Kizz Fastfists wrote:Big nick wrote:cjmcallist wrote:I get the allure but disagree. Gafford would clog the lane and bog down the offense.
We play 5-out and Gafford has taken one (ONE!) three his entire career.
Any rebounding he added would be offset by how bad he would hurt us on offense.
Did you not watch our game with Dallas, lob city with gafford he was a beast.
Dallas' offense is built around playing a big body center that lives in the paint. That is why they drafted Lively. OKC's offense runs totally different. You can't stick a traditional center on the court with OKC without drastically changing the offensive playbook unless you want to watch calamity ensue. That is why players like Gafford, Drummond and Claxon were not options. Olynyk would have been the perfect backup to Chet, but Presti is in direct opposition to trying to win a championship as we have seen for a very long time. I feel bad for SGA being stuck on a team that doesn't respect what he represents, a championship window, for three more years. At this point I'm rooting for him to pull a KD and leave when his contract is up. Maybe then the fans will wake up to see the problem is the idiot that doesn't want to bring a championship to OKC not the superstar players that want to win.
That’s just your opinion. You simply don’t know because there wasn’t a capable center in OKC since SGA developed. The proof leaguewide is that a traditional center most definitely is part of the solution. Every other team basically plays one. Boston is a slight exception to the rule and Bucks have a non-shooting Pf in Giannis. Every championship team in the last x years had a nonshooting big on the floor (and I see Aaron Gordon as someone who is not a good volume floor spacer).
It’s not dallas, nearly every offense in the league is basically created through a rim-running big. A guy like Lively or Duren would help immensely in nearly all aspects of the game in comparison with Giddey, while the drawbacks are really rare (the occasional pass and the occasional nonguarded three on a belowaverage percentage).
Guys that consistently score in the 65-70% fg territory with consistent blocks are most of the time just simply very good (Whiteside was an exception to this for instance). If it was as easy, there would be more than a handful of guys capable of doing it (aka Gobert Zubac JarretAllen Gafford Lively for instance).
If you ever played basketball, you know it way tougher to play against a team with a huge center that is tough to box out, gets a butload of offensive rebounds, dunks it after or on alley oops where there’s nothing you can do and then also impacts your offense when you have to swap dunks and layups for floaters or midrange shots. How great would it be if OKC finally had one such guy or perhaps two of them with Chet on the defensive side. Consistent double double guys like that are super valuable. They far outweigh the supposed spacing that just simply isnt there anyway with Dort and Giddey together.
If you want even more food for thought, this year’s team is basically the same as last years apart from Chet. Noone improved dramatically (maybe JWill to an extent) and some even regressed (Giddey). The difference was basically the abovementioned points that Chet provides over last year’s centers - who could also shoot it. It’s called alley-oop threat, a bit more rebounding, a putback here and there, and obviously the shotblocking on defense. That difference is likely to amount to approximately 10-15 wins and around 5ppg/100 improvement in net rating. I’m confident a similar improvement could be further made.
I don’t think SGA, JWill and Chet are iq limited or that they couldn’t get along to play with a rim-running big that also impacts the defense.
