Bad Loss

It looks like those role players that I talked about having good games just weren’t up to the occasion last night against the Boston Celtics. As I predicted, the star players for both teams sat for a majority of the game if they were dressed at all. Mario Chalmers was dressed for the game, and he played well. He has improved greatly from last year, and I hope he has gained some experience from last year’s playoffs. If his decision making is improved from last year and he doesn’t get rattled, then he’ll be able to control the games tempo and keep everyone in check. The one thing I don’t like about Mario Chalmers is that he defers the point guard role to LeBron James a lot during the course of the game. LeBron has said that he is more comfortable in the facilitator role, but he can’t be stealing the ball from Mario like that. Mario cannot create his own shots as easily as LeBron, so when he is forced to become a wing player, he is very ineffective. When LeBron is a wing player, he can create his own shots from the wing. He can also post up, whereas Mario Chalmers cannot. This being said, I’ll get back to the game. The game was boring, low scoring, and I actually found myself flipping between other games during this one. This was not one of the classic matchups that I had hoped for. The intensity wasn’t there. If the intensity was there, even with the role players this would have been a good game.