DeeDub wrote:mopper8 wrote:DeeDub wrote:
You think? My take was that they couldn't really fit Oden into the system. It seemed like they got him for the Hibbert matchup, gave him that start against Indy and he struggled, and they yanked him for the remainder of the season practically. I assumed the injury excuse was bogus -- the timing just suggested to me that they realized he wasn't going to give them what they expected and then found him pretty useless. Do you have strong info to suggest they did really like him and see him as part of the future?
Riley had a quote in, I think, the end-of-the-season press conference that they had a specific plan in place to have him start for at least the remainder of the regular season as I recall, but on a minutes restriction...8-10mpg basically as a token starter. What I took from it was that they liked him and were developing him for next season
Yeah, I heard that but didn't take it too seriously. Maybe because it didn't fit my preconceived impression.
It also seemed to me that they were going away from some of the stuff they do defensively that requires lots of lateral quickness from the bigs. In the 2nd half of the season they started trapping less in the middle of the court and doing more sagging and such, and it was pretty effective at times. Zach Lowe has a nice write-up back in Jan or Feb about how we basically shut Indy down playing a less-hyper version of our D for an entire 4th quarter. So it seemed like what we were doing was evolving in a way that made Oden a more natural fit anyway. Certainly he can lurk along the baselines on offense like Birdman does just fine and sets a nasty a screen, the question is defensively whether he makes sense, since that is what brings to the table anyway.