madmaxmedia wrote:It's always tempting to try to create conclusive narratives off a small stretch of games, but hey that's fandom and part of the fun.
Bye and bye we are getting better, no question. The big question will be how good can we get, and if we can find another significant trade over the course of the year to balance our roster. It would be incredible to kill 2 birds with one stone and get some front court value back for Norm, and simultaneously free up a rotation spot for Bones. I'm not against Norm individually at all, this is nothing like a Mook situation, but we need more youth and balance in the rotation.
I don't know how James' season averages will settle out out, whether he will end up near a 21/11/6 like he was last year in Philly. He's now all crafty with minimal explosiveness, but that was already the case last year. It does seem like he doesn't feel the pressure to try to score 30 points every night as this team learns how to play together. That's a good thing.
It would also be a huge bonus if Kobe gradually develops into a regular rotation player for us over the course of the year. I get the impatience about him not getting a chance earlier, but we are so early in the season. As a rookie he is still learning to catch up to NBA play and do all the right things, we all see the potential for this though so fingers crossed.
i think i agree with all of this.
- norm powell has pretty much been at peak NORMAL POWER all season and it makes me feel really yucky to even want to trade him, as the last couple seasons i've considered him rather indispensable. but now with bones showing he's up for the task (heh), and considering our lineup imbalance, it's clear that NP's our best asset and the one that kinda needs to be moved. or, if not him, then pray a team that's not going anywhere right now loves bones enough that they're willing to trade a "right now" piece for a "maybe later" piece. like, how much better do we feel with a herb jones type defender in place of powell? it's hard not to think about. and it sucks because it wasn't all that long ago that trading for powell and covington felt like the end-game trade we'd all been waiting for.
- i'm not sure how harden's gonna look by end of season either, and if he actually achieved those numbers i'd think we should all be thrilled. but of course, it's about basketball on the court and less so about the numbers, so i'd wanna ask: how do we feel about what he's doing for the team right now in terms of the good and bad things? i think we can see the positive impact he's having on offense for sure in terms of facilitation. and it's not like he's decrepit and long, long past his prime in terms of scoring/shooting. that's still there and that's a great thing for us. but not just that, it's pretty clear he's still figuring himself out in terms of fit as well as conditioning. at some point i do think things will click for him and he'll just be a really consistent scorer and we'll be much better off. and on defense of course he's still james harden-level meh but in a way that's a good thing, because while it's weird to say, he's kinda underrated on defense, has been throughout his career, and he still is giving us some good defense and effort (at least more than we should expect). i think there's a LOT left on the table we're not getting yet, all things considered.
- agree about brown. he looks NBA-ready (as someone mentioned earlier in the thread). i mean i'm not quite sure at all how much he'll do for us, but he doesn't look super raw/lost the way diabate unfortunately does. he's a big body, a need, and when he took and missed that 3 last night it felt like the "right" shot in that it was smart, timely, and the thing this team needs from that spot at that juncture of the game.
all-in-all, out of all the feelings i think i could have up to this season and including denver's game, i'm maybe a notch or two beyond cautiously optimistic. if you asked me after the loss, i'd have quietly said "yeah this is pretty terrible, but there's like a 90%+ chance we come out stomping the next team in the next game, and there's maybe less than a 2% chance we'd have a similar effort, implying we'd need to fire lue or blow things up." like it sucked but i wasn't SUPER worried because if you've followed the NBA for a long time, you know you're just gonna have extremely weird games where extremely bad things happen that it feels like you can do nothing about - and conversely, games where you can't do anything wrong and you make the other team look like they're in the wrong league. so given that we cleared that hurdle of maybe the team actually gave up on lue, i feel like we're back on track and we mostly only have good things to look forward to.
