I find it humorous when posters can see our defensive identity there that was AWOL for the past year, see our far superior net rating, see us easily dispose of inferior basketball teams, and yet still faun after what we had in previous years. This team has improved. With Hayward available this team would have drastically improved.
The one and only thing you could be upset about is trading away that Brooklyn pick, which is currently, what? Pick 11 or 12?
I'll be one that says I wasn't a huge fan of that trade at the time, but I stand converted after a pretty decent sample of watching this team play and how deep they are. The brooklyn pick upset me most. Again, brooklyn aren't playing like a top 4 pick in the draft team right now.
Hard to disagree with this
Is anyone arguing that the team isn’t better defensively?
That doesn’t mean the passing or offense are better, though, either collectively or individually.
It also doesn’t mean the offense is worse. Over the 9 game winning streak, our offensive rating is 107.6, which is not significantly different from last year’s 108.6 rating. Our 4th quarter rating this year is 115.8, better than last year’s 114.4 (which was 3rd in the league).
The season is still young, so a) these numbers could change significantly over the year, and b) can really be impacted by a single game due to the weight of any given game with so few having been played. (Even cutting out the first two games of the year by focusing on the winning streak only raised our offensive rating by 2.2 points. Due to the unique circumstances around these games (the gruesome Hayward injury that clearly shook the team in game 1, and having to turn around so quickly without any time to adjust for game 2, I feel they are fairly excluded for now given it’s near 20% of the season weight.)
Anyway, I think people are actually underselling the quality of the offense so far, because the first two games have so much weight on the sample. It’s a good offensive team. Maybe not great, but good, and as the sample size increases, I wouldn’t be remotely surprised to find that we have a top 8-10 offense, as we did last year.