Bailed Out By a Star: Kings 96, Bucks 95

Too bad, looks like an exciting finish.

It also looks like Westphal shortened his rotation to nine, and Sergio was the odd man out. He also rode his starters a little more than usual and they and Beno logged all but 45 minutes.

The Kings are now 8-1 when JT gets a double-double.

I saw Avatar instead. Good movie, but still… Why did I have to choose the 6:30 showing?

It was kind of satisfying hearing all of the Saints fans cursing loudly in the theater during the movie though.

Another extremely efficient scoring line, but his defense on jennings was superb, especially considering the quickness and skill level of jennings. He did a great job of moving his feet and keeping jennings in front of him, which ain’t easy to do! Thought the continuation call JT received was a gift, but hey, I’ll take it!

As for Tyreke, he must have to wear specially designed underwear to keep his bowling-ball-sized stones from hurting himself or others.

Finally a close win on the road. J.T and Tyreke come up big at the end. A little momentum heading toward Chicago.

I missed the game due to being snowed in at friends house but, damn is JT supposed to grab every rebound? Rebounding like defense is a team effort. Looks like a good game I missed hope to catch it later today on replay, Go Kings, JT and Tyreke are becoming a nice consistant force for the Kings

21.6 / 5.9 (A) / 5.1® / 1.8 (S). This puts him at 20.0 / 5.1 / 5.1 for the season, joining only LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Joe Johnson in the 20/5/5 club for the year.

Wow.

digressed in rebounding. To begin the season off, that was an area we had dramatically improved on in addition to team defense. Either we have gotten worse or everybody has gotten better.

Can we become a good defensive team, or are personnel changes the only remedy?

Three Kings went after the ball and seemed to knock each other out of the way. Somebody got body checked, I think it was Omri and the ball just kind of squirted out of there and right to Jennings. IT wasn’t like Milwaukee went in there and took the rebound away. It was a lucky bounce and the Kings’ own aggressiveness seemed to hurt them on that one. Kenny Thomas probably should have been in on that play and Westphal knows it as he made the switch right away on the next FT attempt. Spencer just doesn’t have great hands and that may be his undoing as he is letting too many get away like that.

The Kings players know it, the coaches know it, the opposing coaches and players know it, the announcers know it, the fans everywhere are learning it. Pundits, not so much.

It is one thing that we talk about how Tyreke is a leading candidate for rookie of the year, that the Kings are a scrappier crew and Coach Paul is as comfortable a fit as a cashmere sweater.

The mold for superstar is there for Tyreke Evans. This game helped to solidify that presence. Is there any doubt? Two games ago (please do a memory erase of the Minny game on me, someone), on his national TV debut this 20 year old matches up with the known star of the opposite team, their go-to guy and steals the ball, the goes to the FT line and seals the win. This time – another big game as he matches up against his only contempory from this year’s draft class – and Jennings is damn good in case you didn’t notice – and just as Jennings made two big plays – the two FT’s on the rebound sequence described above and then the inbound save and bullet pass assist to Ilyasova it looked like a headline – “Evans with 22 as Jennings gets Bucks the win” – until Evans happened.

Last play of the game, the Kings superstar, their go to guy has the ball inbounded to him and drove in for the score. End of story. Wow, what a story.

It is amazing when your dreams and virtual situations become a reality as a fan. Is there a better way this season could be going? This guy is a gift wrapped superstar. Happy Holidays.

This game would’ve been a blow-out if he would’ve played Chapu for more than one play in the fourth quarter!

His Prediction for the Kings this year was us winning 12 games all year. I like Dwyer, but that was foolish and disrespectful. So eat it KD.

…Jennings showed up late to fall behind Evans.

You guys covered a lot of stuff so I won’t bother. But as Pookey (I believe) said earlier, the boards battle was won by the bucks in the last couple minutes. If you were to go back and see how they got those O boards, you’ll realize most of them (not all) were lucky bounces off of long shots. Rebounding was a problem the last couple games, bt on this particular instance, there was a lot of luck involved and not so much lack of effort (aside from the missed FT) or technique.

I thought that was important to note.

Tyreke of course, there’s been enough said about that.

 My number 2 was PW. The plays that we ran coming out of timeouts, worked to perfection. And, I think his rotations worked to perfection. I especially liked his decision in the 4th to play Beno at the point along with Tyreke. True we lost the advantage of having Tyreke defended by Jennings, but Tyreke had been beating Delfino & Meeks the entire game. And, Beno had been his usual scoring machine all game.

My final hero of the game was Beno. Not only did he score but he defended Jennings better than anyone could have hoped. When he ran the point, he got the offense started quicker, and the offense ran smoothly. I thought at the start of the game, Tyreke was a little tentitive bring the ball up against Jennings. And, we had trouble getting into our offense, to the point that we had two 24sec clock turnovers.

As a side note, I was very impressed with Jennings poise. Especially in the final minutes when to went to the line and hit all 4 FT. He is an amazing rookie, even if he did play one year of pro ball.

is that the score at the beginning of the next game was 0-0. Plus, when you play that bad, you’re so embarrassed you want to do everything you can to get rid of the stench in the next one.

Eeek! The Ghost of Dissed-mas past!!!