80sballboy wrote:nate33 wrote:dckingsfan wrote: Reminder, next year the Wizards have no draft picks... so there is that for getting younger.
We will have a pick if we miss the playoffs... a likely scenario.
We still aren't better than:
Milwaukee
Boston
Philly
Miami
Atlanta
Toronto
Chicago
and I'm not sure we are better than Charlotte, New York, Brooklyn, or Cleveland either. Heck, Detroit might be better than us.
Wishful thinking, but I'd like to see how this thing plays out. We'll see. The Nets are a mess. The Knicks have Brunson-BFD. Cleveland has a scary frontcourt. Detroit is probably a year away from being in the playoff picture. We won 35 games last season with Beal playing 40 games and I know he played well below his norm before the injury. We don't have a CP3 or a Ja, but the combination of Morris and Wright is inherently better than any combo of Neto, Ish, Dinwiddie (until he was traded) and Sato, who was probably the best of a bad lot. Deni should improve and Kispert should shoot close to 40% from 3pt after getting used to the pro line, though who knows how much he plays. Adding Davis (again playing time?), Wright and Morris make the team better defensively and they are pretty good three-point shooters (another issue for years). Then you add Porzingis, who hopefully plays 65-70 games (maybe a stretch) and shot 37% from beyond the arc. He played just 17 games. We had Thomas Bryant trying to play defense for most of the season at the 5. Not saying this is a 50-win team, but they could certainly win 42+ games. That might still just be good enough for the play-in game. Trade for Collins and we could move up to top six.
Depth at the point, defense, improved three-point shooting. Porzingis playing with Beal. Kuzma and Barton will be tradeable assets. I like the moves, but Tommy has to hit a home run or at least a triple for one of his four draft picks for this team to get out of the mud.
The bottom line is that outside of PG, the only real changes made were Barton + Davis in place of KCP, and I don't see that as an upgrade, at least not while Davis is a rookie.
We got some depth at PG, but neither Morris nor Wright were better than what Dinwiddie did early in the season, or what Sato did late. They're merely an improvement for the 25 or so game stretch in the middle of the season when Neto was getting big minutes.
The biggest reason for optimism is the hope that this Porzingis thing is real and the he is, in fact, a top 30ish player like he was for 19 games with us last season. If he can do that for 70 games, and if Beal's plummet in production last season was an aberration (which may or may not be the case), then I can see 43 wins.
But still, that's no guarantee of the playoffs. The East got real good this summer. Murray joining Atlanta makes them a top 6 team. Cleveland and Toronto are a year older with a year more experience. Chicago should be healthier. And the top 4 teams (Boston, Milwaukee, Philly, Miami) should experience little drop off except for Miami, but they're not dropping below us.