Tor_Raps wrote:Its not about having someone AS good as Poeltl but someone who can hold his own where the world doesnt fall apart. You can understand the Nuggets falling apart when Jokic goes to the bench because hes Jokic.
The same shouldn't be true for Poeltl who is a fine C but has been nowhere near allstar calibre for a reason regardless of those cherrypicked stats lol.
I realize that it isn't about replicating his ability exactly, but he's a lot better than many people realize. We're going to have drop-off without him on the floor for what are fairly obvious reasons, regardless of who we have as a backup. He's really, really good. He isn't a superstar, nor a flashy scorer, but he gets a lot of everything done and doesn't really hurt you anywhere, which is a fairly uncommon baseline for a player, especially a non-star.
And calling them cherrypicked stats is a little weird. Yes, they're specific to him, but they're also PER36 to help factor in other roleplayers and the like. Yak is EXTREMELY productive per-minute for us, and sound enough on D that he ties things together for us better than anything else we had available. Players like him have ever actually made an ASG in a light year before. Players worse than him have also made it, so calling him "no where near All-Star caliber" is also a little off-kilter.
You want to diminish his relevance and his impact, so you're trying to downplay him. That isn't really a good pathway forward here. Yak is an underrated player, he's quite good. He isn't "build your franchise around him" good, but on a team with as many flaws as we have, taking the one guy on your team who has almost no positionally-relevant weaknesses off the floor is going to cause large problems. The more so because we've been dog-ass wastes of skin on the defensive glass, and he's excellent there. And he's an efficient roll man, a good passer, a pretty good shotblocker and not a disaster at protecting the ball. He's also a high-end offensive rebounder. Etc, etc, etc.
We lose A LOT whenever he sits. And without him, it's important to remember that we're s**-useless at making shots and rely rather specifically on offensive rebounding to not be THE worst team in the league offensively. And we have struggled defensively. So yeah, it's a big-impact thing when he sits. It will continue to be so, though obviously Mamu will help with the rebounding and opens a lot of intriguing doors offensively.
I think you're not really processing that a) Yak is really good and b) he's really good at the few things which have kept us from being purely embarrassing as a team. Those two things together help explain a lot of his impact.
