Roscoe Sheed wrote:Batum is definitely a step slow and his 3 point shot is much more inconsistent.
I'm not sure how much Lopez has regressed- he looked ok defensively against Minnesota and he can still shoot. I know his foot speed isn't the best, but he was never a speed demon. I think being a back up center just isn't suited for him as many teams don't really play true 5 in the back up role, so he is left on skates chasing around guys who are 6'9"
Yeah, I agree Lopez hasn’t lost a whole lot … I think the issue is, he didn’t/doesn’t have much to any leeway in that department, so the loss hurts him more. He used to get back to low post enough to rebound once in a while and get some high percentage twos. On offense, he’s exclusively a perimeter because of his speed and quickness issues. He shoots more threes than ever because he doesn’t ever go down low. On defense, he isn’t able to switch down on D, so he’s an awful rebounder for a C now. And, like you said, he can‘t defend on the perimeter. It just seems like he hit a tipping point where what he’s lost has put him a steeper downward slope. We got him to be a backup C, and I guess he’s that … but Zu is one of our best players, Lopez can’t play any other position and like you said, has no hope against small ball Cs. He loses minutes for the last two things—and we want Zu on the court so he loses more time.
I mean, you can just break it down by raw numbers at this point. We’re going to lose DJJ for 400 plus season minutes more than we expected. I wasn’t expecting Beal to be perfect, but I was hoping/expecting for 1700-1800 minutes from him. Same with CP3—he was never going to be a huge minutes guy, but if he had given us a satisfactory 900 minutes, it would have been great. That’s 3000 plus minutes of unexpected losses from high rotation players, and it’s leaving out Kawhi and Bogie and Harden, who are going to miss games. You combine that with the drop-offs for Lopez and Batum--and that’s another 2200 minutes or so—and you’re talking about close to 30% of the team’s overall minutes. When you’re talking about a team that’s led by Kawhi Leonard and James Harden, and even though Harden has both durable and productive so far, you’re on a fine line. You know you’re going to lose those guys for a while, and we’re hurting in the other rotation players. The supposed depth we had is decimated. I don’t think we’re as bad as our record indicates—but I don’t think you can lose 3000 high rotation minutes completely, and have a player dropoff for 2000 more, and figure Kawhi and Harden *only* miss 20-25% of available games. and by anything other than mediocre.