EvanZ wrote:There are a couple other assumptions people are making that I think are wrong. The first is that he can increase his 3pt volume arbitrarily without losing efficiency. They think he can just take more of the open shots he’s turning down. The faulty logic there is the counterfactual that as his volume goes up the defenses won’t adjust. Of course they will. Kuminga is left open because defenses know he can’t hurt you. Same with Podz. That might change but defenses will adjust. There are only a few players in the league that can shoot a high volume of 3s and remain efficient. You can count them on one hand probably. Is Podz one of those? I hope so but that certainly isn’t a certainty. The other implicit assumption is that as his usage goes up he will not be hurt on the defensive end. But you should know that guards with high usage invariably give up some defensive energy to conserve themselves on offense. Podz would be no different. This has been notably obvious with guys like Halliburton and Fox recently.
1st assumption. I agree getting his volume up will be difficult. I think he can get up to 5 comfortably but once you get pass 5 then the defense starts taking that away, which is fine because really he wants to drive and kick anyway. So if he can get anywhere above 5 and maintain his efficiency then that's a win for year 2. Him getting to 8-10 like Kerr wants is probably unrealistic but it's a nice goal to reach at some point. TBH I don't think he ever gets to 10.
I don't think he's going to be a high usage guard. He's not going to be asked to take over primary creation for large parts of the game. 18 min when steph sits, but they're still going to run offense through Kyle, hopefully TJD, Dray, Melton. Like there's a lot more decision makers on this team now. We know we'll run a lot of offense for JK and Buddy is going to get shots up. He should probably settle somewhere between 3rd or 4th most shot attempts but it's not like we're going to give him the ball and ask him to make a play down the court on every possession like Hali or Fox do. So yea it would be difficult to do, but he knows that when he's playing with Steph he's guarding the toughest perimeter assignment and he just needs to hit open shots and attack closeouts. When he's not playing with Steph he's still running the offense, we aren't going to go 1 flat and just have him iso the entire possession. He will probably end up with the ball in his hands more often but he's still going to have to go through jk isos, Buddy running around screens and then if the play falters maybe make a play. It's not the same as the high usage guards you're citing.
