I know I am probably in the minority on this forum but I believe that with a healthy George and Robinson this team is much better than last years team. I know it's a big if but I have a positive feeling about how George will improve this team playing with a fully healthy Tatum. I'm exited about this upcoming season.
To me, the comparison isn't really last year's team versus this year's team. It's more, this year's current team, versus this year's team with JB in place of PG.
I don't think "healthy George" is really a thing, so I'm skeptical that we'll improve on last year's regular reason. But, we certainly have the potential to play better than last year's team played in the playoffs. That was a hot mess, and unfortunately one of the bigger issues -- the coaching staff -- wasn't addressed in any way. I think that Joe could have used a more experienced assistant coach added to the staff, particularly somebody that can implement defensive adjustments.
I think this is the right view of it.
One thing that the JB <-> George swap certainly did was double down on a few things that may or may not have been causes of our two recent playoff disasters.
One could reasonably argue that Mazulla ball had failings in the playoffs and JB was part of the solution. Unable to overcome the depths of Mazulla-ball failings due to a system holding him back and system just creating too big of a hole for him to pull us out of.
Brad instead appears to have taken the line that Mazzula ball did NOT fail and in fact it was JB failing a totally valid system.
We shall see which case wins out. I think Brad is correct in general, but is he correct enough to overcome the talent and health-gap between JB and PG? we shall see
The theoretical JB that plays elite POA defense and hits tough shots in the half court when our offense isn't able to generate and make open threes has really only existed for like 2 playoff series in 2024. Its a reasonable take to say that we can't rely on him actually being that guy. However, when that JB showed up we won a championship...
There are a lot of ways to analyze Jaylen Brown's contribution to a team, regular season, playoff, or whatever. I really don't see now we can be a better team with George over Brown, based on my eye test. I believe Brown, albeit imperfect, is a better overall player than Paul George.
But in the context of an entire team, where neither George nor Brown are the best player, the difference may or may not make all that much from a team perspective. Maybe you can say the team will not be all that much worse due to the impact of just Brown vs. George and maybe other players will up their game and make up the difference.
As to the recent playoff losses, I think they lost to two teams that were better than people give them credit for. BOS should not have lost either series. I can't say that I understand what went wrong. System, coach, Brown, clutchness (lack of), bad luck, you name it. There is probably some of all of it. I doubt swapping Brown for George is going to fix that. They will have to dig deeper to fix this and have success in the playoffs again.
