esqtvd wrote:As for KL and Beard, not tired as much as old. Barkley said,when he was 35 he could still have a great game, but then he hurt for a week. Clippers gave it all in Game 6, I think. No feels in the wheels. Batum, especially. I knew he'd be empty.
I still say you're going to get more NBA-quality basketball out of late 20s retreads than a mid-20s never-was like Kobe and Miller. 26 next January. If they don't got it by now, they never will. And KPJ was a good dice roll. Dunno why they dumped him but the funny part is they everybody here hated him.
Yeah … and this is also the problem with the “Rest the old guys until the playoffs!” idea. You get 34 year old plus players that play a lot of minutes in the post season and have some games where they look, well, young. But it get fewer and farther between as age goes up—and even in playoffs. Look, I’m not excusing Harden, who (again!) largely did an El Foldo in Game 7 against Denver. But—well, he did put up 21-5.5-8.5 on 45%/35% shooting splits in the first 6 games. That’s more than okay. He also averaged 40 minutes per game and played 46 minutes in Game 6. That's not okay. He had his tired game at the wrong time—although there were plenty of others with (IMO) fewer excuses.
And I agree about the 30 year old retread usually (key word, but correct here) being better than a 25 year old low rotation guy you hope "develops." By 25, the number of low rotation players—guys that have never played 1000 minutes in a season, or shot over 45%, or have played less than 200 games total in their careers—that become viable NBA players is really low. So low that it’s not a workable strategy to try to “improve” them. The chances aren’t good, and the ceilings are too low. You don’t get enough winners. It’s important to distinguish between players like that and guys that played well for extended periods. I got the fact that we traded KPJ …. Wasn’t a 100% in favor of it, but I go it … but I was baffled when we acquired him by the number of people that referred to him as a “retread” or a “never was.” This is a guy that had dozens of 20 point games before he was 22. Not “a few!”—dozens. Sure those were on poor teams, but you have been able to succeed in the NBA for an extended period as a younger, still developing player. To me, the issue isn’t trying to “develop” a guy who hasn’t done much of anything.
It’s to find guys that have had some success but may have a reason for a dropped trade asking price.* It’s why KPJ was worth throwing an offer to. Same with Ben Simmons. KPJ is going to continue to be a productive NBA player. Whether he’s going to be a starter or a #8-#9 guy is a question (it’s probably the latter) but he’s got a good chance of sticking around and playing a good number of minutes. I don’t that’s true of Kobe Brown or (sorry) Jordan Miller.
*This is why I keep talking about Saddiq Bey. A guy on another forum dismissed my idea to pursue him by saying “he’s had a career threatening injury and never really did anything.” The truth is that he had a serious but common injury that he could have come back from this season, but the Wiz didn’t want to play him. And as for the “never really did anything part”—292 games, 223 starts, nearly 9000 minutes and over 4000 points in the NBA, all before he was 25. That’s the type of guy you take a flyer on. He’s not “developing”—he’s there. He’s likely to be rusty because of the injury. That makes him acquirable. Those are the types of players we should hope to get breakouts from.
For about one week per month we'd have the most fun to watch NBA team of the last decade, about a half of the time we'd tread water with one out due to guns or weight or something, and we'd be completely atrocious one week out of the month when both were out.
