ImNotMcDiSwear wrote:Puff wrote:I guess we were afraid Jalen would continue to perform based on his 10 minutes of play and would force us to sit one of Mikal, Book and Cam or the teachers pet Landry Shamet.
The decision on Jalen is just freaking stupid. You guys must be the spin doctors working on Bobby's payroll.
While I hate what happened with Jalen and think he still shows tons of promise (more than I ever saw from Dragan or Chriss), I'm not quite as down on the rest of the team as everyone else. For whatever reason, the bench unit was hitting on all cylinders in preseason, and now that the season's started they can't hit a shot. Obviously there's been an uptick in intensity, but I think it's pretty obvious that we've not been able to get in transition, or stop the other team from getting in transition, and as a result we've been forced into rushing shots: no rhythm at all.
It's also worth noting that we'd have been stoked if Jalen had a game like Kaminsky had the other night. I think we decided that if, after a season under his belt, Jalen can't beat out a minimum contract guy for minutes, it's no worth paying him $5 mil per when every dollar counts twice.
Perhaps hindsight is 20/blah and whatever but I really liked Paul Reed on draft night. Clearly we would have been better served trading down and taking a flyer on a player with a much cheaper contract and adding a future pick in the process. I'm not sweating Halliburton the way a lot of people are around here, though. I don't think he's amazing or anything. If you're going to drafterbate you might as well look back to 2018 and wonder what we were thinking passing on Tyler Herro, who came into the draft with a pedigree eerily similar to Devin Booker's. After a sophomore slump, dude once again looks like a budding superstar. Were he on the roster we'd all be debating whether he or Devin (or, for a minority of us, Ayton) is more likely to be our #1 option down the line.
Trading down Bane should have been the choice (of keeping the pick Memphis took him with) but we knew we liked him.
Not sure how you can think Haliburton wasn't good. I don't know how many rookies come in, not playing pg, but next to one, and score 13ppg on 41% from 3, 53% from 2 with 5.3 apg and 1.3 spg. That's nuts. As much as I liked him, I still didn't expect that.
As for Kaminsky, I've always liked him, except for when he was dominating AZ in elite eight games. But he is nice offensively. I think he shot better than Book from 3 last year, can initiate, score inside (though on occasion he misses easy layups though so does everyone)..and is solid offensively. Defensively he sucks, but he is a decent rebounder and a smart player...you don't need great D in your 2nd unit typically anyway.
People talk about him as the worst player in the NBA and there are FAR FAR worse players on teams.
Cam and Shamet have started slowly but they are shooters and they are going to have some bad nights and great nights. They will click..they have been without Payne, teams can sag off Payton to double and they don't have Saric who was there when they were REALLY good...so without him and Payne it comes down to Payton and McGee, neither which need defensive focus...and some Nader as well sometimes. That's a much worse unit offensively than Payne, Shamet, Cam and Saric would be.
