Illmatic12 wrote:tontoz wrote:Wasn't long ago that people were underrating Porter. Now i think a lot of people are overrating him. He is not a guy who is going to beat his man consistently 1 on 1. Pierce could do that even at his advanced age. Otto is a good off the ball player but he isn't going to scare anyone with his ability off the dribble.
Pierce bailed us out a lot last year. This year the young guys will be on their own trying to finish games.Just look at the top 3 scorers on the other good teams and compare them to ours. Not a pretty picture.
Who bailed us out the year before? The team with Ariza was just as good as the more hyped team with Pierce. .
Ariza was arguably the best player on the team. He averaged 14/6 with a TS of 59% in addition to being the teams best defender.
Going into this season, Wall/Beal/Porter doesn't look worse to me than Wall/Beal/Ariza (better, factoring in Wall/Beal's improvement and Otto's versatility over TA).
We're not going to give Otto the same slow, iso plays we gave to PP. The team is trying to get away from that and produce better offense at the end of games than they have in the past. The Wiz were closing games with two bigs clogging the paint, and Pierce who demanded a high usage and slowed the game down in crunchtime - hence they were very limited in the types of looks they were getting.
The whole idea of going 4-out is that there will be more opportunities/spacing for early offense, open threes, better driving lanes. Wall and Beal are two athletic guards who should be able to get to the FT line in late game situations, penetrate and create open threes, etc. Dudley as a shooter at PF will be a greater offensive threat than Nene in the 4th quarter (remember all his weak, forced layup attempts and awful FTs? That's gone now) Porter might leak out in transition for easy buckets in the 4th quarter, that type of offense simply wasn't available with PP.
The NBA is being taken over by guards. We have two athletic guards who will be able to make things happen late in games. Wall was actually one of the more productive crunchtime players last year (both in scoring and creating offense overall), and playoff/healthy Beal has shown us a lot of good things as a closer and he'll only be enhanced with better driving lanes
Beal is one of the worst guards in the league at running a basic pick and roll. He is also one of the worst midrange shooters.
You have to take into account that other teams will scout our new offense and make adjustments. Witt caught teams off guard in the playoffs by changing the offense. We were a jump shooting team last season and will continue to be one.
How many winning teams have a weaker first option scorer than Wall? We are asking him to be the primary playmaker and primary scorer. That is too much. We need a legit first option scorer. The absence of one is going to be more glaring with Pierce gone.
