Start coaching the Thunder, starting with Westbrook

Chapter 99 Motor City

Li Sheng will not take care of other teams. Since the start of the game, relying on a good schedule, the team has gone smoothly and is very satisfactory from training to games.

Gradually, the fans questioned him less and less.

However, Li Sheng will not be complacent just because of his achievements so far, after all, the real test has not yet come.

He also knows that for himself, the current smooth schedule can win as many victories as possible, and he needs to welcome Westbrook's return in the future. At that time, adjusting the lineup will definitely usher in pain. If he does not have the current record, Li Sheng will have to be careful in the rotation.

Speaking of Westbrook, he had repeated injuries before, and finally announced that he would undergo surgery to relieve the symptoms of swelling. He is currently recuperating in good condition, but Li Sheng knows that his injuries will continue, so he is not recommended to choose this time to come out.

Otherwise, Westbrook had considered playing against the Mavericks before.

Of course, he has returned to the team to practice together now. Li Sheng also used the system to detect and found that his injury still has hidden dangers, so he insisted not to let him play.

Although Westbrook really wants to play and feels that he can play without any problem, the team is currently in a good situation. When Li Sheng blocked him with a good reason to heal his injury, it is not easy for him to come out and destroy the team's chemical reaction.

Otherwise, don't say that the teammates have ideas, the fans outside will definitely spray him to death.

If you don't play, the team wins consecutively, but if you play, the team is not good. What's going on?
In fact, Li Sheng's thinking is multifaceted. First, the team is winning streak, but Westbrook can't play by himself, so whether it is from his own heart or outside voices, he will be stimulated.

At present, when he is training in the team, he has already consciously started to change his shooting method.

He has just recovered from an injury, and his legs are not used to exerting force, so he is still learning to use his upper body strength instead of relying on bouncing to deliver power from his hips.

This is where the strangeness of zombie jump shots lies. Generally, we use the strength of our half body, especially our hands, to shoot. We also rely on the strength of our wrists and fingers to shoot. But Westbrook doesn't seem to be completely like this. He has a whole set.

So when he couldn't jump up from behind, the whole shooting was affected.

It should be too late to change now, but it will definitely take an adaptation period.

Li Sheng is not in a hurry to add buffs to him, he has to see the effect of his training first, and at the same time see how long he can persist.

Secondly, when the team is slowly getting used to the absence of Westbrook, the chemical reaction is slowly growing. Even Reggie, Lamb, and Perkins are not so unhappy when they are suppressed. At this time, Westbrook's intervention may really destroy this chemical reaction.

Finally, if Westbrook finds a weaker team to win after the team loses, it will be more favorable to the public opinion of his comeback, and it will not affect the unity of the locker room.

This is what someone did later on. The strong team rested in rotation and the weak team played, but the weaker team couldn't beat the latter, and the statistics couldn't be improved. In the end, in order to save a little face, they simply said that they were recovering from their injuries, and let the naive Ru GUI take the blame. (Can this be said?)

This can also reduce the pressure of the team's running-in in the future, because Westbrook has to adapt to sometimes not having the ball in his hands.

It is definitely easier for a star to return to the state with the ball in hand than without the ball, so those who can and accept without the ball, and don't care about statistics, are becoming less and less in the future, but they are becoming more and more precious.

What Li Sheng wants now is not to help Westbrook regain his status alone, but to allow him to better integrate into it while maintaining this slowly built system.

The next day off, the team will go away to challenge the Detroit Pistons.

With the decline of the city's economy in the Auto City, the team has also gradually sunk. Now it is living on the league's subsistence allowances, and will take turns with the Magic to be the number one player in the Eastern Conference.

And this year the Pistons also changed to a new coach, and this coach has some connections with Li Sheng.

Maurice Cheeks took over as head coach of the Pistons in June after spending four seasons as an assistant with the Thunder.

Compared with the Pistons, he is of course more willing to coach the Thunder, because the Thunder is obviously the better team, with better stars, and it is easier to win the record.

So Morris has some complaints about the Thunder and Li Sheng in his heart. However, the Thunder is now in full swing. On the contrary, the Pistons have suffered a losing streak since the start of the game.

In fact, in terms of personal strength alone, these players of the Pistons seem to be not bad. The backcourt combination is Jennings and Stuckey.

In 07, the Pistons selected Stuckey with the No. 15 pick. With his outstanding performance in the second year, they planned to use him as the core training. Not only did they send Billups away, but they also specially invited Iverson and others to "assist" him.

It's a pity that this is a dou who cannot be supported. His personal growth rate is not as good as the team's high expectations. In the following seasons, his shooting has not improved, and his weakness of being accustomed to attacking from the left and insufficient vision of cutting passes has become more and more known to opponents. After being targeted, his performance becomes more and more ineffective.

In the past two seasons, his performance has gotten worse and worse, and he has lost his princely treatment. This year, the Pistons introduced Jennings from the Bucks, which also means that the team has completely given up the idea of ​​​​hardly supporting him.

Jennings is a rookie who scored 50+ in his rookie season and has unlimited hopes.

Even if he is a rookie and peak like Evans, and his performance in the following seasons is mediocre, he is younger and has more potential.

Of course, the Pistons would not have thought that Jennings would fall as fast as Stuckey, but Jennings was injured anyway, and Stuckey can only say that the upper limit is like that.

The small forward position is the "Eagle King" Josh Smith, who is also new to the team, and he is also the biggest signing of the Pistons this offseason.

Smith's physical fitness is superb, and he was once compared with James, but the gap soon became apparent. He did not have a stable and effective scoring method, and he never averaged more than 20 points per game in his career.

Many people say that James is not a scorer, because he only has one scoring champion, but he has a stable scoring average of 25+ all year round, let alone the ability to lead the team, let alone a level.

The Pistons thought that the combination of Jennings + Smith should be able to produce results, which is of course wishful thinking.

In the interior position, there is a combination of rebounding idiot "Zhuang Shen" and Greg Monroe. Both offense and defense are passable. Zhuang Shen is a sophomore, but his rebounding potential has already emerged. He will have more playing time and performance opportunities in the new season.

In the bench lineup, as well as the FMVP Billups who returned in his later years, it can be seen that the Pistons want to make some noise this season.

From the perspective of the lineup, there is even the idea of ​​matching the civilian champion in 04, but except for SF, it seems that they are all weakened versions of each position. Jennings is at most comparable to Billups, Stuckey is not as good as Hamilton, and Monroe and Zhuang Shen are also incomparable to Double Wallace.

The most important thing is that they haven't had a chemical reaction like the Thunder, and they haven't been able to play the defense that the Pistons won at the beginning. The performance since the start of the game speaks for itself.

(End of this chapter)