The Blame Game

I’ll start. Dejuan Blair and Matt Bonner are below average defenders at the most important defensive positions. It is their fault.

Things don’t add up. Either the personnel is lacking or the coach is failing. It really is that simple. And don’t say it’s a system thing, that is such crap.

It is a system thing. The defense is built around bigs, like Duncan. When you also have Blair and Bonner as 2 of your 4 bigs, it becomes a bigger issue when the team depends on defense up front. A lot of the easy baskets come in the paint.

Unfortunately, Duncan is not the same Duncan. That and the lineups this season haven’t been consistent. Lacking practice as well hurts a lot, defensively.

Matt Bonner is a ginger. So I’ll go with it’s all his fault.

I blame Pop for not trusting Tiago enough.

Age and a lack of defensive communication.

I attribute our defensive inefficiency to our increased reliance on our offense and transition. I think Pop realizes he doesn’t have the same team that can shut down teams defensively. It’s also probably not a good thing to rely on Bonner and Blair for extended minutes at a time.

Of course, this is a personnel thing. We used to have Duncan – Nesterovich/Horry/Oberto/Thomas/McDyess – Bowen/Finley – Manu/Barry – Tony. Our weakest position on defense used to be PG, we had good or exceptional (Duncan and Bowen) defenders everywhere else. Now we have two decent (older Duncan, Splitter) and two bad defenders inside, and average defenders in RJ and Tony. We don’t have anyone who would be as good as Bowen and Duncan in their primes. When Manu is back, our best defensive lineup will be Duncan – Splitter – Green – KLeo – Manu, but I doubt these guys will play a lot together. Most of our lineups will feature some bad defenders. Actually, our team and especially our bench, can play pretty good D at times, but not all the time. I also think that our D should improve as our youngsters (Green, KLeo, Splitter) get more comfortable playing with each other and when Manu comes back. But we’ll still miss Bowen/Duncan D, these guys were the best in the NBA at their positions.

To put it simply…its a personel issue. Most of our rotation either sucks or is average. It doesnt matter what system you implement, if you have bad defensive players mixed with some average you will have trouble on D.

-REALLY BAD defenders: Bonner, Blair, Neal.
-Average: Parker, Jefferson, Anderson, TJ Ford
-Seem to be great, and have the potential to be so, but they suffer from rookieness: Green, Leonard, Joseph.
-Really good defensive bigs with excellent fundamentals but not elite: Duncan, Tiago.
-In a category on itself: Manu

Yes, we can improve a lot. But I think our ceiling is a top 10 or 15 defense, because most of our best defensive players are so young and prone to mistakes, and they will never get the benefit of the doubt from the refs.

I blame Dice. (joking of course) If he didn’t retire we would have another good defensive big to plug into the rotation. I’m of the opinion that good defense overall starts with good defense inside. Unfortunately with our big rotation there is (almost) ALWAYS a line up that includes a poor inside defender up front. (Blair or Bonner) The quality of interior defense has a lot to do with how confident a perimeter player is in defending his man tight. It also has a lot to do with how well we can defend the pick and roll. A good perimeter defender is useless when he continuously gets caught on screens without help from the bigs.

Dice is the missing factor here.