I think this board is massively overrating Fournier. Shooting is an important skill, but a ton of really great shooters essentially get played right of the floor in the playoffs if they aren't good defenders. Fournier is fine, but mostly he's an on ball creator who isnt quite good enough in that roll to justify being in it, and isnt good enough defensively to justify playing a strictly 3&D role. He stands essentially no chance of being one of the five guys out there during crunch time.
I'd much rather have Gordon, I get it the shooting numbers arent great but before last year he'd been 33.5-35% the previous two years an I think he's good enough he has to be guarded. He's perfect defensively for this team and he could in theory be a part of your future closing five (at the 4 if Smart is at PG with kemba out, or as a small ball five). he as some athleticism, an is a goo passer for a PF.
I'm definitely not trying to overrate Fournier and I don't think my comments do overrate him at all. He's not a great defender but he is an adequate one and would likely be just fine within the context of our system. And he IS a very skilled offensive player and particularly as a shooter.
I disagree with you, significantly on the importance of shooting in the role we are trying to fill here. The key advantage of the 3-wing lineup is the ability to exploit mismatches and you want all three wings to have gravity on the perimeter, forcing all three to be defended closely, thus awarding at least one of them with a size or speed mismatch.
When one of the three wings does NOT have gravity on the perimeter -- such as when last year we would do lineups with Smart as one of the 3 wings -- that allows one of their defenders to sag. And there is a significant drop in ORtg as a result. Far more than is due just to the marginally lower 3PT shooting between say, Smart vs any of JB, JT or GH.
When Aaron Gordon is on the perimeter, defenders routinely sag off him because they know that he shoots poorly even on wide-open threes and they will be able to bother his shot with even a nominal closeout effort. Seriously, with no defender within 6 feet, his 3PT% was a miserable 33.3%. That may sound, "ok", but that's actually terrible for a wide-open three. In prior years, he got that up to as high as 38%, but even that just isn't where it needs to be.
For comparison, both Fournier and Ross, his two teammates, hit that wide-open shot at over a 46% clip. And they have history of always hitting that shot at a high rate. They simply can't be left open on the arc.
On the Celtics last year, all of Hayward, Tatum, Kemba & Brown hit the wide-open three at over a 40% clip. If you replaced any one of them with Smart -- who hit that at only a 35.8% rate -- and historically has never hit that shot at a high rate -- the ORtg plummeted.
The normal 5 starters (KW+JB+JT+GH+DT) had an ORtg of 118.3 points/100 possessions (286 minutes, both regular season and playoffs). And because someone will ask, they had a fantastic DRtg as well of 106.9. Here is what those changed to if you insert Smart:
in place of(sample size) ORtg DRtg
Kemba (201 min): 110.3 109.4
Jaylen (176 min): 112.6 95.5 (caution: skewed by massive blowouts of CHO & MEM)
Jayson (100 min): 108.9 117.7
Gordon (401 min): 104.8 102.2
In every case, the ORtg tanked by 5 - 9 points, which is a gigantic drop. If you remove just the CHO & MEM blowouts then it is 8-9 points. And this despite that Smart is a competent ball handler and good passer and good FT shooter and at this point in his career a better 3PT shooter than Aaron Gordon. He's not a terrible offensive player by any means.
But he has no 'gravity' to pull a defender close to him outside the arc (unless he has the ball, and even then, never a double team).
This was perhaps most explicitely illustrated in Game 6 when MIA basically left Smart wide open constantly. This led to him infamously taking 23 FGA, including 13 3PA. And I don't blame him for taking those shots -- all of his 13 threes were open or wide-open. But true to history - and as MIA was willing to risk -- he hit only 4 of them.
Teams are not stupid and they scout our players and will play to the scouting reports until our players make them pay for doing so on an on-going basis.
Thus, I think it is very important that whomever we get with the TPE to fill this role be someone who does have gravity - that
does require defensive attention when outside the arc.
Gordon does provide size, defense and rebounding - but I don't think those benefits outweigh the issues I can see with his fit on offense.