Thinking About the Front Court

Second chance points killed me. Teams would just beast the Hornets on the boards. What annoyed me the most was the lack of size when a team drove to the basket as well. I’m not asking for twin towers out there, but last year our players weren’t put in positions to succeed. In other words, West and Songaila getting significant minutes at center and (whether or not they want to admit it), Posey, Stojakovic and Juju at PF is going to leave the team too small to succeed defensively. Legitimate minutes would mean a great deal for the team.

There’s really no painfully empty hole, and there’s a ton of healthy competition for most backup spots. I’m actually excited to see what becomes of the backup front court players. Pops and Joe Alexander are apparently playing very well, and if they continue to do so, then I would like to see them make the squad. They bring different skill sets as Pops brings tons of energy on the boards and plays solid defense (he also may be developing an offensive game around the basket from what I’ve heard), while Alexander brings hustle, athleticism, and a pretty varied offensive game to the spot. They offer different matchups and can swing between a few positions which is key to bench players and making a team.

Jason Smith and Aaron Gray also offer finesse and power-type games, however unpolished they may be. I like the team as it stands, and there’s really no reason they will miss the playoffs if they just play more defense this year.

I’m thinking that with Okafor’s minutes increase alone this team becomes infinitely better. I don’t know whether Bower knew that Okafor was actually pretty decent defensively in the 4th quarter earlier on in the season.

Do you guys remember when Okafor had several block shots at the end of the game? I do.

But not sure whether getting rid of Songalia was addition by subtraction. Songalia was obviously not the answer at back-up center, but he was a fine frontcourt player on offense in general.

Pops and Alexander? I’m hoping for the best, but not exactly keeping my fingers crossed, for obvious reasons. Ditto with Aaraon Gray. These guys all have cheap contracts though so they don’t have much impact financially.

As for why Emeka was kept off the coutr for stretches of the game. He fouled a lot and his defense was not much better than mediocre. I think a team with him has never made the playoffs, if I am not mistaken. Hopefully that will change this season. Emeka’s strangth is endurance thanks in part to his dedication to strengthening his core through pilates (the thing that Larry Brown mocked him for), generally solid rebounding and average offense from center position. That’s about it however. Though he improves rebounding, he’s not a player that brings many intangibles.

To the extent that we don’t play Songalia at Center, I’m guessing our rebounding may be better. But it’s not yet certain however, how much our front court will be improved. DWest is a mediocre rebounder at PF and C and he will continue to get major minutes. Hopefully we will get slight improvement from Gray.

Overall, I’m not feeling a huge improvement on the way in front court and even rebounidng might be a question marks if we end up playing significant amounts of small ball again to give minutes to our numerous wings.

By the way, I actually thought DWest played more minutes at center than just 5%, but I guess stats don’t lie.

I could probably also add that a Shaq-like 56% from FT line by Okafor also probably didn’t help to inspire confidence in him in end of game situations and contributed to his limited minutes.

In a League where size and strength matters, as good as Songaila could shoot that mid-range jumper on offense, he was a huge liability on defense. Even though he did reasonably well guarding the pick and roll, he was small and didn’t board. Okafor and Gray will bring that. Honestly, I don’t want to see Pops or West at the 5. They’re both 4s really.

And as for Alexander, I was surprised to hear him say he’s playing exclusively at the 4. Because at the open practice they had, I was sure he was playing at the 3 some. I could be wrong, though. Either way, he was aggressive on the boards and hustling big time. We were really impressed by him. For one day anyway.