Mark K wrote:So if guys like Jordan are already murdering our ‘loaded’ front court, how does shifting one of them for a wing improve that at all?
Doesn't improve it, doesn't hurt it much either. Because it's not 'loaded' at all, its redundant and wasteful.
Going from 4 pricey bigs to 3 doesn't make you get murdered any more. The 4th big is not protecting us from being lit up in any of these games, because the 4th big is usually sitting on the bench doing nothing.
See, I don’t consider it a luxury. I consider it a necessity. Noah and Gibson have shown this season that they cannot stay healthy. Mirotic has proven he is too inconsistent to regularly handle being a 3rd big. We’ve been lucky that Gasol has barely missed time, which hasn’t been the case over his previous 2 seasons.
Yes, Gasol was a ill fitting signing. And his injury risk on top of Noah forcing us to keep a high priced 4th big will just continue to hold back the rest of the roster for 2 more years if we overly fret on it.
Again, if we were the Phoenix Suns or some other team that employed more small ball line ups, the need for front court depth wouldn’t be as required. That’s not the case though.
Maybe we should become more that kind of team? Our bigs don't win small ball matchups most of the time anyway, because Noah is a throwaway player to guard.
It's not like we are Washington where if you have one slack defense big, we can punish you.
And our own small ball options to match up are garbage because of the way we are built.
Thibodeau traditionally will always play 2 big men. The only time he skews away from that is when he has to out of injury/fouls, like we saw the other game against the Wolves with Gasol sick, Taj injured and Niko fouling.
You have to give the coach a good reason to go smaller, we don't have the talent.
If we had brought in a Tobias Harris, then maybe we would start having more options.
Memphis are doing the exact same thing. That’s the way they want to build their team. They see competitive advantage in that and the organisation has built their team under that model. Are they wrong in doing so?
Like Washington, Memphis has two scoring bigs, Marc and Zbo, both have to be accounted for. They are a mismatch nightmare, we are not. We have Gasol, a jump shooting big at this point in his career (at least where he's efficient) then Noah, who is no threat down low on his own and mostly facilitates from the FT line.
Gibson and Mirotic being around does not change this dynamic. We still aren't a load to handle in the paint even with all 4 bigs.
The Bulls issue is Derrick Rose, his injury and contracts.
No, the Bulls *biggest* issue is Derrick Rose. As I've already said he's about 10m overpaid at minimum.
And precisely because he is is the reason we can't afford to throw 5.5 more million on a 4th big that is inconsequential in over 50% of our games, while we have crap depth behind Butler and Rose.
Yes, we have weaknesses on the wings, of which the FO is betting on Snell & McDermott to fill in due course.
They bet on that this year, and its already failed once. Even though Snell is coming a little finally, that only negates Dunleavy being out, and now Butler is injured.
That just shows you, trying to guess where you have injuries is a fool's errand. This year we've needed depth on the wing as much as with the bigs, but don't have it. So your best bet is just build the most balanced team you can.
Again, as I’ve said before, this team is a player away. It has been since the off season.
Outside of Derrick Rose's health, the reason the team is still a player away is because it signed a duplicating productive big in Gasol when it already had Gibson, and it hardly made the team stronger, because one of our big offseason acquisitions (Mirotic) is mostly a non-factor now, and whenever he's given a chance to play big minutes, he looks perfectly capable of being a rotation player, but isn't allowed to be.
Is he 100% as good as Gibson? Maybe not. Doesn't matter. The downgrade from Taj to Mirotic isn't nearly as big as the upgrade gap in getting even an NBA average wing to help replace the 35-50 minutes of poo-poo platter that has been Kirk, Doug, Snell (early on), Moore, and even at times, Brooks and Dunleavy.
It's overlooked that Brooks and Dunleavy have had their own share of crappy games, despite being decent the rest of the time. If you had another depth option on the perimeter, it would also give you the ability to negate some of the bad games from those two, even beyond replacing the net negative garbage minutes of the other players mentioned.