There are alot of question marks with our bench, however, it good go both ways. Our bench good be either really bad or pretty good. Tony Allen hopefully coming back healthy, POB could be a suprise same with the rookies, and I have no clue how Darius Miles is going be.
Was TA's health the problem last year?
When I watched, it was the mental part of the game he seem to most struggle with.
Beautifully said wdleehi! Tony's conditioning/health was not an issue at all. He is and will forever be "Turnover Tony" to which I take full credit naming. Simply put he lacks good ball IQ. Hence why he makes such poor decisions. I'm talking specifically when he gets all jacked up and takes a stupid shot, or when tries to push the ball upcourt and fails to pass (this is usually when he dribbles the ball off his own foot and out of bounds - then gives that sarcastic smile/confused look).
Of course Tony's health/conditioning was an issue last year. I think early last summer they expected him back in December or so. He beat the estimate by a month or two. And nobody coming back from a major knee injury comes back at full speed right away. Even his turnovers per 48 dropped by about 30% from the first 3 months of the season to the last 3 months.
Tony makes a lot of turnovers, but that's not the only stat you should judge him by. For starters he forces a lot of turnovers so he cost us a net of about 1 turnover every 3 games he played last year. It also turns out that he outrebounded his opponent by a larger margin than his turnover deficit so we really lost very few net posessions if any when Tony played last year.
Something more important than his turnovers is his defense. Check out this page:
http://www.82games.com/ROLRTG8.HTM It looks like the cutoff for minutes on that page is about 35% so Tony just makes it. But there are 200+ names on that page. If you sort by opponent's PER you'll see that Tony allowed the lowest PER against of any of those players last year. You'll also notice that, while Allen had a negative net on court/off court (meaning that we outscored teams by a larger margin with Tony on the bench than with Tony in the game) we still outscored other teams by a significant margin with Tony in the game. There are only 23 players there where their team outscored their opponent by a wider margin than we did when Tony played.
I'm not saying Tony's not turnover prone or that he's a superstar. But he's clearly an adequate sub for us. And unless he has another injury this year he'll start the season much healthier than he did last year. You can't judge his game on the number of times he dribble the ball off his foot.