Vae Victus wrote:After watching Batum play for a season while following Lin in CHA, he's a nice 3rd option type, like he was during the LMA/Dame/Batum era, but as a 2nd fiddle, he's quite lacking.
His defense is lazy, always fighting little niggling injuries that prevents him from playing 100%, not much of a crunchtime scorer (too slow), inefficient, and he got PAID despite putting up a pretty meh season. CHA thought having Batum for another year would lead to improvement, instead they slid back down into the high lotto treadmill cuz quite frankly he's NOT a good #2.
He's basically a point forward as there's no chance he can chase around decent SGs on the perimeter (but then MKG is a hyper elite defender so thats not a huge deal), i thought he'd be a better shooter, but when he went into main option mode he wasnt. Can be a BRILLIANT passer but he's very high risk high reward. It is however indisputable that he's helped Kemba Walker GREATLY the past two seasons, being the secondary ball handler and helping space the floor thereby allowing Kemba to get OFF. Honestly i never thought he had it in him, hell i thought Lin coudla EASILY taken his lunch and starting spot when he signed there, until suddenly Kemba went super saiyan.
Kemba went OFF this year, they got Michael Kidd Gilchrest healthy, most of the rest of the team is back intact with some decent young pieces in Kamisky and Lamb. They did suffer some major losses in Al Jeff (he's like BroLo great scorer, terribad defender, team took off when he went to the bench), Courtney Lee who did a GREAT job as a 3D wing, and of course Lin who led their bench mob and put up some gaudy stats when he was allowed to start and freelance in the offense.
Batum's upside is pretty much reached and he's a very limited player in many ways. A nice piece to have but not at 25 mil a year. The team woulda been better off just giving Lee/Lin that money instead. Lee starts at the 2, MKG at the 3, Lin as super 6th man. More shooting, more defense, and a bench sparkplug. But alas they felt Batum was indispensible.
Better off going after Porter, Hill, and Milsap for that money. Maybe even KCP, there might be some upside left in him to tap into.
Totally agree with you on Batum and I'd even take it further by stating Charlotte would had been better off paying Lin the11M/per to start alongside Kemba and let Batum go..That would had saved them 10+M to go after another max contract player like Hayward this summer...And I truly believe Hornets would had made the playoff with Lin.
Lin could had done exactly what Batum is doing while guarding the weaker opposition wing since MKG could guard the tougher wing...Lin probably would had averaged more than Batum 15ppg on 34 minutes and you would had gotten a good amount of assist from Lin if he was to be given the same duty that Batum gets handling the ball to let Kemba move off the ball.
Also, Charlotte over-rated MKG defense to the point where they believed his defense alone was worth 5-10 wins thus allowing Lin to leave thinking it was no big deal...Of course, the problem with that is that MKG is a liability on offense and can't shoot, so whatever you got defensively, you gotta subtract what you don't get on the offensive end of the ball.
My preference was for Lin to re-sign with Charlotte as the SG-facilitator beside Kemba but knew it was never going to happen because of their ridiculously high valuation of Batum and MKG.
