Category: Anaheim Arsenal

The Arsenal were unable to snap the Stampede’s winning streak last night, losing 93-87 in a game that was close throughout. As a fan, it’s frustrating to endure three close losses in a row to quality teams — I can only imagine the frustration the team is feeling. Positive highlights include Marcus Campbell recording a double-double (albeit on horrendous 4-for-17 shooting — probably about 8 of those misses were off of tips on maybe 3 total offensive possessions), and Mo Charlo coming off the bench to score 21 points on 70% shooting from the floor. Concerns include Ivan Johnson’s continued woes at the free throw line — he went 2-for-6 in this game, and a combined 4-of-10 over the last two games.

The attendance was not listed on the box score, but I can assure you that, as a Monday night game, it was sparse. I would estimate 150 people, maybe. Of course, the lower noise level makes it easier to heckle and try and get inside the visiting team’s heads, which can be amusing. It’s easy to understand, though, why the league tries to schedule as many games as possible on the weekend — even if there are other entertainment options in town on those days, it’s still easier to get people out of the house and into seats on their days off.

On the league transactions page, I saw that the Arsenal have dealt Davin White to the Colorado 14ers in exchange for another forward, Terrence Crawford. It looks like Yuta Tabuse worked his way up the depth chart, and took the place of White, who was one of the opening-day starters. I would surmise that, with the trade for another forward in exchange for a guard, the coaching staff are anticipating that Guillermo Diaz won’t be called up again in the near future.

The Arsenal suffered two tough losses in the last two days. The first, Friday night, was to the D-Fenders, 107-102, in a game where at two separate points the Arsenal held double-digit leads. The game tonight was the Idaho Stampede’s D-League record-setting 16th straight victory, a frustrating 95-91 loss in which the Arsenal held the lead for almost the entire game. What’s disappointing is that, in both cases, the Arsenal couldn’t finish strong — their shooting faded down the stretch, and while there were no real defensive blowups that I can recall, their opponents were still able to score enough to steal the win.

Bright spots for the Arsenal include the return of Guillermo Diaz (fresh from his 20-day cup of coffee with the Clippers), who, judging by the way he has played the last two games, really wants to go back up to the NBA. His stats against Idaho were less impressive due to the fact that almost every time he touched the ball in the second half, he was double-teamed — I think he scored all of his points in the first half. Ivan Johnson also had a pair of excellent games, filling up the stat sheet and making a lot of hustle plays. Unfortunately, center Marcus Campbell has had a couple of pretty dreadful games — little offense (particularly down low), foul trouble, and poor ball handling. I cringed every time a pass bounced off of his hands of stone, or an attempted feed to a slashing teammate got poked away by a defender. Hopefully this is a temporary phenomenon — when he originally came onto the roster, he had a couple of excellent games, making me think that he was going to be a key offensive and defensive presence (particularly for a size-deprived team).

The Arsenal will have a chance to avenge tonight’s loss on Monday, as they play the Stampede again.

It feels strange to call a win “routine,” honestly. Not much to say about the Arsenal win over the Jam last night — for most of the game, the Arsenal held a lead, and never dug themselves a hole. Granted, the Bakersfield Jam are easily the league’s worst team, but they beat the Arsenal twice before during this season (and, strangely, they also beat the LA D-Fenders twice, and they’re actually pretty decent), so you can never take a game for granted. New acquisition Mo Charlo acquitted himself fairly well. The addition of him and ex-Thunderbird Ejike Ugboaja necessitated the waiving of Jamaal Thomas, who I thought was actually a pretty consistent performer and decent fit for the Arsenal game. Such is life.

I just read on the D-League president’s blog that, from now until the end of the season, you’ll be able to watch all D-League games for free as streaming video. I haven’t checked it out yet, but this explains the presence of cameras and video editing equipment at the games we’ve attended for the last month or so — I initially thought that they were being taped as 3 AM filler for NBA TV, but I guess it was really a warm-up for the streaming video experiment. If you’ve been dying to check out Arsenal basketball, now here’s your chance. It’s also quite possible that you might also be able to see me and Sandy courtside at home games, if we keep getting upgrades…

The Arsenal won Saturday night (the second night of a back-to-back pair of games) to notch their first consecutive victories of the season. They defeated the reigning D-League champion Dakota Wizards 106-97 in a game that was probably their best showing of the season. Recent acquisition Marcus Campbell had a hot hand in the first quarter, finishing with 21 points on 10-of-14 shooting, and giving the Arsenal some much-needed size and rebounding inside. Not much to say here other than that the Arsenal had a very impressive shooting night, shooting almost 50% from the field and just about 90% from the charity stripe. Here’s hoping they can keep it up next Friday night for “Affiliate Night” against the D-Fenders.

We wound up getting to sit courtside in “the best seats in the house,” courtesy of a team promotion that we won, and sat next to Arsenal alumnus (and current Indiana Pacer) Andre Owens. It’s really nice sitting down on the floor — it gives you a much different perspective on things, and it’s just fun to be down there. The other notable occurrence of the night was the half-court shot promotion. The guy that they picked to do it was really hamming it up, trying to get people excited, and I thought that he was going to fail miserably, just like all the others have this season. He didn’t win, but he did strike iron twice (better than anyone else has done)…hucking the ball over his head, backwards. I was impressed enough to clap — one of his shots looked like it might get a friendly bank into the basket, but not quite…

…but they’re still winless on the road. Last night they won a 105-103 squeaker against the Albuquerque Thunderbirds, although in my opinion, the game shouldn’t have gone down to the final possession. The Arsenal had a 10 point lead with a couple of minutes left to play, but played sloppy down the stretch and were saved by a Steven Smith bucket on their last offensive possession. The T-Birds played a very up-tempo game, forcing some rotation changes for the Arsenal and making them look very uncomfortable at points in the first half. Albuquerque also aggressively defended inbounds passes for a large chunk of the game, which I thought was pretty unusual.

The Arsenal are the only remaining team that is still winless on the road — even lowly Bakersfield, shaping up to be the Washington Generals of the NBDL, have notched a win away from home. At least the Arsenal have a winning record at home, now.

On the T-Birds’ roster is Darryl “DJ” Strawberry, who I thought was initially an unfortunately-named kid whose parents were admirers of the Straw. But, as I found out, he is actually the Straw’s kid…and he played very well, shooting 10-for-17 from the field and 4-for-6 from behind the arc.

The Arsenal face a tougher test tonight in the Dakota Wizards, current Central Division leaders and last season’s champs. We’ll see how they respond — for their part, the Wizards got blown out last night by the D-Fenders, but I have no idea how they’ll respond.

Addendum: I decided to check on ex-Arsenal player Marcin Gortat, recalled to the Magic (where he apparently has not gotten off the bench), and discovered this amusing widget on the NBA site. Note that it currently reports his PPG, RPG, and APG as “NaN” (aka not a number). I would be pretty offended if I were an NBA player and saw that. Of course, what it really means is that whoever wrote that widget needs to fix their divide-by-zero bug…

On Friday night, the Arsenal triumphed 133-130 over the Colorado 14ers in one of the stranger finishes that I’ve ever seen to a basketball game. The Arsenal forced overtime after trailing for the entire 4th quarter (and almost the entire second half) on a tip-in by Jamaal Thomas after an intentional free throw miss. Then, Kedrick Brown fouled out early in overtime, leaving the Arsenal with only four players on the floor. (The Arsenal only dressed 9 players for the game, had two earlier foul-outs, plus a two-technical ejection of Ivan Johnson, and an injury to Guillermo Diaz that kept him from returning in the game.) Yet, somehow, the Arsenal managed to pull out a win over a team that’s leading the Southwest Division. I’ve never actually seen the situation where a team is forced to play with less than 5 on the floor — I didn’t actually know what would happen in that case, never having tested that in the old standby, videogame basketball.

An exciting win like this, over one of the better teams in the league, gives me hope that the Arsenal can claw their way back to respectability. Granted, they’re still 4 games below .500 and have yet to win on the road, but we’re only about a quarter of the way through the season, so there’s still plenty of time to turn things around. One issue that I’ve brought up before, and which continued to bedevil the Arsenal in this game, is that they are drastically undersized. If you look at the box score, they got absolutely pounded on the boards, and unless they can find some kind of way to play through that, I worry that they’ll continue to give up lots of boards and easy inside buckets.

The Arsenal avenged a loss on Saturday to the Bakersfield Jam with a 119-109 win at home. Even though the box score doesn’t reflect it, I thought this game featured a fairly solid defensive effort from the Arsenal. Ivan Johnson had a monster game, with 27 points on 10-of-14 shooting, and some key steals and contested shots on the defensive end. The Arsenal were up by 17 at the end of the 3rd quarter, but Bakersfield made a bit of a run to get within 7 towards the end of regulation — thankfully the Arsenal held on to win.

One thing that I’ve noticed is that I have yet to see any garbage time in the D-League. Perhaps it’s because of greater parity between the starters and bench than the NBA, but you don’t really see any flood of bench players coming into the game, even if there’s a big score differential. I guess it’s possible that there may have been garbage time in this 134-109 drubbing of the Fort Wayne Mad Ants at the hands of the Iowa Energy, but the 4th quarter scoring seems to indicate that they were still playing for keeps.

Former Bakersfield guard Yuta Tabuse was signed by the Arsenal to take the roster spot of Bryson McKenzie, who was waived due to injury. From reading the transactions page, there seems to be a pattern of players in the D-League getting injured and then later re-signed by the team that waived them — not sure if there is an official injured list or not, but it doesn’t seem like it. The diminutive Tabuse played alright in his 13 minutes — his speed and passing make him more of a playmaker guard than anyone currently on the roster, but it remains to be seen how he’ll fit into the team’s scheme.

The Arsenal finally managed to defeat the Utah Flash tonight, 99-91. While the Arsenal couldn’t stop James Lang (who scored 23 points, mostly down low), he drew his fourth and fifth fouls early in the fourth quarter, and sat down with about 8 minutes to go. (He later returned and fouled out.) The Arsenal stayed out of foul trouble (unlike Monday), shot a decent 48% from the field, and did not yield any big runs to the Flash.

Unfortunately, during the game, Bryson McKenzie was injured on a drive to the basket. Since the game recap is not available as of this writing, I can but speculate that it was either a hyperextended knee or a ligament tear in the knee. There was no contact on the play if I recall correctly — he was leading a break off of a turnover, and, after a few steps, all of a sudden fell backwards clutching his knee as his momentum kept carrying him forward. He was taken off of the court on a stretcher, which is never a good sign.

Right now the Arsenal really lack a defensive presence in the post — Marcin Gortat is back in the Association, and McKenzie was the tallest player left on the roster at 6’10”. I don’t think it will hurt them much in their upcoming game against the Bakersfield Jam, but I think it’s going to be an issue for the rest of the season unless they can pick up another big man.

The Anaheim Arsenal lost to the Utah Flash earlier tonight, 102-90, in a game that was seemingly interrupted by a whistle every 30 seconds or so. There were tons of technical fouls called (some of which were unjustified, in my opinion — the most egregious one being a technical foul on the Arsenal after a Flash player refused to give up the ball following an offensive turnover), and a few close fouls that really took the wind out of the Arsenal’s sails in the 3rd. Unfortunately, the box score doesn’t seem to list the technicals. There was a stretch of five or six offensive possessions in a row in the 3rd that were stopped on Arsenal fouls or turnovers — pretty brutal.

Notable tidbits:

• Utah’s Kevin Kruger shot 1-for-7 yet wound up scoring 17 points, thanks to 15-of-16 shooting from the free throw line. I think he must have taken something like six or seven technical free throws…
• The Arsenal were without the services of Marcin Gortat, who was recalled to the Magic. Gabe Pruitt was back with the Flash after a cup of coffee with the Celtics, but he didn’t get a huge amount of PT.
• There was a huge disparity in assists (21 for Utah versus only 8 for the Arsenal), which surprised me as I didn’t think that Utah’s ball movement was that much better than Anaheim’s.
• Clipper Darrell was there at the start of the game, but didn’t stick around for some reason. Perhaps the Bat-Signal was lit?

Once again I got moved up to courtside (along with my former coworker Adam), which was a nice upgrade. At one point, a ball skipped out of bounds, hit my drink in the cupholder to my right, and flipped it over into the cupholder on my left with only minor splashing — pretty funny!