Originally Posted by
Pelicanidae
Okay so I'm going to respond to only a few points in this to try and avoid making a wall of text too large, but hopefully I don't miss out anything major.
Firstly, you say that you're not talking about playing him alongside Zion or Ingram at least right now. Then you ask why he can't get 20 minutes a night as a backup.
Simply put, if you have two high impact offensive stars like Ingram and Zion, there should not be 20 minutes a game where both of them are off the floor. There should always be at least one, and if either of them are on the court it's a waste of their skills and their time to have them stand around watching Okafor post up.
Every NBA player can shoot 3s in an empty gym or in warmups. I have no doubt that, in a vacuum, Okafor can shoot threes. We've all seen him do it. In-game is an entirely different situation; Alvin Gentry is an exceptionally trigger happy coach. If even he doesn't have Jah shooting threes when he had Julius Randle and Terrence Jones doing it, I have to assume that it's because either he doesn't trust Okafor's ability to do it, or Okafor doesn't want to do it. Whatever the reason, his ability to hit threes in the gym has not translated to hitting them in game, and until it does it's a moot point.
Of course scoring is a central component of the game, but you have to realise that good individual offense is not the same as good team offense, and sacrificing the team's offense for an individual is absurd.
Remember earlier in the season when people were so mad that Porzingis wasn't in the post or the paint, and he was out shooting threes? People were very annoyed by it. He's 7'3! Why isn't he at the rim!? His numbers would be so much better if you force-fed him paint shots! What they didn't realise is that the Mavs had the best offense in league history, and a huge part of that was because while it's true that Porzingis individually would have benefitted from being crammed into the paint and being force fed dunks, the team benefitted from having him on the 3 point line providing spacing and stretching the D. It made life easier on his teammates, as well as giving Luka more room to operate as a ballhandler, and limited the ability of the opposing defense to help; if he had been in the paint, his personal points per game might have been up, but the efficiency of the overall machine would have been reduced.
It's a similar process here. Yes, dunks and free throws are analytics approved, but if you base an entire offense around a back to the basket big with no spacing you harm everyone else on the floor and make the offense one-dimensional. That means that it's easier to defend because there's really only one threat. Good offenses stretch defenses out, they don't allow them to compact.
The problem we have here is that you're comparing Okafor with people who have similar physical measurements as him, without really considering the minutiae. You do briefly mention that all those other guys have shown more skills than Jah, but then you kind of just brush that off to move onto the next issue, as though those other skills are not massively important.
Yes, Okafor and Nurkic are both big bodies who aren't massively quick, but Nurkic is a very astute passer and cutter in a way that Okafor just isn't. Yes, Jokic is also 7'0 and hefty, but he's one of the greatest passers in NBA history, is surprisingly quick off ball, and has ridiculous touch from basically anywhere inside the arc; he isn't just locked into the post. Yes, Gobert has little range to his game, but he's a consistent roll threat in a way that Jah isn't, and he's also an incredible defender even in complex actions, which Okafor isn't. Vucevic is a passer and shooter, Porzingis is a shooter with defensive versatility, so on and so forth. All of that matters, and can't just be handwaved away.
You don't have to be super mobile and agile to be playable but you do have to have other skills to compensate if you aren't. Okafor doesn't really, which is an issue.
I know he can score. I know that he would demand doubles. I just don't see that he deals with them well consistently, and beyond the scoring what does he do? He isn't a great passer, can't space the floor, can't defend complex actions, isn't a switchable defender, isn't a mindblowing rim protector, etc etc. Without anything to add to his post game, he's just a guy who gets occasional minutes here and there when it's tenable. Which is what he gets; whenever we're playing a blowout or against a slow paced team with bad paint defense (read: Detroit) he gets minutes. Those are back up minutes in the post, which is what you're asking for. The alternative is wanting him to play regular, large minutes all the time, which is probably a bad call for the reasons listed above.
I'm not saying he couldn't potentially be more, but right now he isn't, and it would be detrimental to the team's offense to play him heavy minutes when there are better players with better skill sets who could use the ball more.