My hatred for LAL shines above all else: If I thought there was a chance for the C's this year I'd be bummed about the Nets picking up Milsap and probably LMA. But given that it looks like Brooklyn is the best hope for standing in the way of #18 in LA, I am good with it.
I’ll be rooting for the Bucks again. I hope Kyrie’s foot falls off.
To be fair Kyrie's foot can fall off and the Nets can still win the title with him being out for the entire year.
They might actually be better without Irving because him and Harden in the backcourt is horrible defensively and has a lot of overlap offensively (and Harden is better than him).
If they could get away with the optics, they should call up the Sixers and offer Irving for Simmons straight up. I actually think that would make both the Nets and Sixers a lot better, which is just scary. I don't think the optics would allow the Nets to do that, but I certainly would be trying to do something like that.
Yeah that's why I rate guys like Danny Green highly - that combination of shooting and defence in a low-usage, perpetually moving package is perfect next to teammates who're capable on the ball, and it results in huge ceiling raising results when you're trying to improve high-level teams.
I probably won't make that deal if I were the Nets. The Sixers would explode with Irving, and while the Nets would improve significantly with Simmons, I do feel that it'd be to a lesser degree than what the Sixers would enjoy - they just really need a high-level second option next to Embiid.
But the Nets are already better than the Sixers and Simmons would increase their window of relevance. Plus, they just really need someone that can defend like he can. And with Harden and Durant (and to a lesser extent, Blake and Harris), they don't need Simmons to score at all. He can just defend, pass, and rebound. The Nets would basically be unbeatable if they were healthy over the next couple of seasons (until KD and Harden get old).
I think the Nets are so good offensively that defense has almost become irrelevant for them. Adding an elite defender wouldn't benefit them as much as continuing to be unguardable. Plus, I think Kyrie is better playing off the ball than Simmons is, which is important with both Durant and Harden taking up a ton of possessions.
Of course, Kyrie is going to flake eventually, but until he does I think the Nets are probably at their peak with him.
There are times they need stops though. Imagine how different that Bucks series goes with Simmons being able to guard Giannis at times or sticking to Middleton (I get it probably looks different with Harden and Irving fully healthy, but who knows how the 3 of them will actually look when they actually play together).
Assuming the Nets come out of the East, how are they going to guard the Lakers in the Finals (or whomever comes out of the West)? Durant can't guard Davis, James, and Westbrook all by himself. I just think with the pure redundancy that is Irving and Harden, the Nets would be much better served getting one of the best and most versatile defenders in the sport rather than sticking with the most injury prone and worst member of their big 3.
That's why they signed Millsap - he can guard a variety of players. Also don't think that the Lakers are getting anywhere near the finals assuming they even get into the playoffs - I know I've said this about them in 2020 and it backfired spectacularly,. but their team just looks terrible right now outside of LeBron and Davis. You're an awful lot from a rather injury-prone big and a 37/38 year old to carry that team to the playoffs.
I just don't get why you think they are going to be terrible. The roster is old, but Westbrook was the 2nd best team on a playoff team last year. Anthony was a solid rotation piece on a playoff team. They have the 3rd best player in the world and another top 10 player. They have decent depth (again mostly old, but still guys that have been playing rotation level minutes)
PG - Westbrook, Nunn, Rondo
SG - Horton-Tucker, Monk, Ellington
SF - James, Bazemore, Ariza
PF - Davis, Anthony
C - Howard, Gasol
That seems like a 50 win team and a team that if healthy could quite easily make the finals.
Was Westbrook the Wizard's second-best player? Just the other day you were pointing to +/- and on-off stats to argue against Romeo Langford. Those stats do not make such an argument for Westbrook, and have him coming in behind Bertans and Neto, in addition to Beal (and a host of other players who didn't play the full season). Look at something like RAPTOR (which also uses on/off performance as part of its measurement), and Westbrook was 9th of 10 Wizards who played 1k minutes.
The Lakers will have a hard time avoiding the play-in game this year, much less advancing all the way to the finals (which I recall being told they were certain to do after last year's play-in).
In fairness, the argument was slightly different there. The claim there was that Romeo has certain intangibles that make the team play better while he is on the court, even if they don't show up in a box score. In other words, is Romeo Langford akin to Andre Iguodala, a guy who was mediocre stats-wise, but was a key component on the Warriors playing at an elite level.
With Iguodala, you could verify his impact through (flawed) metrics such as RPM, adjusted +/-, etc. What we were seeing on the court was reflected in box scores. There's no such corresponding objective basis that suggests that Romeo is lifting the play of his teammates.
What you're now doing with Westbrook is more akin to the guy who said something along the lines of "so, you're saying Jeff Teague is our best player"? You don't assess quality of a player based upon +/-, because it's so dependent on lineups.
The argument was different. However, Westbrook is someone who's long been criticized as someone who hunts stats to the occasional detriment of his team, so +/- and on-off would be relevant statistics in this discussion. But you're right, there's a lot of noise in the lineups. So I took Westbrook's 10 most common lineups that don't include Neto, and compared the results with how they performed with Neto on the court:
In these 10 lineups Westbrook played 645 minutes and the Wizards were outscored by a weighted average of 5.6 points per 100.
In these same 10 lineups, Neto played 185 minutes, and the Wizards were outscored by a weighted average of 3.7 points per 100, or 1.9 points better than Westbrook.
There are a lot of lineups, and my lunch break is only 30 minutes and thus ending, so I'm not going to go further. But I am comfortable making this conclusion -- when we look at Westbrook's most common lineups, the Wizards were on average a more successful team when Neto was on the court instead of Westbrook with those same lineups. I'm not trying to say Neto is a great player. I don't think he is. I do think Westbrook is a lot closer to league average (or worse) than others in this conversation, and the trendline is heading the wrong direction.
who were the opposing players on the court with those lineups? I suspect that Westbrook was probably playing against more starting lineups of opposing teams.
Also, Washington was 1.3 points better per 100 possessions with Westbrook on the floor then with him off it, so it isn't like he was making them worse (Beal was +3.2, so not like a crazy disparity).
Westbrook was pretty clearly Washington's 2nd best player. It isn't a coincidence that Washington got a lot better once Westbrook found his groove and got a lot better in the middle of the year (they started 6-17, finished 28-21).
They were the same lineups Westbrook played a lot with, so Beal, Bertans, etc. were typically in these lineups. Unless you think that Washington played Beal and Bertans against scrubs, but spared Westbrook the indignity, it's pretty likely they were against a similar quality of competition.
And again, Neto bested Westbrook at on/off if you don't take lineups into account, so I'm not sure what you're trying to prove by bringing that up. Roy said lineups matter, and he's not wrong, but the lineup argument does no favors to Westbrook. You just have to make hand-waving suppositions in defense of your position that, no-matter what, Westbrook was the second-best. Have at it, but Westbrook did not move the needle for the Wizards, and he didn't move the needle for the Rockets the year before. He's on his fourth team in four years -- that's not an accident.
