Game Notes: 11/20

Tonight was a Chuckster delight! Two blowouts!!!

Detroit – 80 at Boston – 98

Not a lot to report here as the game got out of hand in the third quarter and both benches saw a lot of minutes. Ivy and Sheed still managed decent lines for the Pistons, although Iverson’s string of 1:1 A/TO games is starting to get kind of annoying. More impressive than that though, was (and I hesitate to say this) Kwame Brown. Now my previous experience watching him had almost exclusively been the D’Antoni Suns turning tricks on him and Erick Dampier mauling him, but tonight he actually made a few competent moves to the rim. TO’s continued to be Rodney Stuckey’s most prominent cat, and Leon Powe busted my boy Walter Herrmann in the chops late in the game… but other than that there is no news on the Piston’s side. All of Boston’s starters saw short minutes, and all except Rondo had slow nights. Tony Allen and Eddie House had nice lines off the bench, and Leon Powe would have as well had he not gone 3/7 from the line.

LA Lakers – 105 at Phoenix – 92

All of the Lakers starters played short minutes, and they all showed it in different ways. Gasol had 9 rebounds and 9 assists but only 4 points. Kobe actually finished pretty close to “normal”, but his %’s were kind of low tonight. Vlad Rad had a hot shooting night, canning 5 threes, and the bench support was phenomenal as Lamar Odom played 32 minutes and almost hit his average line from last season! The Phoenix starters logged their normal minutes, they just didn’t play very well. Nash was very “Jason Kidd sans rebounds”, Bell and Barnes split similar stats with both coming up kind of lame but decent overall, Amare had a decent line but didn’t get to the line enough, and Shaq was tolerable from a volume perspective but ruined this matchup that ESPN will still froth over after he and Kobe retire by going halvsies on his FT’s and logging 4 TO’s. Boris Diaw had a nice line off the bench, and slung this slick pass with tons of english on it at the end of the fourth quarter that the commentators made fun of because Louie Amundson apparently didn’t know Boris could do this and thus didn’t cut hard enough to get in position for the pass, making Boris look like a fool, and Terry Porter make a frowny face that screamed “no style allowed”.

Injury note: Tuning into the game in the third quarter, seeing Matt Barnes playing with his entire mid-section wrapped (on the outside of his uni!?), I just assumed that he had joined Michael Redd in the ranks of "NBA Players who suffer from menstruation" and that ibuprofen hindered his abilities on the court. This curiosity was lifted though, when he left the game at the end of the third with back spasms. No news yet on his status for upcoming games.

Irrelevant note: In his new Yahoo! profile picture, Amare has a moustache (ok, he has some on his chin too, but it’s not connected. That means he has a moustache)... Hello my new favorite player?