Originally Posted by
Bricklayer
The difference in opinion here might stem from our different perspectives on the Pelicans.
Now I in no way hold up PER as the be-all and end-all of stats. I am going to use it here just because its clean, broadly illustrative of player values, and because what is a "good" or "bad" PER is well established and easy to work with (15 is league average). There are obvious asterisks that are always there, specifically for it not catching the value of defensive specialists and not always accurately valuing roleplayers, but still, here we go. All the Pelicans' PERs from last year (guys who left the team etc. I'll list at the end just to keep the list relevant for current purposes):
Davis 27.5
Cousins 25.9 (23.3 with Pels)
Crawford 17.6
Holiday 17.1
Diallo 16.8 (199 min)
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Ajinca 12.9
Frazier 12.4
Moore 12.1
Cunningham 10.2
Asik 9.8
Hill 8.0
Others:
Goodwin 19.7
Jones 16.2
Evans 15.8
Cook 15.3
Williams 11.7
Galloway 11.2
Stephensen 10.3
Selden 10.0
Casspi 10.0
Hield 9.9
Montiejunas 9.2
Toupane 8.6
Jack 7.7
Brown 5.9
Thompson 4.7
Ok, now for my money all of those players, and all of those minutes, below that dotted line should be in red font. A 12.0 PER guy is at VERY best drab and low tier functional (I should say sans terrific defense). By the time you hit a 10.0 you are talking about seriously unproductive guys chewing up minutes. You get enough guys who are that poor chewing up enough minutes, and you will be a bad team.
In any case, as I mentioned in an earlier post, there are going to be roughly 24 big man minutes a game not eaten up by Davis and Cousins. And that's when both guys are healthy, which given their history, is unlikely to be the whole season. In any case, each team has 48x5 = 240 total minutes a game, so roughly 1/10 of your total minutes are going to be played by non-A.D./Boogie bigs. And while I noted that PER is an abstraction, it's not THAT much of an abstraction, and often bears an uncanny resemblance to what you might arrive upon just watching the games. If you have guys of the caliber of Cunningham, Asik (who BTW years ago when he used to be useful was about a 14-15 PER guy), and Ajinca filling those minutes, then 10% of your minutes are going to inferior subpar players that are costing you points and possessions through bad defense, rebounding, inefficient scoring, whatever.
Again, just using PER, let alone the logic of knowing that Chandler has been a major center and former DPOY/All-Star, Chandler carries to this day a 16.6PER, right on his career of 16.4. It should be an obvious upgrade over the random bodies of the week filling out the Pels roster (if you trusted PER more than I do you could even say a 25%-40% improvement). You could improve 10% of your team's minutes by making that move. That's far from nothing.
The team needs a lot of help. It obviously does need guards. The late season signing of Crawford might be the only piece you'd really be excited about returning. but you would have to show me a realistic proposal where Asik's dead money contract could be used as a base to get any guard of note that would help. To the contrary, I think its a net negative and borderline unmoveable unless you get inventive. My little proposal was not meant to singlehandedly address all of the Pels problems, but it was meant to address something that the numbers suggest is A problem. Eliminate it, and maybe you need to be a little less perfect with your guard moves, and you stiffen up the interior defense to such a degree you don't end to find as many scorers the other way.