YogurtProducer wrote:Tha Cynic wrote:Yeah, I mentioned that he regressed since Jan. But there are also highs and lows in a season and there is also a new player on the team. Part of it is injuries, but we don't know how much right now. His overall season averages now are close to his Indiana career averages. Regardless I have doubts about Indiana as a whole, but they are in a significantly weaker conference.
Either way - people are questioning how Siakam did not make them better when the reason IND was stagnated or regressed is quite clearly due to Haliburton going from averaging 25/13 to start the year and is now at 14/9. Not sure many teams can handle their stud creating close to 20 less PPG
What about the Raptors? Has their been a major drop off after losing a max level offensive player?
If your team can replace your offense, then your impact isn't really felt if you're a non-impact player on D or don't have great intangibles. Without Poeltl, we're 2-10 this season for example, because we have no one who can replace his interior defense.
For Indiana, you'd expect a 2 time all-NBA max player to have a little more impact when he replaced a negative player in Brown, even without Haliburton. If Haliburton's healthy, maybe they go back to being the #1 offense in the league, but they can already achieve that without Siakam. So the question is has their defense improved enough for them to get past being a 0.58 win team? (24-17 before the Siakam trade). They need to get to top 3 in the East for Siakam to be worth the max.
What Indiana can also do is swap their young offensive talent for two-way defensive players. Trading young assets for someone like Jimmy Butler in the off-season and getting another high level 3 + D player probably does the trick. However, there aren't that many two way stars available in the league.