KAT v Boogie

[Laimbeer]

Current KAT or peak Cousins?

[Dr Spaceman]

I’d take KAT, personally at this point. Although it’s hard because Cousins’s best offensive seasons are his worst defensive seasons.

[Johnny Firpo]

Kat is a much much better scorer, that's for sure.

[limbo]

KAT's an assassin on offense. Man is averaging 23.5 ppg on 63%TS excluding his rookie year (which was still a good season), those are unprecedented numbers, especially for someone this young. His passing is improving gradually as well. 40% three point shooter. Needs to get to the line a bit more, imo. He almost led a Top 10 offense last year with nothing. Derrick Rose and Dario Saric, 22 games of RoCo.

Boogie scored a lot but was never close to being as efficient as KAT, and he's also more turnover prone and was consistently plagued by injuries and attitude problems. KAT missed like 5 games in 4 seasons so far. Boogie might be better defensively, but not nearly enough for me to make up the difference.

To me, KAT is probably the best player in the league that's still playing on a garbage team. Mostly every other all-star has find a way to surround himself with at least SOME talent, while KAT is going into next season with who? Teague, Okogie, Jordan Bell, Dieng and of course the human black hole Andrew Wiggins... They might have well signed Anthony Bennett too... I have no hope for KAT in Minnesota, man, he needs to leave ASAP, he's not getting into the playoffs there, let alone anything else.

[E-Balla]

Boogie. I think Spaceman is right to say his best offensive years are his worst defensive (outside of I think 2015? or whichever season he was with Mike Malone and playing great) years but he's still better than KAT in them.

I'd say all of 14-17 Cousins are over KAT last year. People love his offense, but forget he's the worst defender in the league. And they're brought in so many people to help fix him with no luck. RoCo, Jimmy, KG, Deng, Thibs, Taj... Like if he can't learn from them he's hopeless.

I think Minny is to blame for Wiggins but outside of that they've put enough around KAT. Its easy to point out how horrible his cast is offensively but how about how great they are defensively? Okogie, RoCo, Culver, Vonleh, and Jordan Bell are all impact players on that end. Last year Okogie, RoCo, Jimmy, Tyus, Taj were all impact defenders in the rotation.

I don't know KAT is close. So close. All he needs to do is completely relearn defense from scratch. Offensively he's one of the best C's I've ever seen and clear 3rd best right now under Davis and Jokic.

[limbo]

I'd like to wait for a larger more reliable sample size in regards to KAT's defense. Not that i think he's good, but he's been playing with some horrific defenders so far in his career, including Wiggins, LaVine, Crawford and Rose, some of the worst i've ever seen. Not even KG could've carry these guys defensively... And besides, we're comparing KAT to Cousins here, who himself is nothing special defensively. In Sacramento his teams were constantly among the worse in the league, in NOLA he had Davis, Holiday, Rondo so a good cast, but didn't overachieve defensively with it or anything.

As for some of the help KAT got. Butler is good but not an anchor defensively and he clearly couldn't be bothered after seeing how pathetic everything was at Minnesota (and he played less minutes than Deng last season for Minny, which means he was pretty much a non factor). RoCo played like 20 games with the team (only slightly more minutes than Jared Bayless... let's not pretend he could leave a huge imprint). Gibson is old and only slightly above average now. Okogie is too raw. Dieng is solid, but he's a role bench played that's like 10th in MPG for the team. Tyus is not good.

Overall, his key teammates were usually terrible defensively, so i'm not surprised the results were what they were. Having an disinterested Butler, and 1000 minutes of Dieng and 33-year old Taj Gibson isn't enough for me to say ''KAT HAS HAD GOOD HELP, IT'S ON HIM THAT THE DEFENSE IS BOTTOM 5 IN THE LEAGUE.

[AdagioPace]

*"brought to you by Regular Season Wonders co."

[bledredwine]

Boogie.

KAT’s lack of competitive drive drives me nuts. At least Cousins had the potential to dominate other competitive centers. His offensive game and dominant rebounding really reminded me of Barkley. I’m on team Jimmy Butler when it comes to KAT’s attitude. He’s such a crappy defender and in a competitive playoff series, I’m convinced that prime Boogie would do a better job.

That said- as a fan, DMC has disappointed me quite a bit as well.

[LKN]

I'm not sure KAT is outright terrible on defense... but yeah - he's not good for a big man. His DRPM (147th in the league) last year was the same as Steph Curry's (grain of salt for DRPM and all that). It was at least positive at 0.84.

He was ranked 52nd out of 70 Centers.


He is really, really good offensively. He needs to be at least "good" on defense like say Jokic. Jokic is no Gobert, but he's a clear net positive on defense (19th among centers with a 2.59 DRPM)