SOUL wrote:Knightro wrote:There's no reason to believe Black or Howard are ready to contribute next season at a high level after what happened in their respective rookie seasons.
Maybe Black.
I'm just generally frustrated with the low hanging fruit debate topics of "Black didn't get 30 mpg and free rein so the FO doesn't know what they're doing" sort of talk. It's panicky and not exactly real. You even said yourself that guys like Black and Jett are cost controlled and we have them for cheap for a few years so it's not as blasphemous of signing a guy with cap space who we thought would be a big addition who turns out to be a dud and plague to our cap.
Everything we do is going to be based off of Paolo/Franz/Suggs right now but people keep circling the center of the discussion over Black and Jett for some reason.
If fans cannot parse that with each passing year that our draft picks are not going to get carte blanche minutes and roles that our previous ones did (with more hype/expectations), then that's on them. I certainly hope that we have a plan for Black especially, but it would not surprise me if Jett gets moved at all.
The early Sixers process and even the recent Thunder strategy has been just to draft high ceiling guys they think might work on their team or hit, and then try again next year with more picks. Having 4 potential young keepers in Paolo, Franz, Suggs and Black is probably the edge of where you can even consider wanting to devote a lot of time and minutes to with young dudes.
Is OKC panicking about Cason Wallace maybe getting buried with Dort/SGA/Caruso/etc who showed a bit more than others last year? I don't really think so. It'll shake out fine. Same with every other young guy on a good team who got buried a bit until specific points of the season - Jarace, Hendricks (first half Jazz), Whitmore, Hawkins, etc.
A guy like Pritchard wanted out of Boston after three years of sub 20 mpg and suddenly got a bigger role and extended. That's like the worst case scenario of how I want the Black stuff to go but it just shows how things can change suddenly.
A guy like Dyson Daniels is in a similar spot with 17 mpg his first year and went up to 22 mpg, which usually jumps a lot in the 3rd year.. which is an extremely common trend with picks that somehow is being treated as an anomaly with Black.
Jett is an entirely different story, where I just think we did not want to develop that many young guys at once. I cannot gauge how that will go.
This has been discussed to death and it doesn't need to be rehashed any further.
The Magic tried to take two concurrent paths this past season and while this past season was fun and successful, it did not set the franchise up for maximum success this upcoming season, nor was it as successful as it could have been had they actually went for it.
