Warriors v Houston 12th Feb (Preview and Postgame chat)

[GSW1Bulls]

Predictions everyone?

I'm hoping we can get a win, it's not looking great based on our last 4 games but I still think we can get it done.

Why?

They fell to Sacramento, during that game they rebounded well and passed the ball well. The one thing they didn't do well is shoot 3 pointers, we learned our lesson the hard way. Tonight is about four things, in the following order...

1. Team defense. In the last four games we've allowed an average of 118 points... we can't let this happen, we were playing some really good team defense earlier in the season, we need to get back to that.

2. Perimeter defense, don't leak off them, don't let them get easy looks. They love to shoot the 3 ball.

3. Rebounding/Boxing out, simply put we need to out-rebound them, no second chances. 

4. Stephen Curry. He's been playing great at home, 22.3 ppg, 7.2 apg, just a tad under 50% from deep and 45% from the field. He needs to live up to this AND he needs to contain Lin, Jeremy Lin hasn't had a great season, it's been a good season, but not a great season, and yet he dropped 28 points on us including five 3's. Curry won't let that happen again. He's better than Lin, he can contain him. Lin is only averaging 12 points on the road on barely above 40%, we need to make him play his average road game, or more importantly Steph does.

[GSW1Bulls]

Well... that's five losses.

But hey, the Clippers went on a 7 game losing streak. We can come back from this.


What I took away from the game;

1. We need to trust Bogut more with the offense. We haven't had a big guy who can score and pass this well for a long time, so it's not surprising that when Bogut was inside and had great position Curry and Klay failed to feed him the ball. We're so accustomed to either driving or creating space for jump shots that I don't think they really look inside that often, I guess this is one of the issues with having two shoot-first guards in your starting 5, Currys passing has improved a lot but he'll always be shoot first. We need to get into the habit of feeding the big man, even during his limited minutes Bogut should be a large part of our offense. He should certainly be getting more than six points.

2. Ezeli's intangibles were significantly underrated. His hustle, defense and ability to box out was clearly a bigger part of our winning than I first realised.

3. We're still not playing defense and rebounding like we can do. Our defense and rebounding in the start of the season is what got us off to such a great start, we need to get back to that. In each of these losses we've allowed at least 60 points in the first half.