. |
I definitely liken Herb to Scottie Pippen and won't take that back.
Not there yet offensively but it took Scottie a year also.
We could of had maxey instead of kira...i know dae was high on maxey
We can't be fatalistic on Kira. I'm not super bullish on him either, but he's 20. We gotta be patient.
I mean, I think you're being facetious to a degree, but your not wrong. Point Zion is and always was a work in progress. Albeit a work in progress that produced a top 5 offense for months before we were decimated by injuries, but nonetheless. It's not like he doesn't already have the foundation for serious growth as a playmaker.
Also, most guy's aren't finished products at 21. They don't just have everything figured out as young pups. Even superstars. Give him some time to grow before you can him for not being a professional or whatever. His story isn't finished 3 seasons in.
Last edited by Funcrusher; 10-23-2021 at 11:53 PM.
Yep, that's what happens when the shooting falls off.
First two games we were shooting extremely well overall as a team. Hell, even the first quarter of this game we were shooting well, it's why we were still in it despite 8 turnovers.
After that we cool off. NAW and Graham have a bad shooting night. Turnovers continue: 28 of them, BI with 7 and NAW with 5 despite the two of them only combining for 6 assists. 40 attempts from 3 despite shooting sub 25% overall on the night.
15 minutes from Garrett Temple for some unholy reason, despite the fact that outside of the 3 he hit about 30 seconds after getting on court, he was doing nothing for the majority of those minutes.
Good night from Jonas and BI, but that's about all you get.
This is a team that is clearly missing their identity and an adapted game plan. I get that Zion isn't here and yeah he's a huge part of what you would plan, would completely shift things for everyone else, etc etc, but you do have to try some adjustments to compensate for him. He'll be back but not for another 2 weeks at least, can't just go 0-12 until then and wait to figure it out.
Basketball.
You're not going to win in the NBA with so many tournovers ...
You can see the progress in defense, you can see the fight and this team heart, but we HAVE to reduce the amount of TO….
I find it wild that we're supposed to assume that point Zion is a ''gimmick'' that doesn't work when we had a fairly large sample size of it working extremely well for both Zion and everyone else on the court around him.
Zion drives and passes, when given those opportunities, better now than Giannis did at age 25, and we're expected to just drop it because it's a ''gimmick'' regardless of the result? Nonsense.
Ultimately you want your best player to have at least some "point" in them as they are going to have the ball a lot. Zion actually has really good play making skills far ahead of most NBA players especially given his play style. That IMO was the most underrated part of his game leaving Duke.
I know. I've even heard the argument made that Zion is a ball stopper and that he's lazy off ball, which is funny because that's a literal antithesis to his game.
It's just weird. Not to mention I keep hearing the sentiment among fans/pundits that Ingram or NAW are the two most offensively talented/skilled players on the team, and, no offense to them, I love those guys, but it's just not true. Our best player is our most talented player, and short of BI turning into peak T-Mac (which imo isn't totally impossible but highly improbable), that's not going to change soon.
There is just such an inherent attachment to archetypes in basketball, that seems to permeate all manner of discussion, and Zion just seems to go against many of the popular ideas of what is most valuable as a skillset, and who it comes from. Rim gravity is nice, but being an offensive superstar is all about "3-level scoring" and/or running super heliocentric offenses. I mean, most people wouldn't even consider it, but Zion was arguably the best scorer in the league last year, and it sort of just not recognized, at all.
Zion is very arguably the best player in the league at generating and scoring on the best, most efficient shots in basketball. The only other guy in NBA history who has been as effective as Zion in terms of combining volume and efficiency is prime Steph Curry. That's not exaggeration, that's not hyperbole: the combination of points per 100 and TS% Zion put up last year was historic and the total number of seasons in NBA history where anyone has rivaled it can be counted on one hand with fingers left over.
Combine that with increasingly good playmaking (as da Throne mentioned above, it's a very under discussed aspect of his game which was visibly improving with experience) and the fact that by the end of the year, his defense had actually become pretty okay, there's a legitimate argument that Zion was on pace to be a top 12 player in the NBA this season. He finished last year as a top 20 player.
No disrespect to BI, who is a deserving all-star calibre player, or NAW who has made good growth and is blossoming in front of our eyes, but acting like either of those two players are on Zion's level is just a little bit silly to me.
The reality is that we're not a good team right now, and we might never get to be a good team, but we're certainly not going to look our best missing Zion. There's just no way, what he gives this team cannot be replicated by anyone else on the roster - and the only players in the entire league who could replicate it are past MVPs (Giannis, arguably, Steph as well though he does it from outside instead of the paint).
Other teams suffer the same.
2018-19 Warriors without Curry were a sub .500 team, despite still having Klay/KD/Draymond on the roster. They went 5-8 in those 13 Curry-less games.
This year's Clippers are currently 0-2, and have looked rough as hell at times, largely because without Kawhi they lack an identity.
Last season, the Sixers went 10-11 in the 21 games Embiid didn't play, despite having a solid and fairly deep roster. They went 39-12 in the games he did play.
In the 2015-16 season, the Cavaliers won the NBA championship. In the 6 games they played that year without Lebron, they went 1-5.
As shocking as it may seem to some people, when you take a team and remove their best player, the guy that everything was built around, that team becomes bad. Even if there are still good players on the roster, even if there are still all NBA and allstar players on that roster. There are a number of reasons we aren't good right now and we can debate and discuss them but ultimately the biggest issue we have right now is that there's a top 20 player on this roster who isn't playing right now, and that throws the entire team into a spin.
When Zion returns and this team still loses more than it wins, what will be the reason given? Refs against the team? The rotations (an old fan favorite)? The budget deficit? Covid after effects? Vaccine after effects? Global warming? I am dying to know!
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)