nate33 wrote:I think he ultimately pans out as a journeyman 5th guard, or if he improves a bit more, he might find a niche as a regular-rotation backup SG.
His modest improvement this season is helpful. He might move out of the "detrimental to the team" category and into the "modestly helpful backup scorer" category. He is no where near making himself an indispensable player though. He'll probably never reach a point where he can't be replaced by some other easily-attainable free agent.
What is important is that he has have been with them 1 full ( strike shortened ) season and a part of one his first year. In his second full season with the team, he is improving and if you look at his numbers year over year since he got in the league, they are improving. His defense is getting better.
In a short sample size this year, he seems to be trending the right direction. And I can visible see it to confirm the numbers.
I was never a huge Crawford fan but I did see his value to the team. With his play so far this year, he is slowly making me more and more a fan. But while I had questions about him, I thought he was their best choice for PG until Wall returned.
Given what they had to start this year, I thought they should have put the ball in his hands and let him run the team as the starting PG. He is clearly their most talented guard with Wall out and Beal being a 19 year old rookie.
I think the team made a huge mistake wasting time looking at players like Price and Pargo. They wasted all of preseason on this experiment and it slowed the development of the other players. All they needed to do what start Crawford at PG and let Mack back him up until Livingston became available. What they should have been doing was looking for better options at SG and to do that all they needed to do was resign Mason. Adding Price was stupid. Now they are stuck with him for a year before they cut him. And they wasted time putting the ball in his hands at PG. All they needed to do was this.
Crawford/Mack
Beal/Webster/Mason
Then with Livingston who we could all see was most likely going to became free.
Crawford/Livingston/Mack
Beal/Webster/Mason
Then when Wall returns
Wall/Livingston/Mack
Crawford/Beal/Mason - two good teachers. One about swag and driving. One about spot up shooting.
Trevor A//Webster/Singleton
When your trying to craw out of the gutter, you have to be smart and efficient in your moves. You don't have time to screw around on a player like Price when you have player who have played here that are better. This blunder I put squarely on EG. Moves like this are his responsibility because they are smaller moves that Ted turns to him to decide. So he made two good moves in getting Webster and Livingston but he blow it by adding Price and Pargo into the mix when he didn't need to. And had he not screwed around with those two, it would have been way easier to add Livingston as soon as he was available for game one. And resigning Mason was a no brainer. He wanted to be here. He was even talked about as a future front office person. How do you blow something that simple.
Now, by the time this plays out, we will now have.
Wall/Livingston/Price
Crawford/Beal/Martin/Price
Trevor A//Webster/Singleton
So we have Price and Martin instead of Mason. Not a huge difference in the end, but how things played out game by game with price and the PG battle over preseason has lead to a terrible start to the year. In my view it has been wasted time and loses. Maybe it works out for them in the longer term picture. To do that Martin has to prove to be better then Mason. If so, they would have added a 26 year old 6-1 SG with some handles and kept a 6-7 3 pt shooter who might have a role longer term.
The smarter safer move would have been to keep Mason and use Webster at SG when needed. That is what I called for.
We could have started the year with
Crawford/Livingston/Mack
Beal/Webster/Mason - actually, I might of even started Webster or Mason depending on the preseason.
Trevor A/Singleton//Webster
That turned into
Wall/Livingston/Mack
Crawford/Beal/Mason/Webster
Trevor A//Webster/Singleton
Its the little things that make all the difference.
Once Wall returns and we end up at the follow, they will be fine, but they will have wasted another year getting there.
Wall/Livingston/Price
Crawford/Beal/Martin/Price
Trevor A//Webster/Singleton
Price is going to end up the 3rd PG and the 3rd or 4th SG. Why are they wasting so much time playing him in preseason and to start the year ? Things are going to look better. They did address there back up PG issue and they did add a young SG to replace Nick. They also upgraded at SF. They do have a better roster. This was just a ass backward way to get there.