what?? personally what I saw was some surprisingly spirited defensive effort from the cavs for much of the game. Vince was simply unstoppable tonight, everything was going in, regardless of how many defenders were between him and the basket or how many hands were in his face. He made quite a few very tough shots (and got pretty lucky some other times) at very key moments that either got NJ's momentum back on track, or killed any chance of ours starting, for most of the game... and many of those tough shots were jump shots, made at the perimeter; our perimeter defense did not break down nearly as much from what I saw. I saw lebron really getting after RJ for most of the game, our rotations were slow as usual but we weren't just blatantly leaving guys wide open as much, although we started to once we began collapsing on carter (which didn't really help).
the nets played extremely well in general... except mcinnis
The nets team fg % was ridiculously high during the period where carter was just tossing them up and they were going in, and all his teammates were sticking their jumpers. Then as carter cooled off, so did the nets team fg%. If someone watching didn't know anything else about this nba season, he probably would've thought the nets were one of the top nba teams, the way they played tonight
meanwhile, i thought our offense let us down tonight. Yes we put up points, but we were playing catch-up the entire game, and we just couldn't get anything started offensively. I'm really starting to worry about larry hughes' shooting. We weren't converting our offensive tips. Lebron was having trouble finishing tonight; couple occasions, he missed the layup which ordinarily would've been no problem for him. He also forced passes during a stretch which led to a few turnovers. On the positive side, donyell and damon hit some threes, and I really don't mind damon taking 1-2 bad shots a game (he took two bad threes tonight that i saw, made 1 missed 1). Gooden was solid as we've come to expect... maybe mike brown should look into running a few offensive plays a game for gooden.
i don't want to get into the whole debate about Z, but i will say that the cavs looked very active and dangerous with gooden marshall lebron jones snow.... until the nets started penetrating and getting layups. take that as you will
that first quarter really killed us, the refs calls/noncalls were frustrating for me, as a cavs fan, to see, but the players have not let that affect them and just keep playing. That's a tough thing to do but letting that get to them got us in a hole right off the bat, and we stayed in that hole pretty much the whole game.
also, it was nice to hear the Q so loud during that comeback stretch
