Point Blank – May 4
Will the Hawks step up or turn to stone (cue Joe Walsh, and be ready for plenty of James Gang in the weeks ahead)…If C.C. stands for Command and Control, then it really is a “C” grade for Sabathia so far…Matt Harvey is who he is, not who he was...Carolos Rodon has earned his way out of The Drawer…
We begin the day with condolences for anyone that had a Portland +10 ticket last night, the Trail Blazers managing to lead by 20 in the first half and still be up by 11 entering the final stanza, but that result may have answered one of the key questions proposed here yesterday - did leaving Daman Lillard and C. J. McCollum both on the court for more than 40 minutes in Sunday’s opener leave them a little too gassed to play deeply into the Game 2 night? Until McCollum made an unguarded triple with 8.9 second remaining the Portland offense had only scored nine points over that final stanza, and prior to that shot the last made FG had come with 5:21 remaining. There was some fantastic Golden State basketball in that closing stretch, but also a lot of Trail Blazer fatigue.
Now the board shortens tonight, with only Atlanta/Cleveland Game 2, and there should be a warning up front that if you are not a fan of “The James Gang”, the remaining playoffs are going to be an indoctrination. For LeBron James and the Cavaliers to be in the hunt brings me too easy of an excuse to reach back for some classic Rock and Roll, during that peak period of the James Gang when Joe Walsh was the front man, and most of you should know what became of Mr. Walsh since (if you are not familiar with the history of band, note that Walsh was replaced by Tommy Bolin for a short while, before he went on to Deep Purple, giving them a pair of iconic lead players). And where did the James Gang come together? In Cleveland, of course. So as the Cavaliers keep winning, some of the classic old shows will keep spinning, this time opting for Walsh as a solo artist heading his own band in 1972, the early stages of his talent and vision at play (how lucky are we that someone had a multi-camera shoot going way back then), now with the question of the day – will the Hawks step up, or “Turn to Stone”?
Of course, for most of Game 1 it appeared that Kyle Korver already did…
Hawks/Cavaliers #2 – Can Cleveland make Kyle Korver disappear again
Let’s start with the basic foundation for this setting because once again the psychology behind the players matters – this will be the ninth meeting between these teams since their playoff series started last May, and it has been an 8-0 SU and 7-1 ATS run by Cleveland, six of the wins by more than tonight’s pointspread. The Hawks play almost impeccable basketball, with good movement on offense and that fundamentally sound defense that has been a discussion point here often, but what they do not have on the roster are great players. At this stage of the season, you need a few of those.
Atlanta showed grit and purpose on Monday. The Hawks did not quit and hold back for tonight after falling down by 18 late in the third quarter; they instead put on a stunning charge, keyed by the defense and an unlikely offensive catalyst in Dennis Schroeder, and actually managed to hold the lead at 88-87 with a little over 4:00 remaining. But they could not score when they needed to, a big part of that being Korver taken out of the offense to a degree that is rarely seen –
Korver’s Monday
Minutes: 36:45
FG: 0-1
Assists: 0
How does a back-court player be on the floor so long and contribute so little? In this instance it may have genuinely been good game-planning by Tyronn Lue, something we are not yet accustomed to - “When we take him (Korver) out of the game, they have a tough time scoring. We know in the last series (against the Celtics), they were a plus-78 when he was on the floor and a minus-24 when he was off the floor. He’s a big part of what they do and we have to lock into him and try to take him out of the series.”
Now it is up to Mike Budenholzer to counter, and while he brings a terrific tactical acumen, the natural flow of the Atlanta offense is not geared around targeting a particular option. His take - “We tend to just take what’s available and let the offense go to the other guys. If you are playing somewhat of a four-on-four game, then the looks and the opportunities for everybody else should be high-quality. We’d like to get Kyle some shots and get him going but historically the way we play, (we) just let it flow to other guys.”
Getting Korver open is the issue on one end; on the other it is the fact that no matter how hard Kent Bazemore tries, it is a difficult one-on-one for him against James. Since the All Star break the Atlanta defense has been #1 across the league, but in losing three times to the Cavaliers in that span the production from LeBron has created much for the Hawks to overcome -
James post-break vs. Atlanta
Minutes: 117:24
FGs 36-63
Points 88
+/- per 48: +14.3
Bazemore did one thing well on Monday – he limited James to just a single FT attempt. But with 25 points and nine assists, LeBron was a little too comfortable.
Hence the big question – do the physical matchups now get into the heads of the Atlanta players? Can they take something like the second half surge from Monday and build on it, or will their lack of success in this matchup erode their basketball ego? There was an inadvertent slip by Budenholzer yesterday that may shed some light on the Freudian aspects of it – “I think we just look at it as we can play better. We obviously had opportunities in the fourth quarter and down the stretch and we weren’t good enough. I don’t look at is as encouraging or discouraging.”
Perhaps what Budenholzer wanted to say was that “we didn’t play well enough”, instead of “we weren’t good enough”, but could the latter be what the others are thinking in the locker room? There will be some Zig Zag in the marketplace getting behind the Hawks tonight, but I will not come close to reaching towards the pocket.
Item: On Command and Control for Sabathia
I really wanted to like C. C. Sabathia this season, as he makes the attempt to fight his way back after battling the bottle, and you can get an insightful read directly from him on that front here.
It is worth taking a few minutes from your day. And there appeared to be a window open in the marketplace – because his performances in recent seasons were nothing special, if he could turn his game around there would be value to be found, especially since he only needs to make a couple of good passes through the opposing lineup each night, before turning the game over to a terrific bullpen.
But it just is not there so far, which raises the question as to whether it ever can be again, with his 36th birthday coming up in July, and with over 3,000 regular-season innings having been logged. In opening 1-2/5.07, Sabathia’s lack of success has had nothing to do with baseball’s geometry, but rather a sharp decline in what was formerly his cornerstone, outstanding command -
Sabathia’s command decline
K/9 BB/9 SWS%
2014 9.4 2.0 10.5
2015 7.4 2.7 9.1
2016 6.3 4.6 7.3
Those are extremely significant drops to have in back-to-back campaigns, and at some point in the near future it may come down to a difficult decision for Joe Girardi and the Yankee brass. As much as they want him to succeed, if he is not missing bats and throwing strikes he is not Sabathia anymore.
There is also another New York pitcher requiring some power ratings adjustments these days, though at a much different place in his career arc…
About Last Night…
The Braves have been the worst offense in baseball, and it hasn’t even been close. To understand just how bad they have been, let’s compare their team performance level to the individual player that would match it across the slash line categories, based on players with at least 50 plate appearances so far (there are 270 of them) –
AVG .228 Adeiny Hechavarria (.228)
OBP .297 Joey Rickard (.296)
SLG .295 Andrelton Simmons (.294)
That is quite a composite, isn’t it? Yet last night the Braves had twice as many hits (8) as strikeouts (4) against Matt Harvey, and Harvey walked away from the mound at 2-4/4.76. That is quite a drop from his 13-8/2.71 of 2015, but while there has been some baseball luck in play (that .351 BABIP will regress), the bottom line for Harvey is that his stuff has not been there. Let’s go to those four rate stats that I use often early in the season –
Career 2015 2016
K/9 9.3 8.9 6.6
BB/9 2.1 1.8 2.9
GB% 45.2 46.0 40.0
SWS% 11.9 11.6 9.5
Perhaps this season it really is proper to call the analysis of Harvey’s performance a post-mortem, medical terms applicable because in 2015 he threw more innings (216) than any pitcher ever coming back off of Tommy John surgery.
Let’s start with Terry Collins - "He hit 95 tonight a couple of times and might have even hit 96 once or twice. Because he usually pitches at 96, 97, we think there's something wrong. And I'm not sure there is. He and [pitching coach Dan Warthen] are trying to straighten out a couple of things. He's throwing quite a bit on the side to try to get a feel for his release point and a feel for what they're trying to do. It doesn't just happen overnight."
And as is so often the case, understanding the performance of a player can often be accentuated by getting inside his own head. From Harvey, there is confusion - "Right now, I'm not feeling good with my mechanics. I'm not feeling good throwing the ball. It's frustrating. I think I've said it before: I'm the one who is most frustrated here about what's going on.”
Harvey has a lot of talent, and may well figure it out. But for now you don’t want to be chasing prices on him turning things around – I would wait until he clearly shows that he has his stuff before taking any kind of plunge. I can say a similar thing about another struggling hurler, and this one is worthy of investment…
In the Sights…
Consider this split –
15-6 +37
0-5 -13
Rather drastic, isn’t it? The first category is how the Red Sox have done in games started by someone other than Clay Buchholz. The second have been the results over the five Buchholz outings. The markets are not even close to pricing him properly right now, and because I believe it is not a case of baseball luck, and also that there has been enough from Carlos Rodon recently to remove him from “The Drawer”, it means #974 Chicago White Sox (8:10) are in play. You can lay as low as -110, my charts call this one good up to -125.
If you thought that Harvey made a terrible Atlanta offense look good last night, how about the Buchholz loss to the Braves in his last outing, a game in which he allowed 12 base-runners (8 hits and 4 walks), while only registering two strikeouts. Let’s go to the rate stats again –
Career 2015 2016
K/9 7.0 8.5 6.2
BB/9 3.2 1.8 4.2
GB% 48.5 48.3 39.8
SWS% 9.3 10.6 8.6
Buchholz is off of his career norms in every category, way off of 2015, and when a team like Atlanta roughs him up, there is even more cause for alarm.
Meanwhile I have written about Rodon’s inconsistencies keeping him off of my playlist to this point, but he is showing me something this season. BB/9 is down from 4.6 to 3.7 and GB% up from 46.8 to 53.8, and if he is throwing strikes his raw stuff is in that nasty category of 9.0 K/9 and better than 50% in GB rate, a combination that can be lethal. Here is where he has earned the trust – three starts back he had an awful outing vs. the Angels, failing to finish the first inning and serving as the kind of game that can shake the confidence of a young pitcher. But he has rebounded with back-to-back outings of less than 15.0 PPI, with more strikeouts than base-runners allowed in those games, and it was the first time he had ever thrown back to back games of under 15.0. In other words he did not panic, and instead stayed with his stuff, and if he continues to do that his stuff is very real. So is David Robertson’s, who already has nine saves and has only been scored on once in 12 appearances, while none of the White Sox set-up men have had to work since Sunday, so the home team carries pitching advantages across this one
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