Note30 wrote:wolves_89 wrote:I think people are sleeping on just how much of an improvement to the bench the team did this offseason. Replacing the 4400 minutes the team gave Nowell, Prince, Rivers, McLaughlin, and Forbes with Milton, NAW, Brown, and Anderson (takes Princes SF minutes) is a truly massive upgrade.
Prince and Brown are about the same. Anderson already played big minutes last year. NAW was also on the team last year. McL is probably keeping his minutes.
We replaced Nowell with Milton. That's really it. We went .500 in the post all star break so expecting massive changes from the bench is unlikely.
While NAW and Conley were on the team last year, they weren't part of a fully healthy team but for maybe 3-4 games. They were plugging holes, but then sub-optimal talents had to try to fill in their shoes on the back end. I think Conley is exceptionally huge. He may not have a huge role in minutes, shots or assists, but his impact will be huge. Not only because of the Gobert synergy, but just his overall leadership and floor command while not necessarily needing the ball to prove his worth.
Nowell and Rivers both were forced to average over 10 mpg against the world champs in the first round, just to get us to a nine-man rotation. Neither guy is in a training camp on a standard contract, two-way or even Exhibit 10 or camp tryout. Essentially they're outside of the Top 500 players in the NBA and both were in the playoff rotation. And we were in almost every game to the very end.
I think where we really struggled in previous iterations of the team is the versatility of the roster. Guys can play with the ball or without the ball. Guys have the size and strength if switched in a suboptimal situation, they won't be orange cones like Nowell or Forbes or Russell. Milton, Brown, Edwards, McDaniels, Alexander-Walker, all can hold their own guarding anything from PG to PF. That's an enormous advantage that we saw Denver really exploit in teams last year on their way to a title.
