He gives us a different look and something different they brown and tatum don't bring. He's a slasher who can handle the ball and who can play multiple positions. He has a nice touch and after his hand injury fully recovers, he will be back in business. Good transition game, smart on the open floor.
This kid was a 5 star high school recruit. Not saying every 5 star high school recruit pans out, but he's long, has many strengths, and a clearly decent ceiling. Give him the Celtics shooting coach that taught brown how to hit the 3. Picking at 14 wasn't going to get us a "sure-thing." but we have a nice prospect
I dont get what there's not to like. I also keep seeing people say he's "redundant" and we "already have brown and tatum and Hayward. Why do we need Langford"
-You can never have too many wings
-There are 17 roster spots on a team
-Someone's gotta come off the bench.. Brown/tatum/Hayward can't play 40 minutes each
-langford is a good prospect. Even if we had 10 players like tatum and brown, id still get langford
As for his weaknesses:
-Stevens and staff need to fix his defense
-Give him the shooting coach that taught Brown how to hit the 3
Itll take time but it will pay dividends in the long run to have this kid.
Very good points, but I have issues with some of them. Assuming that Brad doesn't play Hayward at PG or PF (the latter which I support), there will only be 96 minutes to go around for all 3 of them, and that's not even factoring Smart's ability to play as a combo guard. Drafting a high risk prospect like Langford demands attention and minutes, and I don't really see where we can afford that barring an injury. It's not like he's a Jayson Tatum who had a pretty high floor when he was drafted to earn minutes under Brad. As for the "you can never have too many wings" argument, I agree with the sentiment itself, but there are different kinds of wings. You have wings like Brown who can play 2/3, pure SFs like Tatum and Hayward (Utah Hayward was a 2/3, but he's lost that step to play the 2 imo after the injury), "swings" like Morris who can play 3/4 and freaks like Kawhi/George who can play 2/3/4 (Giannis is another variant of this who can play 3/4/5). What we have are wings that really struggle to play the 4 full time, and drafting a 1/2/3 (with 1 and 3 being major question marks atm) wing in Langford isn't going to help with our versatility, it'd exacerbate the existing logjam of wings that can only play 2/3. What we needed (if we had to go down the wing hoarding route) was a Doumbouya type who can play 3/4, although he has an even lower floor due to his lack of skills. My main gripe was that we could've selected a few prospects (including Doumbouya) who'd give us a similarly good overall floor/ceiling mix (lower floor but higher ceiling/higher floor but lower ceiling/similar in both) and would've filled some holes in our team, aside from not causing even more of a logjam from happening. I'm not too mad with the pick though, if Celtics fans had their way we'd be seeing Bol Bol drafted at #14, which would've made us the laughingstock of the league.
Where are you getting 96 minutes from? My math says 144... 48 minutes per guy x 3. I’ve been under the impression that we play a 3 wing line up, as most teams do, with the pf playing on the perimeter. It seems like you agree by referencing Gordon as a pf.
Tatum will certainly play PF minutes and smarty will play Pg minutes. So if you assume 30 minutes each for jaylen, Gordon, jaysen, then you’ve got 54 minutes left to be taken up by semi, smarts sg minutes, Langford, and Williams.
I didn't reference Hayward as a PF? 96 minutes come from the SG and SF positions, the only positions that they can really play full time in, although Hayward can play PG if Brown/Smart is the SG. And Tatum playing PF minutes is just asking for a random PF to go off on us like how random PGs did this season, he's really not ideal at PF. Look at my post above, which went in depth as to how our wings are redundant in the sense that their versatility is all in the same couple of positions, creating a logjam at the two positions can't offer enough minutes for them.
You are overrating this PF problem. Last year Baynes and Horford hardy ever played together, we had significant minutes with Hayward or Tatum as the PF and I don't recall us getting cooked. Both Jaylen and Hayward did a decent job against guys like Blake Griffin and Kevin Love. there arent many post up type fours who will kill you I the post. And whether we like it or not we have only two real PF's on this team, G Will and Yabu. So Hayward/Tatum/Brown will get significant minutes there barring a big acquisition in free agency. And thats fine, you make up for any defense loss (if any) by spreading the floor with shooting n those lineups.
That was because we had Morris at the PF position (he's a decent full time PF) soaking up significant minutes for the small ball lineups to do their work in short spurts, and that didn't match the playoff success we had when we started Baynes and Horford last season. I'd say you're underrating the PF problem by playing wings that have the wrong versatility to play that position full time. Forcing square pegs into round holes would only lead to another repeat of last season.
Yea, I totally disagree with this idea. First, you're looking at the position as if positional defense is static. We frequently switch everything, the days of bigs backing smaller defenders down every possession is gone.
I understand your concern about the bigger PFs. But, and this is really something I feel you are overlooking, there is only a handful of large/powerful PFs in the league, anyway. Further, only one or two teams have both a big powerful PF and a C next to him, that also play big minutes at the same time. I'm not looking at rosters but Detroit is the only one that comes to mind and they are a non-factor. I can confidently say, that we should not be constructing our roster with trying to compete with the pistons in mind.
Moreover, Tatum literally started the last TWO seasons game 1 at PF. So it seems that our coach and front office disagree with you.
Yeah I totally disagree with your idea. Having size doesn't mean you back your defender down in the post every time, it gives you stifling defense (assuming the length and size aren't stiffs, which btw I think is the important thing here) and a more effective offense as you can exploit mismatches more through what we and most teams exactly run: a switching defense, whether it's pure size advantage or more mobile size advantage. What I'm an advocate for is mobile and skilled size to match the likes of Toronto and Milwaukee, who are very big as you start looking at their frontcourt, with Milwaukee steamrolling us by playing 1 guard, 1 wing and 3 bigs compared to our lineup of 1 guard, 2 wings, 1 swing and a big. Toronto plays with 1 guard, 1 wing, 1 swing and 2 bigs. And you're advocating to downsize even further without a significant improvement in skill (the skill upgrade with Hayward at PF doesn't improve our lineup's overall skill level with Kyrie's departure)! Pure size (as seen with Detroit) doesn't cause problems to us, but the elite teams of the league have mobile and skilled size in spades, and trying to wing it with three wings against that brick wall is not the way I'd like to see this team go down.
Moreover, the team switched very quickly by shifting Tatum back to SF once it was clear that he wasn't cutting the mustard at PF, so it seems that our coach and front office snap out of their small ball dream when faced with reality.