younggunsmn wrote:Sabonis deserved KAT's spot, he's had a monster season.
This might surprise some of you, but I've come to appreciate Rudy a lot more this season.
The things he does well, he is doing very well this season, and he has brought energy and effort every game and been one of the most composed players.
But this is a league where the guys with the ball in their hands, who make the plays and take the shots, are the ones who decide whether you win or lose, and Rudy is not the kind of player who is going to be able to turn a loss into a win or stop your team from falling apart in the 4th quarter, because he is not that kind of player.
At the end of the day he's still just an A+ role player.
His playoff failures were because the playmakers around him were just not good enough,
and I don't think Ant and KAT are good enough here either.
And that's the big mistake of the Rudy Gobert trade, a year and a half in, is that thinking the guys we already had were good enough for Gobert to be the missing piece, so much so that we were willing to grossly overpay to add him.
If you've got Luka Doncic, maybe it puts you in title contention.
If you've got the dynamic chucker duo, not so much.
We were coming off a horrible playoff series from KAT and Russell and just kept doubling down instead of moving on from the guys who suck when the lights come on.
I disagree with the Rudy commentary.
He can absolutely determine whether a game is won or lost. He may not be the one taking a last second shot to win the game, sure, but we just saw as recently as the OKC game that his defence can shutdown the opponent from doing the same. If you want to argue he's a "role player" in the sense that he's not a well rounded player I could buy that but I'd counter that he's S tier rather than A if we're going down that path.
I'm also surprised you're still parroting those talking points about his playoff "failures". The Jazz teams came up short because their entire defence operated under the expectation that every single perimeter defender was getting beat every time. That worked wonders in the regular season since Gobert is a top 5 defence all on his own but obviously that scheme came up short in the playoffs.
In terms of the rest of our team though, I sort of agree. I think there was an expectation that Ant would be far further along in his development which, in hindsight, was never fair. He's still maturing and that's ok. He can't be something he's not, at least right now. And KAT, to his credit, appeared to have answered a lot of the questions I had going into the season. But if Ant can't "pull his weight" then it cascades down the whole roster.
Anderson's complete offensive ineptitude has been a bigger issue than anything else on the roster at this point as well. If he were even close to his career average from 3, let alone the roughly 40% he had last season, then I think we'd be in a far better place.
