Missed the game entirely, but just watched the replay. I liked most of what I saw from Kornet, but the Suns interior defense looked pretty bad to me. Is Nurkic considered a better defender than Ayton?
It is an interesting question to compare Nurkic to to Ayton. The basic box score is 15 pts/11 reb for Ayton and 12 pts/8 rebs for Nurkic, not that much different. As to DRtg, it is hard to compare as the teams are so different but both have one of the best DRtg on their teams among starters, so they both seem to be impacting defense. Not much difference in blocks although Ayton does play a few more minutes on average.
I would have to think that PHX is pretty happy to have gotten Grayson Allen, Nassir Little and Keon Johnson, along with Nurkic in exchange for Ayton. POR is probably happy to have Ayton. The problem for PHX obviously is that they have only had their starting 5 on the floor together in 20 games for a total of 274 minutes. Even with Porzingis missing a lot of games, the Celtics have 33 games and 554 minutes (OKC for example, has had their starters together for 54 games, the most in the league). This is an issue for teams trying to integrate new players into the core rotation of a title contending team (PHX has 3 new starters, BOS has 2 new starters). You need more than 20 games.
Even 33 games for BOS isn't great. I think this is part of the problem at the end of games. Of those 33 games where we had all the starters, how many of those games were close at the end? Maybe there is a way to find this but how many total minutes of "crunch time" plays has the starting 5 had together? I am guessing it is not very many.
Topic: Celtics (48-14) at Suns (37-26) Game #63 3/9/24 (Read 8017 times)