MAVS NEWS: Luka Is Hurt, But is Trudging On | DLive's Mom Passes Away| Maxi OUT

[DanSchwartzgan]

But, if you MUST play all of those ways in combination EACH game, rather than leaning into any 1-2 of them when the situation calls for you to do so, then in my opinion, you are not flexible ENOUGH.  

I think it is CAN rather than MUST.  The regular season (especially the first half of it) will be a time of experimentation.  Good teams don't fret over the early regular season as much as fans.  I don't think we have to necessarily sacrifice a good record to experiment.  But, we need to know what we have and don't have going into the final two months.

I think better wording for "not flexible enough" might be "not dominant enough".  Some teams are good enough to dictate to their opponents.  We aren't there.  We don't have a single lineup and style of play that will work for 82 and 16.  A healthy LAC, for instance, doesn't have to adapt their style nearly as much as most teams (though they are deep enough to do so).  Same with GSW.  They are very different teams and until we get our version of Paul George, we will be dictated to by these better teams.  Our only hope is to be high quality in every combination of things we throw out there.  We have bench guys in Maxi, Powell, Tim, Wood and Bertans who have been starters much of their careers.  None of those guys are ball handlers, which is where a lot of angst comes from.  Maybe Grank gets the job done.  If they don't, there will need to be an addition before we get to the playoffs in order to be fully adaptable to whatever opponents throw at us.

To illustrate my point about dictating, let's imagine the same team replacing Hardaway with Jaylen Brown instead.  He starts and Dinwiddie moves to the bench.  Now all of a sudden we can dictate a style of play and almost everyone in the league has to adapt to us.  If we don't have to give up key pieces (something centered more on draft picks), I think we are top 4 in the league instead of top 4-6 in the west.