During the 2014-2015 PBA season, the Meralco Bolts play a brand of basketball that vacillates between incredibly exciting and gouge-your-eyes out boring. With total dedication to hustle plays, shooting layups, or trying to draw fouls, the Bolts play fast, and when their bigs is unproductive, they usually lose.
Watching a hand-off to Gary David or Jared Dillinger and let them close the game is predictable and antithetical to the way most people think about the game of basketball. When the shots aren’t falling, though, it is a brick after brick after a David trip to the three-point area after another David trip to the three-point area line after a Dillinger drive to the basket after brick after brick.
Nothing about that is good. And it’s no disrespect to Mr. Hot Hands David, whose holding the ball three feet or twenty-two feet in front of him combination has become the single best way to trigger a ref’s whistle in the entire PBA, but this team is kind of awful. Not in its penchant to either stay in the middle of the pack or at the bottom half, but in the way it sucks sure wins out of hoops.
Shooting under pressure, daredevil and "no-holds" barred drive to the basket are the worst shots in basketball from an analytical perspective, but they’re some of the best shots from a spectator’s perspective. Most viewers would rather watch guys barrel their way through a phalanx of defenders than watch a bunch of players passed crisply around the court until they sport an open shot near the basket.
Worse, the Bolts don’t even play great defense with nobody averaging at least 9 rebounds per game, so they’ve got nothing really going for them in both ends of the floor. The best they have available is Cliff Hodge with 8.0 rebounds per game, while their undersize veteran center, Reynel Hugnatan, can only manage 4.4 rebounds per game.
As another bit of colloquial hoops wisdom goes, you can’t win a ring with no defense.
Watching a hand-off to Gary David or Jared Dillinger and let them close the game is predictable and antithetical to the way most people think about the game of basketball. When the shots aren’t falling, though, it is a brick after brick after a David trip to the three-point area after another David trip to the three-point area line after a Dillinger drive to the basket after brick after brick.
Nothing about that is good. And it’s no disrespect to Mr. Hot Hands David, whose holding the ball three feet or twenty-two feet in front of him combination has become the single best way to trigger a ref’s whistle in the entire PBA, but this team is kind of awful. Not in its penchant to either stay in the middle of the pack or at the bottom half, but in the way it sucks sure wins out of hoops.
Shooting under pressure, daredevil and "no-holds" barred drive to the basket are the worst shots in basketball from an analytical perspective, but they’re some of the best shots from a spectator’s perspective. Most viewers would rather watch guys barrel their way through a phalanx of defenders than watch a bunch of players passed crisply around the court until they sport an open shot near the basket.
Worse, the Bolts don’t even play great defense with nobody averaging at least 9 rebounds per game, so they’ve got nothing really going for them in both ends of the floor. The best they have available is Cliff Hodge with 8.0 rebounds per game, while their undersize veteran center, Reynel Hugnatan, can only manage 4.4 rebounds per game.
As another bit of colloquial hoops wisdom goes, you can’t win a ring with no defense.
Well, again, I hope Isaac Holstein gets a chance to show what he is capable of delivering. When he gets more that a few minutes per game, folks are gonna see some serious stuff.
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