***The Kenneth Lofton Jr Appreciaton Thread***

Originally posted by Jiks:
Biggest choke I've ever witnessed. Don't even want to talk about it.

I don't see it as a choke job. We didn't have any interior defense after Favors and Rudy got into foul trouble. Udoh is ok but he's not elite by any means and Crowder isn't gonna do any good stopping people down there. You open up the lanes and Westbrook and George are gonna have a field day. Westbrook went insane from downtown which he hasn't been able to do until tonight. It just shows how much of an impact Rudy has on a game.

Originally posted by saniner:
Refs sucked, yes, but why were we chucking threes up 25?! Went 1-11 in like 5 minutes during their run. Dumb basketball. Rudy with 5 fouls hurt us, but they didn't play smart ball like they usually do.

Also, brodie can ball. Friday is gonna be crazy

That was the other thing! We completely went out of our offense to try to respond and that's not gonna win us any games. We've done so well becuase we've stayed in our offense, but for whatever reason the guys decided to try to play OKC's style of ball. We're not gonna win if we do that.

Originally posted by saniner:

Refs sucked, yes, but why were we chucking threes up 25?! Went 1-11 in like 5 minutes during their run. Dumb basketball. Rudy with 5 fouls hurt us, but they didn't play smart ball like they usually do.

Also, brodie can ball. Friday is gonna be crazy

They felt safe and started going for home runs. Bit em in the arse.

Originally posted by JustinMT:

Originally posted by Jiks:
Biggest choke I've ever witnessed. Don't even want to talk about it.

I don't see it as a choke job. We didn't have any interior defense after Favors and Rudy got into foul trouble. Udoh is ok but he's not elite by any means and Crowder isn't gonna do any good stopping people down there. You open up the lanes and Westbrook and George are gonna have a field day. Westbrook went insane from downtown which he hasn't been able to do until tonight. It just shows how much of an impact Rudy has on a game.

Gobert's foul trouble was the story of this game. You have to give Westbrook and George a ton of credit but they dont come back if Gobert is on the floor.

Nice to see Alec show up and play his ass off. Exum needs to settle his f**king nerves. He's been absolutely awful.

What a Game! Mitchell was amazing. Sucks he had 5 fouls, I feel he would have been more aggressive late. The no call was questionable, but you can't play for the foul on a game tying shot.

https://streamable.com/8d714

He steps into Rudy to initiate contact. He got away with it before, and I'm glad they didn't call it here

Now if they could only answer why they've allowed so many pushoffs.

^^^ I'm obviously a homer but we had our fair share of s**t calls so it's tough to feel to bad. No phantom foul call in game 5 on Gobert, and most likely no game 6.

I was out of town and had to pull off in a rest area to listen to this on the radio since it kept going in an out. People probably thought I was drugged out of my mind yelling at Crowder talking to my radio, getting in and out of my truck and pacing, and finally getting out celebrating the final seconds. Such an intense game and the final 3-4 minutes were brutal. Especially hearing "Westbrook for 3... misses... Adams with the rebound... George for 3... misses... tapped out by Adams... " the final minute.

Oh and Mitchell is pretty f**king good! I highly doubt Houston turns into a series, but we'll see.

Looks like no Rubio for games 1 or 2 for sure. That's rough.

Originally posted by tjd808185:

Looks like no Rubio for games 1 or 2 for sure. That's rough.

And could be 10 days. Damn it.

I swear some of the Jazz fans on facebook are some of the dumbest people on the planet. People arguing that Bryon Russell deserves his number retired and he was more important on those Finals teams than Horny. WHAT???

Originally posted by JustinMT:

I swear some of the Jazz fans on facebook are some of the dumbest people on the planet. People arguing that Bryon Russell deserves his number retired and he was more important on those Finals teams than Horny. WHAT???

We left Russell alone with Jordan WAY too much in those two Finals'. If we had doubled him more we might have had a shot. Hard to fault Russell for not being able to cover MJ (and that WAS a push off), but he needed help.

Watching back some of those Finals games, our D was way too passive. During the final shot in 98, you can see the rest of our team just standing there watching Jordan get himself open for that shot EVERYONE knew he was taking. Make someone else beat you.

Kobe did a breakdown of Mitchell's game 1 performance and it's awesome. Even more awesome is that Mitchell has watched it a few times already. Kobe points out a lot of areas Mitchell can improve, and it will be interesting to see how Mitchell responds.

Not going to lie, not sure I expected us to go back to Utah 1-1.

Originally posted by Jiks:
Not going to lie, not sure I expected us to go back to Utah 1-1.

I was talking to some guys from work and they discounted Utah, and I told them if we can nail 12-15 threes we would have a very good chance, and we got 15. This was such a great overall team win. It was beautiful. Great to see Exum get some confidence and nail a couple threes, and unleashing Burks has been so great for us.