Chaos Revenant wrote:I could see Washington overachieve (as in accidentally luck into the playin) if a few things happen, not all high likelihood events, but all of them are things that could reasonably happen.
- Last year was a fluke for Poole, 2021-2022 was his real baseline, and he realizes more upside beyond that. If you get the version of Pool that GSW got whenever Curry was out, that's a pretty good SG in the NBA. Like I mentioned in the other thread, it's not out of the question that Poole > Beal if you think 2022 is closer to his real baseline.
Basically Poole giving 70-80 games of say, 25/5/5 with only below average defense.
- Deni becomes neutral on offense and maintains/improves his defense. A Deni that is average offensively is an NBA starter and can push Kuzma to the 6th man role to feast on 2nd units.
- Kispert and Davis build upon their strong finishes to last season - Davis improves on defense while not being completely unplayable on offense, and Kispert evolves from merely a spot up shooter to a 3 point shooting guard/wing with some level of creation ability. Bonus if he can be average on defense. Interestingly, Klay Thompson has the exact same wingspan as he does.
- Jones is a significant upgrade over Morris and makes the offense run more smoothly.
Agreed. I was a bit more pessimistic when I thought that Poole was just a low efficiency chucker with terrible defense. If he was our best offensive weapon, I was sure we'd be a bottom 4 team.
But now that I've run the numbers to see that Poole is actually an almost serviceable first option scorer, there is at least the possibility that he improves a little bit to become a totally respectable first option scorer (though certainly not elite). If that happens, and if Avdija improves his 3-ball to the 35% range so that he is average on offense and good on D, then suddenly the team might not be in the bottom tier of teams (Detroit, Portland, maybe San Antonio) and instead vault into the next tier of halfway decent teams fighting for the play-in (Indiana, Toronto, Brooklyn, Houston, Orlando). I don't even think they need much improvement out of Kispert - just the expected modest improvement one sees from a player going into his 3rd year.
Basically, all it would take is for Poole to replace Beal's production, and for incremental improvements from Deni, Kispert and Jones to make up for the loss of Porzingis.
Frankly, I'm a little concerned about this. I would very much like to jettison all of our veteran depth (Shamet, Wright, Gallinari) to make sure that we are totally unable to withstand injuries. Ideally, we play like a 35-win team when everyone is healthy, but normal injuries coupled with terrible depth bring us down to 26 or so wins for the season.
& fun too... weirdly!
