01-10-2021, 01:30 AM
(01-10-2021, 12:29 AM)loki Wrote: I'm not sold that those 3 are enough long term. Dorian has really struggled shooting the 3 so far this year. That's not a great sign given that almost every shot he takes is wide open. Maxi has been incredible, but only on half the attempts compared to THJ. Burke has picked it up since the bubble, but that's a relatively small sample size. His first 6 seasons indicate that he might fall back down to earth.
I'm not comparing their shooting skill to Tim's. The thing is, we have yet to play our 7'3'' max contract guy, who is tasked to, and takes 7 threes per game. With or without KP, you'd still have same number of possessions in a game. Tim is great for covering for KP's scoring loss, but when KP is on the floor, you are likely to see Tim running forward and back without touching much of the ball between Luka and KP. And when you need to route the ball to a second creator, JRich, Burke and Brunson are your better options.
Then you have to decide whether it is better to have MOAR spot up shooting and adorable hustle in Tim, or good defense but a dummy of a shooter in Dorian (who happens to be also much more affordable). Their roles are distinctly different. You keep Tim on the floor for his scoring, therefore you have to go to him on offense to make up for his mediocre defense, while Dorian's on the floor for his defense and his only task on offense (along with crashing the offensive board, which you don't expect from Tim) would be to keep his defender honest.
Dorian scored 42 points on his 43 three point attempts in his 8 games this season. Had he been hitting 40% of his shots, he would have scored 51.6 points. That makes 1.2 points more per game, which costs not more than a single Luka Doncic fumble/bad pass.
Let's see how his shooting percentage shakes out when he hits the 100 (centa) mark this season (he is 35.9% - 37/103 in his last 100 or so three point shots going back to the play-offs and seeding games). If the opponent leaves Dorian as the only option to go to in the playoffs and he misses a bunch of open shots, that would be a problem; but this was not the case against the Clippers (11/30 36.6%).