Some of you might be wondering if you can have a Lion Face/Lemon Face post with just three games on schedule. I mean, would there be enough faces to go around?

Ask these guys what they think:

Lion Face: Dirk’s Bounce/Drew Gooden’s Start/Jason Kidd’s Passing
Maybe I should have just typed the Mavericks here but I felt like these three components were the salt of the earth type of aspects to the Dallas win. Drew Gooden’s first quarter was pretty damn impressive. He notched 12 points by making all five of his attempts and he helped the Mavs get out to an early lead. He did a lot of this thanks to Jason Kidd picking apart the Bucks defense with his passing. He ended up with 17 assists but it felt like 19. Hey, isn’t it about time Drew Gooden showed us how interesting and unique he is with facial/body hair? I feel like muttonchops would be the next way to go.

Oh yeah, don’t forget about Dirk’s game-winner:

Lemon Face: Brandon Jennings’ First Half
In the first 24 minutes of this game, he sure didn’t look like the point guard who’s 55-point game stupidly made internet people call him a Top 5 point guard or the next Allen Iverson (both of those assessments are embarrassingly wrong). He wasn’t even the best rookie in the game for the first 24. Jennings shot looked forced and his decision-making was average at best. He also didn’t provide any resistance against Kidd who was Tom Brady’ing the Milwaukee defense. I wouldn’t start handing out hardware just yet, internet; Tyreke Evans still has a place on his mantle for that ROY trophy.

Lion Face: Brandon Jennings Second Half
Actually, maybe Tyreke has a nice candelabra he can put on that mantle. Good lord, Brandon Jennings made this a game! He was lucky that Luke Ridnour came in a played so well in the first half, otherwise he wouldn’t have had a chance to bring this Bucks team back. When Brandon Jennings’ jumper is falling, he’s very hard to guard. In the second half, his shot fell quite nicely. In his final 15 minutes of regulation, he scored 17 points on 6/11 shooting with three three-pointers. In his time on the court other than those 15 minutes, he was -16.

Lemon Face: Gerald Wallace Shot Attempts
When Gerald Wallace takes just five shots in a basketball game against a team like the Magic (not exactly chalked full of shutdown perimeter defenders), it makes me assume he got to the line 35 times. Well, this box score says he went to the line only eight times, which is much less than 35. Okay, so he probably only played 20-25 minutes due to an injury that makes him sound like the poisoned triceratops in Jurassic Park, right? Wrong. He played 46 minutes. That gave me a lemon face.

Lion Face: Josh Smith
When he gives an S about basketball, he’s unstoppable force that impregnates immovable objects. Josh Smith condor’d his way to 16 rebounds and 20 points against a HUGE Portland frontline. He battled Greg Oden for rebounds and won pretty much every time. He took advantage of LaMarcus Aldridge’s LaMarcus Aldridgeness by outworking him for boards whenever the opportunity presented itself. And this alley-oop made my lion face roar:

Lemon Face: Raymond Felton
How in the hell is he a starter? I’m not a D.J. Augustin guy by any means but Felton’s inability to evolve as a basketball player makes me want to be one.

Lion Face: Joe Johnson
There was a certain moment in last night’s game in which Joe Johnson began to celebrate today’s release of Assassin’s Creed. It was called crunch time. Joseph went straight assassinous against the Blazers in the fourth quarter and out-Roy’d Brandon Roy. There were drives against bigger men and step back jumpers against good defense and hands in his face. Much like a plot twist at the end of a Shyamalan production none of it mattered. Joe Johnson proved again that when he wants to be, he’s a Top 10 player in this league… when he wants to be.

Lemon Face: Rashard Lewis
Welcome back from your 10-game suspension – perhaps, you should go back to the performance enhancers. Okay, it’s probably more rust than a lack of female fertility drugs or whatever the athletes are taking these days to hit more homeruns or get through more episodes of Desperate Housewives. But whatever it was, it was not the Rashard Lewis I like to see. He finished just 4/15 from the field, which included missing all six of his three-point attempts. Somebody gets this man some Creatine!

Lion Face: Ronald Murray
True fact: Flip Murray is averaging over 30 points per game in contests in which he’s a teammate of Stephen Jackson on the Bobcats. Flip tried to keep Jax’s debut from being soured by a loss with a 31-point effort from 13/21 shooting. 10 of them came in the fourth quarter in which the Magic let the Bobcats make this game far too interesting. I feel like if you put guys like Flip, Eddie House, and Chris Gatling together in a “random scoring in an NBA game” contest, it would bring about the following scenario:

One More Lion Face: Rodrigue Beaubois/J.J. Barea
For the first half of this game, Beaubois had me spouting off incorrectly worded sentences in French and proclaiming that he was the best rookie in this game (which he was for the first 33 minutes). He caught a nice alley-oop pass on a play the Mavericks seemingly run once a game now to get the rook an easy, crowd-pleasing dunk. And on top of that, you had J.J. Barea with an 11-point second quarter in which he played the pick-and-roll perfectly to free himself up for open shot after open shot.

Perhaps, everybody can answer this question in Twitter form or in the comments: Is Barea actually good or is he just Earl Boykins good?

BONUS UPDATE FROM MATT:

Lion Face: Josh Smith, Al Horford and the rebounding trapezius of wonder!

Before last night’s game began, the Atlanta Hawks should have won easily. The Blazers were at the tail end of a road trip, completely gassed, playing Atlanta at home off a rest day. Then the game began, and going into the fourth quarter, the Hawks should have lost that game. They couldn’t hit water if they fell out of a boat, couldn’t maintain their dribble (14.2% Turnover pct, compared to their 12.9 season average), and Jamal Crawford, their instant offense, was stuck in neutral. But the Hawks seemed to have stumbled onto a new strategy this season for when their shot isn’t falling.

“Hey, if we grab a jillion more rebounds than the opponent, it doesn’t matter how crappy our conversion rate is! WE ARE LEGION, ATTACK THE GLASS.”

And so they did, nabbing a stunning 57% of the boards, compared to a Blazers’ opponent average of 47%, including 34% of the offensive boards compared to the Blazers’ opponent average of 23.3%. Josh Smith had 16 boards, Al Horford had 10, and when those two guys get double-doubles, you’re in serious trouble against the Hawks. If you let those two set the base of the soup, one of the guards, just one of them, is going to come along and drop in the seasonings (Joe Johnson, who would have merited not only a lion face but a NOVA reference, were it not for him taking 31 shots to get 35 points).  Josh Smith had an offensive rebounding percentage of 10%. That was by far the highest on either team outside of Joel Pryzbilla, who of course only played 18 minutes because, you know, why would we play the guy who’s playing better when we have the guy who fouls  a lot? (To be fair, Oden actually played well with 11 and 7, but you’d think at some point Nate would have seen how Al Horford was killing him on the glass). Meanwhile, Horford was tearing it up. People question his ability due to his size, but his rebounding and scoring intelligence is so much higher than most bigs. If he can just keep developing, I think he could be an absolutely crucial part of an Eastern Conference contender.

This Hawks team is something to watch right now. They played ugly as sin for three quarters, but the Blazers couldn’t put them away, and their work on the glass was fun to watch. They make rebounding fun.

Lemon Face: Nate McMillan

It’s games like these that truly worry me. I’ve actually been incredibly impressed with the Blazers after a slowish start. They’ve been pounding teams and Andre Miller looks much better than I expected, despite not really fitting in offensively yet. But last night, McMillan seemed to compound every problem with another, and most seemed borne out of a stubbornness I don’t fully comprehend. Pryzbilla had a low defensive rebound rate, but had a 17% offensive rebounding rate, but only played 18 minutes. Oden was getting out-hustled. One particularly telling sequence was Blake shooting one of many missed threes (we’ll get to him in a sec) from the left corner, which caromed to the far side of the rim (which is what usually happens, I found out thanks to Chris Ballard’s “The Art of a Beautiful Game” which I’ll be driving into your skull over the next week). Pryzbilla, instead of keeping his position inside close to the basket, spun around to the far side and nabbed the glass. There are games where you need that kind of savvy. This was one of them.

Or how about keeping Steve Blake out there, firing away three pointers when he hadn’t knocked one down in what seemed like forever? It’s one thing to keep giving him the shot when Rudy Fernandez is crying out to you “Por favor!” but the defensive liability Blake was creating was just as influential. Johnson used the wings to get where he wanted if Blake was on help-defense. Miller would have shut him off. Again, I desperately WANT Andre Miller to not be good so I can be right and brag to all my friends around our pog game, but I was wrong. The Blazers need Miller exactly for nights like this when the offense runs out of steam.

Finally, what is Rudy Fernandez going to have to do? He finally got minutes last night and was a huge reason the Blazers hung as long as they did. He had a 76% TS% last night. There’s officially a logjam in Portland, but then, we knew that.

I’m mostly pointing out ways that Portland could have won a game that they shouldn’t have been in to start with, so it’s not like McMillan is doing a horrible job. On the contrary, this team’s turnaround can largely be attributed the changes he’s instilled. But I worry down the line about the implications of these things.

Lemon Face: Scott Skiles

I don’t want to say this, but the guy should have told Jennings to cool it a bit late in the fourth. I know, I can’t believe what I’m saying either. I’m giving Skiles a lemon face for NOT being harsher on his rookie. I appreciate the sentiment of letting his players play, but the kid’s got too itchy a trigger finger to just be running half-cocked. I’m not saying he’s not the best option to score. But work some clock in a tight game.

Lion Face: Charlotte Bobcats

Put up 91 points with 31 from Flip Murray the same day everyone is having fun mocking them for the Stephen Jackson trade, nearly knocking off the Magic. I feel bad for this squad. No one gets crapped on more than them, even though Minnesota is a much worse team at this point.

Lemon Face: Orlando Magic

You almost lost to the Charlotte Bobcats on the first night after a major trade. There’s just no points for that.

Additional Lemon Face: Brandon Bass, possession killer.

10 points on 8 shots in 13 minutes, for a team high 29% of possessions. Distribute and contribute, man!