pingpongrac wrote:Scase wrote:pingpongrac wrote:Reporting for duty.
I knew there was going to be some growing pains and we would be lucky to be a .500 team by the play-in tournament because of a tough schedule to start, but I can't believe how incredibly disjointed we've looked for the majority of the first 22 games; we have more often looked like a bottom 5 team than a mid-tier team and I'd be fine with that if we had more to look forward to, but Flynn/Achiuwa/McDaniels have mostly been bad and Gradey was terrible in his first NBA stint while Koloko is still sidelined. I still have high hopes for Gradey's future, but it's reasonable to expect him to not truly make a big impact until his 3rd season. Without a 1st (most likely anyway) in this upcoming draft, the only assets we have to improve our outlook in the near future are Siakam/OG – who are both expiring and likely seeking max contracts – and maybe we could flip Poeltl/Schroder for a few picks or young pieces and salary. The closer we get to the 15th (of December and then January), the more I'm hoping for a big trade to build up our asset base and truly start the rebuild.
We're in the bottom third in offensive efficiency and turnovers per game while our defence has been incredibly average across the board despite us having a lot of good – or even very good – defenders on the team. Darko hasn't shown many positives so far aside from being a nice/likable guy and he should be given a lot more time to work his way through some things in his first stint as a head coach, but it's disappointing how entirely rigid he has been with his rotations/substitutions and his reluctance to divert from his gameplan is creating more problems for a team that just isn't capable of playing how he envisioned. I had been able to see the vision of the FO for the majority of moves/non-moves over the past few years and could rationalize with most of them (with one of the exceptions being letting Eubanks go for nothing), but they have missed the mark on a lot of things; OPJ has been injured and missing in action for 90% of his Raptors career thus far, Poeltl hasn't made us any better and Flynn hasn't shown much of anything in 3+ years while our lack of shooting and guard play has been apparent for 2+ years yet not much has been done to change that, etc. My patience is wearing thin and losing Siakam or OG for nothing (or on the flip side trading for a win-now piece in hopes of pushing us into the playoffs) would probably be enough for me to lose all hope in this organization getting back to a similar level of success as the mid 2010s with the current FO.
Our 3 best players have been good (we're getting 20/10/6 per36 on 56 TS% with great help defence from Scottie, 22/7/5 per36 on 57 TS% from Siakam and 16/5/3 per36 on 58 TS% with elite man defence from OG) and we've been healthy (OG is the only starter to miss time), but we've been losing a lot of very winnable games due to various reasons. Last season was frustrating, but it was mostly because FVV and Scottie underperformed which made it seem like we should have been better. This year has just been bad despite us arguably having better players than we did at the start of 22/23. The pieces just don't fit the way Darko is using them.
I don't disagree with mostly anything here, but I wanted to ask. Why is Scottie at 56% TS% and Siakam 57%, when they are 56.3 and 56.5 respectively lol.
I rounded the numbers, just as I did for their per36 numbers so as not to make it look quite as messy.
Scottie: 20.4/9.5/5.8 per36 on .563 TS%
Siakam: 21.7/7.2/5.2 per36 on .565 TS%
OG: 16.4/4.7/2.7 per36 on .578 TS%
The point stands regardless of a few percentage points or fractions of PTS/REB/AST though lol. Our three best players have been good statistically, but we're a bottom 10 team by most metrics. We were playing at a similar level at this point last season, but that was with Siakam missing 10 games and FVV/Scottie not playing well until mid-December while we still didn't have a starting C either. If this is us with our best players playing well and being healthy, I don't imagine we'll be much better when we inevitably have an injury or two to our starters that we need to play through. That's what I'm getting at.
Fair enough! I am waiting for the inevitable injury as well, like we are losing to the hornets missing lamelo, while being full strength, this has disaster written all over it.
