On Al's initial go around with the C's did we underrate his value to the team and maybe in the league in general. There were some complaints that he wasn't living up to his contract. But is it possible that the team around him limited his opportunity to reach that value?
Depends on your perspective I guess. Did the team around him limit his ability to reach his value? Or was he simply the hero we wanted, but not the hero we needed?
We had a young team with star shoot-first point guards (IT4 and then Kyrie). We desperately lacked a consistent #2 guy on offence who could ste up as an Alpha guy carry the team offensiively when our top guy had a bad game. Hayward was supposed to be that guy, but that went down the toilet when he got injured.
By default this kinda led to us hanging our hopes on Horford to become that guy, but it just isn't really who he has ever been. Al Ha always been that versatile "do it all" guy. He's that complimentary piece who everything well and contributes in so many ways, plus once every 3 or 4 games he can put up a nice offensive night. He's never really been a pure scorer - which is (IMHO) what we really needed at the time.
Fast forward to now, and we have a pair of 2-way stars on our roster who are capable of scoring 50 on any given night, so we don't really have any need for another volume scorer. What we really need is more of those complimentary 'swiss army knife' guys who can do a little bit of everything on both ends of the court to help take a bit of the load off Brown and Tatum. Horford (assuming he can still produce at a high level) is probably the perfect complimentary piece for our roster as it's currently constructed.