Uneven Night for Jakucionis as Miami Heat Get Blown Out | Damian Lillard Back to Portland

Uneven Night for Jakucionis as Miami Heat Get Blown Out | Damian Lillard Back to Portland

I’m not going to lie to you. I’m not going to sugarcoat it. Uh, Summer League has been a really rough watch this season. And I can’t be too mad because just a year ago, it was quite literally the most exciting brand of basketball that I’ve ever seen. Not even just summer league. Like, I’m talking in my life watching those boys Williams and Cole Swider and Josh Christopher and Isaiah Stevens, Kashad John, Scalware Web, Pa Larson, the list goes on and on and on. those guys put on a show last year. That year is not going to be great. That’s one of those years like like today. Like I mean this game was a very boring watch. I started taking notes and then I said what’s the point? I why would I what kind of degenerate do y’all think I am? I’m going to take notes on a game. It was the heat lose to the Pistons by 20 points in summer league. I’m not going to do it. So, we still do got a lot to talk about because well, not not even with regards to the game necessarily because the most exciting thing to happen during the game was Damen Lillard going back to the Portland Trailblazers and it’s like I posted a little YouTube short about it, but I feel like talking about it a little bit more and it’s like I didn’t want Dame. You know, I posted a free agent targets video just a couple days ago. We talked about Dame. I said if you get in for cheap, fine. You know, it’s a lowrisk potentially high reward move. So, doesn’t matter. But I didn’t really want him. Not anymore, at least. You know, I wouldn’t be thrilled had the Heat signed him just because I find it hard to be optimistic about a 36-year-old player who’s coming off an Achilles injury. You know, I same reason when the Jets got Aaron Rodgers and all the Dolphins fans are like, “Oh, we know we’re the worst team in the division now.” Maybe they were. That’s just cuz the Dolphins suck. But it’s not cuz I thought the Jets were going to be good. Like Aaron Rogers wasn’t going to be good, and he wasn’t. I mean, he was okay. He wasn’t too bad. He’s actually better than I thought, but still nothing to write home about. Uh, and obviously from Damen Lillard’s case, I hope that, you know, he’s able to return to some fraction of himself cuz even if he can be 70% as good as he was before, that’s still a damn good player. But I just didn’t really want him. I don’t think it fits the Heat’s timeline. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me. So, the part where I am a little bit salty is that he went back to Joe Cronin, who, if y’all don’t know, that is my OP number one for life. I wrote a whole diss track on that man. And the fact that Dame went back to him, that grinds my gears because I even saw my guy Drew Star on Twitter rec quoting all the the stuff from a few years back where I was devastated. By the way, in 2023, I remember being at work when that damn Bleacher Report notification came up with the red siren emoji and my heart sank when it said Dane went to Milwaukee. Oh my god. I felt like I was going to vomit everywhere. I was sick. Right now, I don’t I don’t really care except for the fact that uh all the like I said, the the old stuff was resurfacing of Dame was saying, “Oh, if I can’t go to Miami, I’ll go back to Portland.” And Joe Cronin is like, “No, there’s no coming back.” And it’s like, now you going back to that Dame, bro. Like, they didn’t care about you. They didn’t respect your wishes and now you going back to them. You doing them a favor? That that’s BS. Just like when LeBron went back to Dan Gilbert, bro. That dude took out a newspaper hit piece on you and you went back to him. LeBron, it’s okay, LeBron. You can come back home to Miami now. I’m not mad at you. But yeah, that that part was kind of annoying. I mean, clearly Dame doesn’t want to win, which is fine. He he prefers to be by his family and be in a place he’s comfortable with. He has every right to do so. But don’t go out there and say, “Oh, all I want to do is win.” And all this other BS he’s been saying for years. It’s not the case. Like him saying, “I don’t run from the grind.” Is him saying, “I’m scared of winning expectations.” Cuz it’s true. Like having expectations is hard. Not being on a team where nobody expects you to win. That’s not hard. Uh and that’s just kind of one way I felt about Dame. I know a lot of Heat fans are saying, “Oh, it’s like when D.Wade came back to Miami when he was on the Cavs and kind of, you know, in terms of the fans being happy that their guy is back home, but it’s like Wade already won championships. Like, okay, he won his rings. He he went out. He saw what the the grass wasn’t green on the other side and came back.” Like, Dame, you didn’t win. You know, I wouldn’t hate you if you went ring chasing out because shoot, go win. You know, I like guys who value winning over everything else. I I guess that’s not Damian Lillard, but that’s fine. That’s his prerogative. Not mad at it. Uh anyways, we don’t need Dame cuz we got a point guard of our own and his name is Cascus Yakonis who led the heat today with no Pella Lararsson, no Khil, no Kash Johnson. Those guys or Pella’s in he’s getting ready to play Euro basket with Sweden. Khalil left Vegas, which you know makes sense. he doesn’t need to play no more after kind of dominating the last two. And the Kashad Johnson is still in Vegas. Just didn’t play today. So, I don’t know if he’ll actually play tomorrow or not. Uh but without all those guys today, uh Casper’s led the Heat to 88 points and uh how many turnovers they had as a team cuz it was not pretty for a while. 20 Oh, that’s uh fouls. But 19 turnovers still way too much. Listen, correlation does not equal causation. But do I feel great that last game when Casperis didn’t play, it was their only Vegas win in the game in which they played the best offensively and now Casperis comes back and it’s one of their worst offensive performances, one of their worst losses. No, I don’t feel great about that. But I already established at the beginning of summer league that it’s sort of I don’t want to say it’s irrelevant, but it doesn’t mean a huge deal. It doesn’t make or break a player. So that’s fine. Casper didn’t have a great summer league. He had the one good game where he shot well. Fine. We’ll see what happens. You know, I’m all and I’m also on record saying that I think Casper will play better once he has better players because he’ll have more spacing. He’ll have more uh athletic lob threats, better shooters in the corner that can actually make his assists because yes, although today the numbers aren’t great for Casperis, he had some I think there was a lot of uh potential assists that were left hanging because either his teammates didn’t catch the ball or they missed a shot or etc. So, I do think he can be better once he’s with the real squad, and that remains to be seen. For example, it was literally the first play of the game where Casper’s had another turnover. Like the fourth game this summer league where out out the gates, he turns it over. He can’t stop turning it over, but this one I don’t really think was his fault. It’s kind of nice pass to Golden inside who couldn’t catch it. Uh, and then Stevenson missed a great dime in the corner from three where Casper did like a rocket one-handed pass out to him. There was another pass that Stevenson bobbled. So, just a couple examples of of uh Caspers making some good plays that didn’t necessarily work out. Uh because we’ll go just jump to the numbers here cuz if you look at his overall stats, you’ll see 15 points, five rebounds, three assists, two steals, and a block. That doesn’t sound bad at all. But if you look a little bit deeper in the box score, you’ll see that he had three assists. Yes, but that was to five turnovers, which obviously is is not good at all. You should never have more more assist more turnovers than assist. Not to mention that once again, yeah, four made field goals to five assists. Of course, that was a big thing in college. He had plenty of games with more turnovers than field goals. All right, what did I say before? Four field goals to to five turnovers, whatever. You know what I mean? Uh did that a lot in college. Happened quite a few times in summer league already, too. Not great, you know, and a lot of different reasons for that in terms of the shot attempts. I still feel like he’s forcing a bit too much. uh a lot of his layups. He’s kind of driving into traffic and hasn’t quite learned uh how to slow down his body usage frame all the time. Sometimes he has a lot of nice reads where he’s able to steal the defender the defender on his shoulder and really control himself. Uh and that’s part of the reason he did get to the free throw line a ton today. Six to six from the line. We like that. But I still think he needs to kind of learn uh how to slow down a little bit because a lot of times he’s too run and gun going into the paint, which is very common for a 19-year-old. Uh so that’s fine. uh he did have a nice block today as well. That block uh showed some great hustle. So, he continued showing these uh these uh effort plays on the defensive end, which is not what we expected. So, part of me is happy that saying, “Hey, we didn’t expect this guy to be a solid defender and a really heat culture, tryhard type of guy. I love that. You know, it’s positive.” But another part of me is saying, “Hey, we didn’t draft you to be a defender. We drafted you to be a playmaker.” You haven’t really done that in summer league thus far. Uh, I mean, they were down 16 at the half. Uh, the offense was looking terrible. Caspers got posterized. Definition of a poster off a lob. I’m talking like a Brandon Knight type, you know, Chris Paul to DeAndre Jordan. Bang. Brandon Knight on the ground. It’s kind of how Cass got dunked on, but he did recover. Uh, he had an overall better second half. Even had a really nice pass to Omar Balow uh, inside. Balow, who I love, by the way. I mean, wasn’t great today. You know, he had nine points on on three on three shot attempts, which is pretty good because he did get to the free throw line. Uh, but the reason I really love Balo is because he somehow has my most viewed video of all time on this channel, which is still funny to me. I know I mentioned that a couple videos ago, but it’s just funny to me. Like literally out of all the video, I’ve been doing YouTube for like five seasons now. And Omar Balow, a guy who’s played two summer league games, a deep dive on him is my is my most viewed. Can’t understand the YouTube algorithm, man. What I do know is that if y’all like this video, comment, and subscribe, that does help the algorithm. So, make sure y’all do that for me because I do greatly appreciate it. But uh I forgot even what what I was going to say. Oh yeah, back to Casper’s numbers. I wish we saw more playmaking stuff. The the forcing shot attempts. I know he said he needs to control that, but I think he’ll get better by learning what he can and can’t do. And I also like the fact that he’s being aggressive shooting the ball because in the first few games he’s taking like four or five shots in California. No, be aggressive. So I appreciate him at least attempting to get shots off. But when you look at the playmaking stuff, it’s like the Heat as a whole only had 13 assists today. Not all that is Casper’s fault. Like I said, they should have had more guys missed shots. Uh Caspers didn’t play the whole game. He he only or he played 28 minutes, so that’s a good chunk. But in and in those 28 minutes, he did have the ball. It’s not like in those first couple games where Kier Lewis was ball handling. He didn’t have any Kier Lewis today either. So Casper was making plays. And to only have 13 assists as a team when you’re the lead point guard, it’s not great, you know. And then you look at the the Pistons, they had some guy named uh Brooks who had uh no, not Brooks who did it. It was a Jenkins. This Jenkins guy who had 10 assists by himself, 16 points and 10 assists with only three turnovers. And it’s like, I don’t know who this Jenkins guy is. Dannis Jenkins. I never heard of him, but Caspers couldn’t give us one game with high turnovers, low assist. And I know we gave a lot of uh uh gave him a lot of like uh leeway basically saying, “Hey, you’re not playing with great teammates. You know, fine. It’s going to be hard to get assist when guys aren’t great shooters or scorers.” But the Pistons didn’t play anyone today either. Ron Holland was sitting there in street clothes. You know, I think he might be a decent NBA player regardless of him trying to fight Duncan Robinson, but they’re teammates now, so those guys are cool. But I think he’ll be a good player. He didn’t play tonight. I mean, who else did did the Pistons play tonight? I think I might have heard of that uh that Ziegler guy before. He had a nice game. Uh the Chaz Laneir. I know he was a second round pick a lot of Heat fans were interested in, but other than that, I don’t know these guys. That doesn’t mean they’re not good players, but how good can they have a bigger staff on their team? Like, you know, how good can they be? And that guy named what’s his name? Jenkins. That guy didn’t have problem getting 10 assists. Had almost as many assists as our entire team. I don’t know. I’m just trying to get mad about something because this game was irrelevant, you know. Uh it just sucks what once again the Heat getting blown out in summer league. Whatever. We’ll see what happens with with Caspers when we get to the preseason games. I think they released the schedule. First game is going to be October 6th. We’ll see what the Heat roster looks like by then. I know Mike Miller and UD on their podcast saying things will be different. Pat Riley’s not done making moves. And I’m sitting here like you need two sides to make a move. And yeah, Pat Riley could have this whole list of names that he wants like LeBron. But if Lakers don’t want to trade LeBron, what are you gonna do? You know, you gonna keep Wiggins and then essentially run it back with Norman Powell. Is that good enough to be a non-playing team? Probably. You know, just because the Celtics will obviously sold off. We’ll see how much Indiana struggles without uh without Tyrese and now Dame has gone to the Western Conference again. So, we’ll see. But either way, I don’t know. The Heat still got one more summer league game and then we’ll have plenty of time to talk about all of that. I will say though, I don’t think I’ll have a post game for tomorrow’s summer league game because I won’t be home. I won’t be able to watch it. They they actually just added that to the schedule like a day ago. So, I was like, for the last few days, I’m like, I’m not going to plan my like keep my weekend open waiting for them to schedule the summer league game. So, going out going to my girlfriend’s dad’s birthday dinner. So, I’ll miss the game. I’ll probably rewatch it at some point. If I if it’s worthy enough to do a post game, I will. If not, we’ll do some other stuff related, maybe. what we learned. Maybe do some more Casper’s film breakdown. Uh cuz I do think there was a lot of interesting stuff we can look at today. But I don’t know. We’ll see. Either way, I’ll be having tons of more heat content throughout the summer. Make sure y’all like and subscribe cuz the support is greatly appreciated. And I’ll see y’all in the next one. Peace out, everyone. [Music] Yeah. space. You know this homegrown [ __ ] don’t a fan.

Discussing the Miami Heat losing to the Detroit Pistons 108-88 in NBA Summer League. Kasparas Jakucionis with an uneven game. NBA and Miami Heat News featuring Bam Adebayo, Tyler Herro, Andrew Wiggins, Kel’el Ware, Kasparas Jakucionis, Terry Rozier, Nikola Jovic, Jaime Jaquez Jr., Duncan Robinson, Kevin Love, Haywood Highsmith, Pelle Larsson, Keshad Johnson, Erik Spoelstra and more. Subscribe for more Miami Heat, Miami Dolphins, NBA and NFL news.

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