Paulo Alves

So, you know, from an overall, like, 10,000 FTU perspective, I think it's fine.

I think the same logic applies that I had on the previous wallet, things were going poorly.

I'm not too high, I'm not too low either.

It's just, well, we're...

A game back, I guess, on the loss column from the two seed, we have the same losses as the Nuggets.

They are the three seed.

Granted, the Nuggets are playing without Jokic, but still, that won't grant them extra wins when we get to the side of the seeding for the playoffs.

So we're fine from an overall perspective.

But getting into a little bit of specific players and specific things about the team, I was not impressed about that Spurs game.

I know it's a win.

I know it's a great team.

But I saw confirmation of some stuff that I had been talking about, that I had been thinking about, particularly about Alper and Shingo.

I had touched on it a little bit in previous spots.

And in the Spurs game, it was especially glaring, especially in the second half.

The effort from Chengdu just doesn't seem to be there nearly to the level that it was last season, on defense especially.

And so, just remembering from last night, right?

You know, you come out, the Rockets are down 16, halfway through the third quarter.

There's a play where Shingun, well, where Castel's on the ground grabbing the ball, and Shingun just kind of haphazardly puts a hand on it and looks to the ref to try and throw it to say, hey, call a jump ball, right?

And I'm like, really, that's kind of the bare minimum.

He could have tried to take the ball away from him rather than just clearly look for the jump ball.