Braggins wrote:catch20two wrote:Diop wrote:Zeller has really regressed this year, it’s sort of weird
I don’t know about regressed. The advanced numbers still fancy him and he’s about on par with his career best raw stats.
Just the level of competition at the center position has improved with the growth of players like Embiid, KAT, and Jokic down to the more defensive minded ones like Gobert, Capela, and Adams.
His lack of size and length just get exposed whenever the intensity is ramped up.
Hes a poor man to man defender in a lot of matchups now, but he still has a lot of defensive value because of his team defense. Hes smart, covers a lot of ground for a center, and can actually challenge shots pretty well against guards and wings.
Our perimeter defense is also terrible and puts Cody (and also MKG/Marv) in a lot of bad situations. Teams don't have much trouble penetrating against us. Also our guards/wings don't make it difficult for teams to feed the post, which shouldn't be easy to do against modern defensive schemes.
He’s a poor man to man defender against any big that has a offensive repertoire. The perimeter defenders are so used to ‘digging’ to help Cody from the Clifford days that they still do it by habit. I’m not even concerned about his man to man defense that much because in this league if a player know how to score at a high level then there’s not much you can do to stop it. You can only hope to contain them from having big scoring outputs above their averages.
What bothers me about Cody is the fact that he can’t keep these guys off the offensive glass. Cody really struggles in the rebounding area. I want to believe that this hurts our ability to get out in transition since we have to rebound by committee. But that’s just an assumption.
