10-19-2022, 12:33 AM
(10-18-2022, 05:50 PM)F Gump Wrote: You can argue that being able to handle GS then will make you good enough against the rest - but you'd be wrong. All big man groups and team strengths to play against are not alike. For example, if you can't get past Towns-Gobert in playoffs, you might not even get to GS. Or GS might not get past them, and then the hurdle is not GS but someone else. And MINN's a completely different animal to deal with, requiring quite a different big-man roster. I'm not saying the Mavs chosen plan does ALL of that, but it's a helluva lot more flexible than what you wanted them to settle for.
I’m arguing that not playing a guy like McGee is precisely HOW they got by Gobert last season. They put Kleber in the corner and made Gobert choose his own poison. Spoiler alert: there was no right choice.
Towns is a bit of a different challenge because in theory he can punish smaller guys inside, but honestly from what I’ve seen lately, even the few who can do that prefer not to play that way most of the time. How many guys are we talking about…Towns, Embiid and Davis? I’d prefer Kleber against any one of those players over McGee, tbh. I do concede that you need multiple options to deal with guys like that, and that McGee should help reduce wear and tear on some of the others, but that could have been accomplished in a less destructive way, surely.
I continue to be more worried about teams that can move the ball and make Dino-bigs seem obsolete because there seem to me to be significantly more of them. I hope the Mavs are still among their number at season’s end.