youngcrev wrote:Ben wrote:GoSixersBro wrote:
Maybe if he was actually still a top threat from three you could make that argument, but no, he's not helping this team in a playoff series more than Oubre. I don't even care for comparing the two, but my point is we are literally **** if he's our consensus 4th best player.
Just to amplify your last point: any team on which DFS is arguably the 4th-best player is not going to be worth a darn, unless the team's top 3 are the league's top 3 superstars. He's mediocre at best.
Take a look at this past season's Celtics: their top 4 were Taytum, Brown, Porzingis and White, with #3 and #4 interchangeable depending on how one views things. Then maybe Horford and Holiday, with Pritchard still in the mix. We're at the top 7 players and we still haven't gotten to someone as mediocre as DFS.
Caleb Martin is already being overvalued by some in terms of what he's likely to bring-- he's never been as good as Derrick White was before he went to the Celtics-- but hopefully Martin can still plug some holes and provide value. We don't need ALSO to be over-hyping DFS as some kind of missing link, a guy whose value warrants entering financial straits. He might be the fourth-best player on a bad team, not one with title aspirations.
I get that the Celtics have become the measuring stick... But like, we can't poopoo every deal that doesn't automatically make us better than the best team in the league. DFS is a quality role player and would help tremendously with matching up with the Celtics wings defensively.
Would I prefer a better player that moved the needle more? Absolutely. But I'm not turning my nose up at helpful playoff caliber rotation pieces.
Our top-3 is going to have to outperform their top-3, because we're not getting anything close to their 4th and 5th best guys.
I don't mean to get in your face about this, 'cause we're both rooting for the same thing and I know you just want the team to be better.
So please take the following in that spirit of a fan just trying to get at the truth:
(1) If all that matters is for our top 3 to outperform all other teams' top 3s, then it doesn't matter whether we trade assets for DFS (and it doesn't matter much whatever else we do).
(2) If a lot of other stuff DOES indeed matter besides how our top 3 perform (as I think will be the case), then we can't be getting tricked into overspending for mediocre role players.
(3) Back to my original point, if your 4th best player is mediocre-- not even a good NBA player-- then you're pretty much screwed. The 2022 champion Warriors' 4th through 7th players were, in no particular order, Kevon Looney, Jonathan Kuminga, Andrew Wiggins, and Draymond Green, all of whom are good NBA players. The 2021 champion Bucks' 4th and 5th best players (in whichever order you prefer) were Bobby Portis and Brook Lopez, who at the time were both good NBA players.
To find a title caliber team with a 4th player as "meh" as DFS, I think you'd have to go all the way back to the 2012 Miami Heat and Udonis Haslem (or Mario Chalmers, take your pick), and that Heat team had two of the top 5 or 6 players in the past 25 years as well as a third who was the league's top 1 or 2 at his position, all in their primes.
In short: if we're to have any chance at a title in the next year or two we're going to need to acquire another good player-- perhaps with a KJ Martin S&T -- or else need one of our existing crew to take a big step up (Oubre or Council or Martin, although I doubt that Martin's going to become an entirely different-level player than he's been for the past several years). It won't be accomplished by adding one or more mediocre players.
