Ruzious wrote:Yeah, Anderson's a fine player, but he's going to get paid - it's been guestimated he'll start at 18 mil, and I'd have a hard time anteing up for that for a PF who has obvious defensive limitations and rebounds poorly. But there is no perfect player out there other than Durant.
I would go after Horford. He's as good a fit as we'll find, and I really like his all-around game - though his rebounding numbers have steadily decreased for some reason. He's even added a 3 point shot to his game this season. He defends well, can play with pretty much any kind of big - would especially fit great with Gortat, passes real well, makes 55% of his 2's. He doesn't get to the line much and he'll turn 30 in June, but again - there are no other perfect players. If he's gettable, he'd definitely be my Plan B after Durant.
We're a team of generalists, not specialists. And as such, it becomes difficult for us to fit in specialists like Anderson. We don't have a rotation-worthy defensive and rebounding specialist to play next to him. He'd have an enormous positive effect on our offense. But I don't know how well we could cope with his negative effect on the defense. I think Porter would have to grow a ton as a defensive player to make up for Anderson.
So as good as his offensive game is--and I think it's good enough he could be a sixth man of the year in the right situation--he's probably not going to be worth 18 million a year to us.
But he would be worth that to Detroit or Sacramento. Those are his obvious destinations this summer. Detroit if he wants to play in the right scheme and fit AND win, Sacramento if he wants to find a good fit and play at home. Even if Sacramento ends up losing Cousins, they'll still have Cauley-Stein, who is an ideal big to play next to Anderson. SVG and Andre "Poor Man's Prime Dwight" Drummond with Stanley Johnson at SF makes even more sense IMO.
Horford would be an amazing acquisition. A game changer. He'd be the second best player on the team immediately. If Bradley Beal, Marcin Gortat, and Otto Porter are suddenly your third, fourth, and fifth best players respectively, that's a loaded team. Easily better than any starting five Atlanta has ever put around Horford before.
I wouldn't have any worries about his fit because Horford too is a generalist who could fit in any scheme and bring net positive value to any team.
I'm also not that worried about his age. He has a bad injury history, but he keeps himself in great shape and his game is built to age well.
The only thing is he seems to love Atlanta. Zach Lowe said he's interested in finding a city with a large Dominican community, but that he is also interested in the fifth year that Atlanta can offer him. New York, Miami, and Boston all have much larger Dominican communities than the DC metro area. Philly and Orlando have bigger ones too. This kind of non-basketball consideration hurts us in comparison to the franchises from those areas. Atlanta has a smaller one than DC, but it's only a difference of about 5,000. I think that, for us to sign Horford, we need to structure our pitch around continuity roster and FO continuity and pure basketball reasons. The first would be hard to do if we fire our coach and GM and make large roster changes. The second is hard to do because our coaching staff is weak. It's really hard to beat the fifth year Atlanta can offer AND Mike Budenholzer. Plus, if he wants to stay at center for the majority of his minutes, that eliminates us.