FFBlitzace wrote:I honestly feel like there's too much panic going on here. I get it, this is excruciating right now. We're supposed to be better than this. We're not even defending well every night, let alone the atrocious shooting. I understand, it's absolutely maddening.
But I truly feel like things just weren't in the cards for us this season. I mean, we tried really hard and hung in there for a while through a lot of adversity. But eventually the morale just ran out and frustration took over, and we don't have the offensive talent to "brute force it" by simply shooting ourselves out of the hole. As pepe pointed out, "law of averages" would help us, but not drastically, since we're not a team of shooters.
Don't confuse my stance with me just being an apologist and making excuses for poor play, and wanting to run things back again. No, we absolutely need to bring in offensive talent and put our two young stars in a position to succeed. They still need to improve in their own right, but the team has to be better around them. It's a circular thing. The surrounding pieces help them, and they help the surrounding pieces. Right now the gears in that machine aren't even connecting, let alone turning.
We're not as bad off as it feels right now.
I agree, but that's just how sports fans are. The middle ground take is rarely accepted.
I'll take it a step forward and say expectations were probably too high coming in. We weren't that good last year, high seed in the East, but by net rating literally middle of the pack in the NBA (and that is with the added bonus of playing East teams more frequently so really probably worse). We expected our guys to take a step forward and they didn't, it happens, Paolo is in his 3rd year. Look at the contending teams right now and the season their best player is in. Timeline is not fake, it is hard to win with your best players this young in the NBA. Doesn't mean don't try to add better players than we have, but also be realistic.
Now they need to tweak the pieces around Paolo and Franz, it's obvious. And guess what? Even if they do, Paolo and Franz might not be good enough to win anything significant. It is hard to win a title in this league without a superstar and they have to make massive efficiency changes to get there. They do need to give them a better chance though, I give them a mulligan for sticking with the "family" roster (Wendell and Isaac extensions were horrible regardless though). I give them a pass for the deadline because trading assets to try to win from the play-in without Suggs is a sunk cost. But if they go into next season without some significant roster turnover then they are insane.
