(11-11-2023, 10:30 AM)ItsGoTime Wrote: Ya, when I say 48 mins of great C play, I don’t literally mean a full 48 minutes every game for all games. I think we have a good smallball C option in GWill who can keep the 5 out dream alive. I’ve been also saying it lately, Isaiah Stewart has come on strong to begin this season shooting the 3, HE, I think, would be a great Maxi upgrade if after his % normalizes he can stay up there at or above league average. Eventually I think Lively will get to the point where he gets the green light to shoot 3’s as well as it seems that’s a part of his development.
I just really think that our defensive path forward with both Luka and Kyrie on the team is to choose rim protection and rebounding over perimeter defense. Not saying to give up on perimeter defense, just that when 2 of your 3-4 perimeter guys on the court are Luka and Kyrie, you can’t possibly think that having 1 guy out there is going to make that much of a difference.
We all see clearly how well this team works with Lively out there, I’d just like that to be the case for longer than Lively’s minutes (he’s averaging 24.3 mpg so there is a lot of time without him).
I put out a list of guys I’d like to see as varying degrees of upgrade on Discord a couple days ago. At that time I hadn’t thought about Poeltl. I’m in between your thoughts and Dan’s on him. He is certainly the type of solid upgrade we could use for much of his proven game, but I don’t know enough about him to know if he is good for our offense. I do suppose if he is a hard worker, Luka and Kyrie can make the most out of effort.
That list was (in no order):
Gafford
Hartenstein
Allen
Capela
Stewart
Zubac
There are others I’m sure that I don’t have on that list too (especially some of these young up and comers), Poeltl probably should be there IMO.
I worry this is more of a regular season strategy than a playoff strategy. A lot of those bigs have struggled or got played off the court to some degree during the playoffs and most of them will cost assets. I thought we had a decent defense with Luka and Brunson during the WCF run (without a dominating center). No reason we can't do that with Luka and Kyrie.
I see the argument to get a vet min backup traditional center for those times when we are getting killed in the paint. Its a problem that Lively is our only big that can rebound. McGee would have made sense in this capacity, but I think Luka had issues with him. Shouldn't be that hard to find somebody, and as Dan has pointed out, we still have a little exception left to go over min if we have to.