gift, a “what the heck?” bit of good luck on the trade market, and the attention to his failures has masked all the other reasons Dallas has regressed as a scoring team to the point that it ranks 23rd in points per possession — with no signs of improvement coming.
Last season, the Mavs made important structural changes to their offense, adjustments that fit their personnel and recognized the team’s age. They transformed themselves from a mid-range team into one that took a ton of three-point shots, open perimeter looks they got by running multiple pick-and-roll combinations, spacing the floor well and whipping the ball around the court with precision. They finished with the eighth-best offense in the league, and then, remarkably, they improved by about three points per 100 possessions in the playoffs — when offense generally drops — and blew the doors off everyone they faced.
No team assisted on a higher percentage of its field-goal tries. Only the Magic shot the ball more efficiently in the last eight seconds of the shot clock, per 82games.com, evidence of how well the Mavs moved the ball and players until a defense finally broke. Only five teams got a higher percentage of their shots in those final eight seconds, evidence of how important patience was to Dallas’ scoring success. Only San Antonio and New York attempted more corner three-pointers, a shot for which Dallas showed no real affection until last season.
The Mavs didn’t get to the free-throw line all that much, had little use for offensive rebounds and turned the ball over at an average rate. In short: Other than Dirk Nowitzki post-ups and the mid-range shots that remained (mostly for Dirk and Jason Terry), Dallas relied almost entirely on getting a good first look near the rim or from three-point range, and making it.
For reasons well beyond Odom’s failure, the Mavs have been unable to function this way in 2011-12. Even more damaging, there is no fall-back plan on an aging team with no consistent off-the-dribble creator on the perimeter. Odom is a decent creator and absolutely could have helped, had he showed up ready to compete at a high level. The Mavs, at the very least, need a backup power forward capable of keeping the offense afloat when Nowitzki sits, and coach Rick Carlisle showed creativity in fitting Odom amid intriguing super-big lineups in which he was essentially the small forward.
It was a risk worth taking, and it didn’t work. But the Mavs’ issues go far beyond Odom’s.
Rodrigue Beaubois was supposed to fill the role as a go-to perimeter creator. He has advanced in small increments, but he does not get to the rim as often as J.J. Barea did, he is not as accomplished a passer and his outside shooting — 28 percent from three-point range — remains a liability that hurts the Mavs’ precious spacing. Delonte West helped early, but injuries to his hand and ankle have stunted his progress, and his game has always featured more step-back 15-footers than at-the-rim drives and dishes. Pairing Beaubois and Jason Terry, intended to be a facsimile of the dangerous Barea/Terry little-man duo, improved Dallas’ offense in the 685 minutes they’ve shared, but it hasn’t been enough to change the larger picture. Using West and Terry together has been a disaster, and teaming Jason Kidd with just about anyone has been hard to watch.
Kidd long ago evolved into a spot-up shooter assigned to hit open three-pointers and pick apart defenses with passing from beyond the three-point arc. But that evolution might have passed a breaking point. Nearly 82 percent of Kidd’s field-goal tries this season have been threes, up from about 65 percent last season. His assists per minute have reached a career low by a huge margin, and his increase in turnovers has sabotaged what remains of Dallas’ transition game. The Mavs rank 29th in points per possession on fast-break chances, per Synergy Sports. Kidd was at least a nominal threat to do something other than shoot threes last season, but he has not been this season. His passing, always a step ahead of rotating defenses, is less valuable now that Dallas’ spot-up shooting game is less dangerous.
The Mavs have redistributed a significant chunk of their three-point attempts — about 1.5 per game — from the corner to other areas, and they miss the spot-up brilliance of Peja Stojakovic and the version of DeShawn Stevenson that showed up last season.
Teams can generate good looks without an All-Star type on the perimeter if they have an explosive big-man finisher to use on pick-and-rolls, but Brendan Haywood is not in Tyson Chandler’s league in that sense. Dallas has suffered more on offense for its decision to let Chandler go and stock up on cap space this summer. Chandler shot nearly 70 percent on three attempts per game last season out of pick-and-rolls and cuts, and when defenses fouled him, he made them pay by morphing into a league-average foul shooter. Haywood has attempted only about 1.5 shots per game from pick-and-rolls and cuts, and he is simply not a threat to catch the ball from 10 feet out and do something productive with it. He is slow and needs time to gather himself after catching, and in that time, his defender can recover well enough to either contest a shot effectively or foul. Haywood has shot just 46 percent from the line, and that’s actually an improvement over last season.
The Mavs feasted last season by using Chandler on the pick-and-roll and stationing Nowitzki along the perimeter as an outlet. Such action removed a big man (Nowitzki’s defender) from the paint and spared Nowitzki some of the shot-creation burden. Though Dallas has tried to approximate it using Brandan Wright and Ian Mahinmi along with Haywood, it cannot approximate last season’s results.
Nowitzki is still hugely effective in the post and as a pick-and-pop threat so dangerous that defenders often stay glued to him, opening driving lanes for the Mavs’ guards. But those guards haven’t been able to do as much with those driving lanes this season, and even when they can, the shooting around them is not as deadly. Even Shawn Marion’s off-ball cutting, an alternative way of creating space for a non-shooter (see Avery Bradley in Boston), has dropped off over the course of the season, along with his post game, perhaps the result of cumulative fatigue from defending so many star point guards early.
Bottom line: The video tape and numbers — literally almost any kind of numbers you might choose — indicate a total system failure. The Mavs have dropped from first in assist rate to middle of the pack, suggesting that the easy buckets at the rim and the open threes just aren’t there. They still get a disproportionate number of field-goal attempts in the last four seconds of the shot clock, but they rank as one of the league’s dozen worst-shooting teams on such attempts, per 82games.com. And try as he might, Carlisle just hasn’t been able to find enough lineups and player pairings — super-big, super-small, whatever — that work consistently.
Mixing and matching is key on an aging team, especially one that has suffered short-term injuries to so many key players this season. Only the Nets, Bobcats, Nuggets, Hornets and Raptors have played their most common five-man unit fewer minutes than Dallas has played its No. 1 minutes-logging group. Few teams have played so many units at least 30 minutes combined, suggesting that Carlisle and his staff have tinkered more than most.
The Mavs will probably make the playoffs because the hardest part of their schedule is over and they have tiebreakers already in hand over all four teams right around them in the Western Conference standings (Utah, Phoenix, Denver and Houston). Things could get very dicey if the Mavs don’t do well in their next three games, against the Warriors, Kings and Trail Blazers, but they should still sneak in as the No. 7 or No. 8 seed.
That will be disappointing for the defending champions, especially because it would mean a meeting with either San Antonio or Oklahoma City. Odom’s play didn’t help, but it is just one of many factors contributing to the root cause of Dallas’ decline.
http://nba-point-forward.si.com/201...amar-odom-for-mavericks-failures-this-season/
I'm not even going to get into questions about the validity of this but this right here
Death x10
i legit died...and will now be referring lamlam an N.O.
Well, in a way she was right. He is now getting $8mil to do nothing, same thing as year off, but now with a salary.
Nobody who knows even just a bit about basketball is blaming Lamar for Dallas being in the position they are in. What he (rightfully) caught flack for was being terribly out of shape at the beginning of the season, the tantrum he threw after being traded/not-traded to the Hornets, demanding a trade to the team that swept his team in the '11 play-offs, publicly whining about going to miss playing in front of Jack and the L.A. lifestyle (movie premieres and such) in general, his lack of effort during games (and from what I've heard also in practice), his dubious elongated leave of absense (and subsequent meeting with Cuban where he asked to be bought out) and just his attitude towards basketball in general, which has caused him to become a locker room cancer.
While people do feel for what he's gone through - the death of that teenager, the "betrayal" by the Lakers - the general consensus is that if he felt like he was not mentally up to the task to play ball, then he should have done the sensible thing to get counseling and take the year off...
and let the church say AMEN. lamar isnt the make and break for any team but the scrutiny he is under matches his new status as a hollywood starruh
apparently so and that is why lamar odom for all his god given gifts will NEVER be a top flight player. as much as i drag on athletes those who are the best of the best have to have more than talent, it takes constant dedication and hardwork to achieve success
WTH?
THIS X100
Nobody. Just because the team is having other problems does not absolve him of his play. There have been many articles written about DAL erratic offense, JET's mouth, Jason Kidd's absence, Delonte West being insane, + Roddy being a disappointment.
Lamar isn't above getting criticized. And of course this situation is being scrutinized closely. It's virtually unheard for the 6th man of the year to come to a new team + utterly fall apart on such dramatic level. Add in his reality show, the tabs, bizarre absence + TMZ stalking his relatives and of course you've got 10x more drama and subsequently coverage.
KhloéKardashianOdom ‏ @KhloeKardashian
Peps want 2assume they know. My last tweet was 4me and not for any1 else. (Why tweet it for 6.5 million followers to see, then!?) I always send out encouraging tweets but 2day I get backlash? Odd
I was thinking the same thing -- why is she tweeting if not for everyone to see?
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