City of Trees wrote:Being in a playoff race while still figuring out your starting line up is not ideal. IMO that goes to show how far ahead the Kings are in their rebuild... ha they are trying to figure it out on the fly. Crazy times.
Yup. Its really a tough situation. Barnes is an easy inclusion into roster because he can more or less play the same way he's always played. With Bagley its a bit trickier. Spacing wise, I doubt it will work for us to have him and WCS play in the paint. So you're essentially asking a 19 year old rookie to adopt two completely different play styles depending on whether he's playing with the starting lineup or with a bench lineup. I don't know if that's a fair thing to ask of him at this point.
I really believe if Bagley came off the bench we would have won the Minnesota game. He would have started the second quarter and would have likely sustained our offense and thereby avoided the debacle of a second quarter we witnessed.
For this season, I think its in the best interest of the team to move Bagley back to his bench role so he can be the feature player to start the second and fourth. This also avoids the spacing problems we had in the Minnesota game.
Long-term, you wonder whether Bagley is gonna be our 5 or whether he will be a F/C combo player. If its the latter then you wonder if WCS can fit with him in the starting lineup. I wonder if it makes sense to expect Bagley to adjust his game to fit with WCS. I'm hoping we can sign Nikola Vucevic in the offseason. He would fit so much better with Bagley as a starting front court.