Chapter Forty-Eight: Bloody Warriors
When I play basketball, I actually feel that time flies very quickly, especially when I train, this feeling is particularly obvious, and my personal training has actually begun to have some relatively mature rules.
In fact, a large part of the credit for this should be attributed to the shooting coach of the Lakers, who helped me optimize many of my shooting movements, and as the so-called master leads the door, the practice depends on the individual.
As long as I find a relatively good training method, the rest depends on my perseverance to complete the training, for most people it may be quite boring to practice alone, but for me it is a lot of fun and I enjoy it.
A lot of people make the mistake of being too flashy and on hits when training, and I was the same at the beginning, focusing on the posture of the movements in training, and being very concerned about the shooting percentage in training.
But after a few training sessions with the Lakers' shooting coach, I began to understand that training itself is more of a process of maintaining muscle memory and shooting rhythm, and if you always put too much energy into training to pursue some movements that are close to your limit, then such training is destined to be difficult to last, and will eventually have a negative impact on your training as a whole.
In fact, keeping the movement and shooting feeling smooth in training is the most important point, when your muscle memory and shooting rhythm are very smooth and comfortable, you can complete the shot at any time like eating and drinking.
And those difficult shots are actually not deliberately pursued in the final analysis, although I do deliberately learn and imitate shooting moves like Jordan, but I will not say that I must force myself to use it in the game, in fact, if I can use these movements very naturally and smoothly in the game, it can only mean that I have fully integrated these movements into my instinctive movements in my usual training. It's the kind of action that you don't need to think about and can do it well just by instinct.
Of course, my personal training intensity is still quite high today, but it seems that I have temporarily reached a small bottleneck, perhaps because the competitive state bonus brought by my previous training has been very high, which means that my potential has been basically tapped by myself in a short period of time, and at this time I will enter a relatively low state.
In fact, this is also determined by the laws of nature, anyone's state will have ups and downs, no matter how hard you put in to train, there is no way to change this, and even when your training intensity is too high, it may bring certain side effects in a certain period of time, and then the competitive state will decline to a certain extent.
After all, the NBA's regular season is long and hard, just as the Great Wall cannot be repaired in a day, and I can't be too eager to let myself suffer from injuries due to overtraining.
Of course, at least today I haven't experienced the fatigue of overtraining, but I have to say that I have clearly felt that my sense of improvement has become weaker because of training.
This may be like the marginal utility in mathematics, the effect of doing something will get worse and worse as you do it for a long time, and training should also follow such a rule, so I will do the necessary stretching training for my body outside of training, and even add some items such as yoga movements, to make my body as flexible as possible, so as to prevent some possible injuries.
About an hour and a half before the start of the game, I received a call from the girl Amy I met this morning, she and her boyfriend and a few other good friends were really outside the stadium, and I was very happy to hear it, every fan of mine is a kind of motivation for me, which can inspire me to face every game in a better state and with more passion.
To be able to see Amy's smile again I think these NBA fans are really cute, she and a few of her best friends are wearing different team jerseys, God knows how there can be such a big disagreement within a few of their best friends, and everyone's favorite players are from different teams.
I bought tickets for them, but unfortunately I couldn't get them a connecting ticket, but I did get two connecting tickets for Amy and her boyfriend.
At the time, her boyfriend looked like a stunned kid in high school, and I even suspected that he was a few years younger than Amy, and of course I was not just graduating from high school at this time, but also a hairy boy.
An hour and a half later, the game finally kicked off, and as expected, the entire basketball court was almost full, and the enthusiasm of the home fans was extremely high, and the home jerseys they wore were relatively neat, of course, there were still many fans who liked to wear the jerseys of their favorite teams.
Today, the players of the entire Lakers team came relatively early, and Shaq actually came to the arena early, and he even obediently practiced his worst free throw under the leadership of the shooting coach.
Seeing this change in this guy's attitude, I also silently blessed him a few words, hoping that he can have a good sense of free throws in today's game.
However, it turned out that my thinking could only be wishful thinking, or maybe I was a poisoned milk, and in the end, Shaq's free throws in this game can only be described as miserable, of course, all this is an afterthought, at least now he feels good about free throws in training.
I'm also a little curious as to why Shaq has such a terrible free throw feel, in fact he doesn't feel bad in his hands, although he doesn't have a strong mid-range shot, but he has a pretty good hook around the box.
In my opinion, this hook technique is actually more of a test of the player's hand, but I don't know why he can maintain a high hook shooting rate, but it is difficult to practice free throws well.
He himself may throw the pot to give him those huge palms, but NBA players who have small hands where to go, like Jordan and later Kawai Lai Anald also have huge hands, and even the palms of Boban, who is also a tall insider, are only afraid that they are bigger than Shak's, but their free throw shooting percentage is very impressive, but Shaq has not been able to make the free throw shooting rate exceed sixty percent in his career.
The Warriors' starting line is quite gorgeous, but the biggest problem with their lineup is that the bench is not particularly powerful, in fact, the Warriors are quite good in terms of the age configuration of the personnel, from the rookie who has just entered the league to the core players who are at their peak, and then to the experienced veteran players, at least on paper, this Lakers team is very powerful.
Shaq jumped to the ball for the Lakers first, and point guard Van Exel did not intend to stop and play positional battles after getting the ball, but was ready to use the starting advantage to bring the speed of the game up.
He went straight to the heart of the Warriors' defense, using a low-handed layup to give the Lakers the lead before the Warriors' defense could take shape.
And the Warriors are not the kind of team that plays slowly, in fact, they don't have a particularly reliable interior player in their lineup, so their offense basically relies on fast defense and fast attack and accurate outside shooting, which is really like the Warriors at the peak of the small-ball era many years later.
In fact, in the 90s, when the speed of the game was generally not fast, not all teams were slow, at least this Warriors team has been using close to run-and-gun tactics since this era, but their current tactical system is not as perfect as in the later small-ball era, and the tactical execution is not as thorough as later.
What's more important is that there are too many super inside lines in this era, not to mention the dominance of the four centers, and there are countless excellent interior lines like Uncle Mu, Morin, Camby, Sabonis, Divac and so on.
And the new generation of super interior Duncan, Garnett, Nowitzki has just entered or is about to enter this league, they are all cross-era super inside, in this era of the background of the Warriors without a strong interior is indeed difficult to achieve the final victory, because by shooting can indeed achieve good results in the regular season, but once it comes to the playoffs with bayonets, in the face of this era of defensive rules that are not very favorable to the outside, The saying that you can't win a championship just by shooting is true.
The sharpest bayonet on the outside of the Warriors is their core player Crazy Sprewell, his physical fitness is very good, and most importantly, he plays with a rare hardness, which is a bit like Jimmy Butler later, who rushed to the Lakers' interior with a basketball like a dynamite bag.
Even in the face of Shaq's full block, this guy didn't show even a little bit of fear, which I admire him, of course, it's definitely not a good idea to fight Shaq head-on, although it caused Shaq's foul, but he himself was knocked out by Shaq.
He didn't even be able to get a single ball in the subsequent free throws, it is estimated that after the body was hit by too much force, it was difficult to control the hand all of a sudden, and the free throws were all rotated on the basket several times and then slowly slid out.
However, Shaq's attention was once again unable to focus, allowing the Warriors power forward, who was half a head shorter than him, to grab the offensive rebound, and with a whistle, Shaq actually got two fouls in an offensive round.
I saw Shaq spread his hands, opened wide, kept yelling at the referee, and turned his head to look at the surrounding home fans, at this time the home fans would heckle and laugh mockingly.
Head coach Silver Fox Harris had no choice but to call a timeout, but he didn't expect Shaq to get two fouls in less than a minute of the opening game, which greatly exceeded everyone's expectations, and for Silver Fox Harris, who especially likes to arrange personnel according to the game plan, this is even more of a thing that makes him crazy.
However, he had no way to continue the game normally in the future, so he could only press Shaq to the bench, and Shaq on the bench was furious, just like a mad lion, constantly roaring, but his anger was useless, but it made other Lakers players around him fall into a not very good mood.
What surprised me was that this time the Silver Fox Harris actually replaced me early, Eddie Jones was moved to the small forward position, Ceballos became the power forward, and Robert Horry was used as a center.
I didn't expect today's Silver Fox Harris to wake up like a big dream, using a set of small ball lineups that surpass this era, but in fact, this is also a small accident, after all, in order to deal with the small lineup of the opposing Warriors, if you force the extremely slow pace of the backup center Campbell on the court, then I am afraid that the Warriors will get too many opportunities to shoot outside, once the Warriors such a team that wins by shooting can find the rhythm of scoring, then it will be very difficult to suppress their offense.
Today's Warriors' tactical execution is quite good, the most important point is that their players are very good in execution, more precisely, they are very proactive on the court, without the slightest hesitation, once there is a shooting opportunity they will shoot immediately, as long as our Lakers' defense is a step slower, their shooting is equivalent to empty blue.
I put my main focus on the defensive end of the floor, and I know that the Warriors have a very limited defensive ability, and we have too many players on the court to score, but if everyone can't defend each other, there is no way to open up the difference.
The player I was playing against was Chris, who was called God's Left Hand America. Mullin, who was an off-ball player who was very good at finding shots with pick-and-rolls, played a style of play a bit like Klay Klay, the Warriors' super-pitcher. Thompson, because he's fast enough and has a lot of consistency, even though he's not as sharp as he was when he was younger, I'm still not that good at defending him.
In general, I really don't have enough defensive experience, and when facing the Warriors, I may be able to solve it by going around quickly, but when facing the opponent's more complex multiple pick-and-roll and elevator door tactics, I and the other Lakers players have not had enough tacit understanding, resulting in untimely defense and sometimes defensive confusion.
As a result, the Warriors have always been able to get out of the space with great ease, and even though I feel like I've put in my best effort on the defensive end, I can only watch the opponent hit one shot after another.
It made me a little frustrated, and none of the teams I've faced before have been as shooting to the end as the Warriors, and the scary thing about this kind of team is that when they're at a high level, your average defense can't be effective against them.
On the other hand, the Warriors also have a lot of scoring points, with multiple offensive points with the ball, and our defense will always make mistakes in the face of their complex high-post blocking tactics, and when the opponent sees our struggle on the defensive end, they will be more brazen to exploit our weaknesses to attack us.
In the first quarter, we allowed the Warriors to score as many as 35 points, but fortunately our side was not too bad on the offensive end, and personally, although the feeling was not as inexplicable as in the previous games, after all, the opponents I faced in the previous games were all bench players, and this time it was against the starters, and I also had some changes in psychology.
Even so, I still scored 11 points on 4-of-9 shooting and 3-of-5 free throws in the first quarter, which was already the most points for the entire Lakers, and of course I did shoot a little bit more in my style.
And it's incredible that I basically played the whole first quarter, and what happened to the Silver Fox Harris today, so that I played 11 minutes in the first quarter with less than 20 minutes of playing time per game.
It's just that my other teammates were still a little bit worse, and the Warriors led us by three points after the first quarter.
The second quarter of the next quarter is even more bloody, especially when a furious beast that has been locked up and released is about to strike, and the whole arena will be shocked by his terrifying deterrent.
Shaq was completely crazy in the second quarter, of course, the Warriors didn't want Shaq to catch the momentum of the whole game to the Lakers, so once Shaq got the ball on the inside, he would be frantically caught by the opponent, and Shaq was not the kind of player who would pass the ball back out of the line, so the Warriors quickly paid several fouls to defend Shaq.
I thought that Shaq, who had a special training session for free throws before the game, would be able to perform a little better, but to my surprise, Shaq came up and missed four free throws in a row, which made him even more angry, but anger alone is useless, and I even feel that anger will only make his free throws more abnormal, because he can't control his free throws in the first place.
When the anger completely enveloped him, it made his hand more ferocious, which also made his free throw shooting percentage even more miserable, shooting and free throws actually need more skill, too much power will only make the shooting rate very bad.