FanPost

Things I don't understand:

OK, I put up a post about perspective, but a few things still shine through the understanding of our position this year as legitimate concerns:

--why wasn't Dante Cunningham coming off the bench before Juwan Howard all season? He roundly outplayed him tonight, and I just don't get why McMillan hasn't been going to him more.

--why, again, is Jerryd Bayless our great white hope at PG when he doesn't pass, ever? even when it means a drive that goes nowhere? I'm sorry, but Bayless threw away a couple of the team's surges tonight by trying to play Michael Jordan when he should have been looking for open teammates. This guy just doesn't play Blazers ball. He's all about his own offense, and nothing else, but his skills don't match his ambition. Why isn't someone sitting him down and explaining to him that he is just plain NOT AS GOOD AS HE THINKS HE IS, and that he needs to learn to play his role? His game is the antithesis of Roy's: greedy, short-sighted, and unintelligent, and it's going to ruin this team if something isn't done about it.

--Why does McMillan get stuck on a certain rotation and fail to adjust? Really, a lot of the anger at Bayless has to do with McMillan playing him way more than he deserves or is capable of delivering. Why can't McMillan look at who's playing well (Cunningham, Pendergraph) and who is not (Bayless, Howard)? He'll pull Martell and Rudy if they miss so much as a shot, but Bayless is allowed to run us into the ground game after game, and he still gets minutes. It doesn't make any sense! And while still tip my hat to Howard for being a hundred times more effective than there was any reason for him to expect to have to be, he's been a liability the last few weeks and McMillan has not adjusted to that. McMillan's greatest weakness as a coach seems to be this lack of flexibility and spontaneity. Whether it's a severe liability or not remains to be seen (i.e., requires a season in which we do not lose upwards of 300 games to injury), but I am a little bit concerned.

--Why does the team shoot so cold when the pressure's on? We got all the looks we needed to roar back a few times tonight, but we couldn't hit shots. Why, on a team with some great shooters, do we fail to come through when we need to so often? What is missing?

So those are my concerns, even considering our injury issues this year. What do you think?