I'm not railing on him, I just wish he could show up for us in big game situations. We're gonna need that from him.
But I think that more than anything getting O'Neal back will help. Gortat should not be playing close to 40 mins a game like he's been doing this season.
How did O'Neal play last night by the way?
The two absolute prerequisite skills that every big man need to be a reliable contributor to any good team are 1) toughness and 2) good hands. As the playoff hunt gears up, the games get more spirited, more competitive, and MUCH more physical. Imagine this completely commonplace scenario: your big man sets a high screen for your point guard and rolls toward the basket; he catches a pass in the paint at about 9 feet from the hoop, and immediately, there are 2 smaller guys swiping at his hands and 1 big man bumping him with his chest. If our big man here is soft, that chest bump is going to throw him off balance, and he doesn't want to travel, so he is forced to put the ball on the floor as he shuffles a bit to regain proper footing; this is when those two smaller guys have the best chance of getting their hands on the basketball - maybe not enough to get a clean strip, but enough that when our big guy tries to pass the ball back out to the wing, the pass is slower and far less accurate than it needs to be, and so instead of punishing the opposition for leaving their primary assignments to converge into the paint, Jared Dudley has to move a bit to catch the ball, and even then it's far from his shooting pocket. Instead of an open three, Dudley now has to make a play, has to make decisions while his defender is right up in his chest, hands and feet active (because remember, this game has playoff ramifications and everyone is working their butts off to get a W).
See, in this case, what our big guy did doesn't seem so terrible. He didn't turn it over, dribble it off his foot, pick up an offensive foul, or miss a contested 9-footer. But he turned what could have been an advantageous situation into a scramble.
