erudite23 wrote:And we'll need to do it for more than just 5-10 mins a game, otherwise we traded Favors and Jae for nothing. Those two defend the position far better than Green will. Favors provided huge value as a 2nd center and insurance policy for Rudy. Jae was a more rugged defender, better rebounder and better ball handler than Jeff Green. We just made a huge investment in Bojan. If his main contribution is to push Joe to the bench and keep him fresher, that doesn't move the needle hardly at all. You have to play them together, and not for short stretches, either. It's gotta be 20mpg at least that they are on the floor at the same time, preferably 25ish. Then once you give Georges some time and play Royce some spot minutes, that leaves between 15-20mpg for Green, which is about where I think he should be.
There's a good chance it doesn't go that way, but if that ends up being the case, we won't be in contention for ****. It will mean we spent 73m to make Joe Ingles a super sub. **** that.
I buy all of this. It's why I was more comfortable with Favors + Carroll than I am with Bojan + Green. But I do think that adding that much shooting will make things look very different. Conley and Bojan means 64 more minutes of top notch shooters on the roster. Wherever that fits in, it is a lot more than we have had.
I think we'll need Mitchell to be our best player and provide some iso scoring. He's not Harden or Leonard or James. That's why I preferred to stay an elite defensive team instead of trying to win shootouts with Bogdanovic. So we could very well be pretenders--a high scoring regular season offense, that comes up short in the playoffs.
I think we'll need 24 minutes from Green at the 4, 16 from Joe (that's the Joe/Bojan soft fluffy marshmallow forward lineup), and 8 from Naing (continuing in the marshmallow mode). The marshmallows will try to make up for their lack of toughness and size by chucking a lot of 3s. But that goes cold sometimes in the playoffs, especially without a genuine star to carry. So we'll see how much Mitchell can offer at that point, and how much Rudy can defend all by himself.
In '03-'04, Jerry Sloan coached the ESPN predicted "worst team of all time" to 42-40.