tsherkin wrote:But more what I was saying is that you don't need a superstar to be a quality team. We saw that well enough in the Lowry/DeRozan years. We had a fair amount of talent, more than we have now, but an attainable level of talent if you're lucky enough to get the right pieces. You just don't seriously contend for a title without That Guy (TM), pretty much. Unless you have an absolutely disturbing amount of talent around a guy who is still pretty good, with a nice run to the Finals, like Boston last year.
I think the comp falls apart because Lowry was consistently ranked somewhere between 8th and 18th in the regular season by BPM/WARP/VORP, and I believe our highest ranking among current players is Ingram at 50 (and Scottie at 45 (as a rookie).
You can build a pretty good team around a top 10-20 guy if you have enough 3pt shooting and defence, I'm just sure we have don't have enough of the former, and Gradey right now alone is enough to undermine a defensive unit (though he's young, Sam Hauser wasn't a passable defender at his age either).
If we had say current Derrick White or prime Jrue or even prime Brogdon, that I'm just gonna call COMBO here, and I guess a passable stretch big like a prime Larry Nance JR, I think we'd be a fun ballclub that can win some games, even if we wouldn't win the title or anything:
Poeltl-NANCEJR
Barnes-CMB
Ingram-RJ
COMBO-Agbaji-Walter
Quickley-COMBO
So hopefully we can find an all-around solid guard and a stretch big. All those guards listed above got traded for Picks/prospects so they do come on the market. In theory, someone from the group of young guards with decent numbers who have hopefully not come close to peaking yet like Ivey or Podziemski might be a guy we could trade for to be that COMBO type.
Also we might have a good pick one of these next couple years with an Ingram injury.
Not sure how we find a stretch big, those are difficult to get.
If I told you to build a contender without a top 20 guy, you'd try to throw out 4 3+D guys and one guy who can cook a bit on O. That's just not the approach we're going for, and maybe we haven't been able to because you do have to draft BPA, there's no point in having a team of Agbaji level players even if they do fit the bill of solid defenders who can stick an open 3, that doesn't work, you still need good starting level players. But yeah, I'm low on this team, I just think we'll be very easy to defend.
Though again, your point about a star is right. I would say of the top 18 offences in the league, 16 of them had a genuine offensive star and the other 2 had offensive bigs who compromised their defence (Sabonis and Sengun, and while Houston finished 4th on D, they would have been first with an average defensive starting big man, and they immediately faceplanted on O in the playoffs and traded for KD to fix that). We can see if Barnes or CMB can be that type of undersized 5, maybe a Poeltl for a tough forward or wing who can shoot becomes possible at some point down the line, but that seems like wishful thinking. And also those Kings and Rockets teams had a ceiling with those guys as their offensive hubs, though I'd take Barnes and my guess is CMB by year 3 or 4 over Sabonis/Sengun defensively.
