pingpongrac wrote:Ackshun wrote:Felt pretty strongly that we deserved to be a lottery team last year, regardless of the home court disadvantage.
Without Kyle this year, and any significant additions, I won't be surprised to see another lottery bound season.
Hopefully having Birch for the full year helps. Not sure if Wainwright, Barnes and home court advantage can add 20-25 wins.
How do you explain a 17-17 record through the first 34 games of the season then 10-28 the rest of the way though? It seemed/seems pretty clear to me that we were more in line with being a .500 (or better) team if not for COVID then blatantly tanking the last 1/3 of the season. Our record around the midway point was average, but we were trending upwards (in the midst of a 15-7 stretch) and most metrics pointed towards us being a team battling for HCA (3rd best offence in the East, 6th best offence in the East, 4th best NetRTG in East, etc.) before we lost 3 of our top 4 players for a few weeks.
It's not "adding 20-25 wins" by sheer luck to get to 45-50 wins this season. It's a combination of advantages like playing at home, an extra 10 games (back to regular 82-game season), improvement of our players, no Baynes (lol) and not blatantly tanking a large chunk of the year with a few disadvantages like losing Lowry, likely being without Siakam to start the season (or having a rusty Siakam) and the uncertainty of what the rest of our roster is going to look like as there is still nearly 2 months before training camp even begins.
People are putting way too much weight into our end-of-year record while ignoring the factors.
I honestly don't know whether or not this team is gonna be sub 500 or 40+ wins, and won't rule out the possibility of them outperforming expectations for the reasons you said, but I think people might still be underestimating the impact of losing Lowry.
I know his win shares, vorp and other 'team impact'/value type advanced stats took a big dip last year but beyond his intangibles and leadership (which I think means something, even with a solid org. culture otherwise), I think we're going to feel the loss of his half court shot creation pretty hard given how starved for that we already were. IMO its not an ideal role for FVV to fill, who I see as a more natural offball player but who knows - games aren't static and winning cultures are supposed to be about guys being able to evolve and step up as needed tbf
IF a bunch of major things go right I can see us surprising (OG taking that ultimate step forward to being efficient in isolation on high volume/usage + Siakam returning to form on usage/role he can handle, FVV evolving his game, Birch being a legitimate 30 mpg starter over a full season, Flynn taking a major step forward, Barnes being immediate positive impact and being a bit further along with his shooting/scoring than expected - at least within 10 feet)
But imo that's a lot of things that need to go right, and its more likely we have a similar year to last season - not outright abysmal, compeitive in most games, but ultimately transition into heavy 'rest' stealth tank during second half of season
TLDR: guess we gotta evaluate and see what we have
