We probably should have know this going in. We are the only team in the league that doesn't have two players above 6'8" that can play with each other. I literally went down each roster on basketball reference. I'm not counting Ryan anderson , if he proves me wrong that he can play ... then ill eat my crow We can PJ and Clint. Those are the only good front-court players we have. We have a few other players above 6'7" , let me talk about them Hartenstein - probably sucks , cant get PT anyways.... gone to G league Gary Clark - probably sucks, cant get PT either .... gone to G league Now , I liked those both those guys at some point last year, but either they haven't improved, MDA wont play them out of stupidity , or something else.... but anyways , i dont think its an absurd opinion to think that they are not likely to help us that much The rest of our frontcourt includes Nene who is on the roster for some reason , and Tyson who is also geriatric. Why dont we have any other traditional type PF players ? Why dont we have any 3/4 wings ? Morey asleep at the wheel ? Tilman financial constrain ? MDA wont play them anyways ? Intentional roster construction !? I dont get it. I know we can make a trade. I know we can pickup g-leaguers and sign guys who are still FA ... but those are low probability answers. Frankly , our best option at this point is to hope that Harden can play the 4 and make use of our depth at guard. How did it come to this ? The season isn't over because of this last game or the porous defensive start in general, but holy hell do we have some issues to fix.
Morey find these scrubs according to his Moreyball horse ****. Why basketball idiot always want to tell basketball professional how to play?
I think it is shocking how bad our frontcourt depth is. Capela is the only player worth **** right now, I know people will say he's playing bad but Gobert would look bad if they asked him to switch constantly and when he's not switching having guys Ole'd to him every possession. I think it's a combo of things. The coach is fine with it first of all, he's the king of small ball. If this were JVG coaching there is 0 chance we go into the season with no defensive bigs, 0. He'd demand some, coaches do have a say in who is on their team. Also that Morey just has missed on nearly every PF he's tried here. Dmo was the exception, he looked like he was going to be a quality player until he discovered he had rights...and again, as you say OP...Hartenstein and Clark look like they aren't going to contribute here so that leaves us with SFs playing PF and Nene...
Exactly ! The coach DOES have a lot of say in who make the roster. Morey hasn't been great about picking bigs or big wings lately, but he did pick Harrell ( who mda only played when there was an injury or when nene couldnt) , patrick patterson is still in the league. Covington was a good spot, we just didnt keep him . I think we underestimate how lucky we were in 17-18 with Luc , Ariza , AND PJ ... ( along with clint and even Ryan looked OK back then) I dont know what the path out of here is .. but there's no way we contend without getting another quality big, we are just too small.
Our front court is fine. It's the 6'3 pg who thinks he plays the front court and has the range of an Old school center is the problem.
If anyone argue's that Morey has always been preferential to smaller players ... that is somewhat true, hes always been willing to look at skill over size for frontcourt players... ( willing to draft guys like Landry, Patterson, Harrell , Morris ) you know a 6'8" PF vs a 6'10" one. But we've NEVER had a front court so small. to @JayGoogle 's point .... look at our roster in 13-14 or 14-15 for Mchale. 13/14 over 6'8" - Asik, Casspi, covington, Howard, chandler parsons, Tjones, DMo, greg smith ( not all guys on roster whole season) 14/15 and over 6'8" - Ariza, Tarick Black , Joey Dorsey, Howard, Dmo, Jones, Papanikolau, and Josh smith. ( dorsey and/or black were primarily dwight insurance) ... oh and we had clint too. this year. Clint, nene, Tyson, Hartenstein. I mean come on man ! in 14-15 our team , with dwight howard missing half the year .... won 56 ****ing games and was the second seed. I dont know what point im trying to make, but all I'm saying is that Harden could win games with tarick black starting and our 3 other best players were beverley , ariza , and Dmo . We did this moving the ball and playing next man up. Our three best shooters that year ? Terry at 39 , harden at 37.5 and dmo at 36.8 . We were 12th in offense and 8th in defense. We morphed our team and direction in crazy ways , partially to keep up with GS and contend .... but we've been ignoring some important elements of the game for a while ... chief among them size and interior passing . I too would like my PF to be able to guard guards and hit the 3 , but at this point I'd settle for being able to get a rebound, make a correct pass, hit an open midrange jumper, and ( if stuck on a smaller player) then be able to use your size to make things tough.
good thing we have all that extra cap space to fill up our front court with solid pieces... oh wait, our back court salary takes up over 50% of the team's salary cap? Guess we'll have to rely on g-league players or has beens taking vet mins.
McHale also would not ever go into a season without an NBA level PF, him being a PF himself he knows the importance of one. MDA is smallball king, and coaches just have that say in the roster, he's not going to fight Morey for a PF, MDA wouldn't even want Dwight on the team, even the Dwight we were getting then (We thought we were getting Orlando Dwight) because MDA didn't even know what to do with Pau Gasol and Dwight when he had the Lakers. Just didn't know. I see all these people saying go get this big man and that big man, MDA doesn't want them, won't play them, we have a 15 million center right now that is going to be riding the bench for over half the games because MDA would rather play a SF at center. This is just who Mike is. It's just like Morey couldn't get Adelman to play players he acquired, Mike simply isn't going to play some of these guys that Morey would want to add to the team. I think this is more on MDA than Morey, Morey is trying, and like others have pointed out Clark is playable. I don't know about iHart, I don't know if we've seen enough of him to say, but I know MDA. He just would rather spread the floor as much as possible and he doesn't consider the effect this has on defense, he just doesn't. It's like him putting in EGO over House, it never hit him that it was a defensive downgrade, he was just thinking maybe the offense needed better shooting, that's alwyas the first thing on his mind.
Ok, so in this hypothetical. Let's say Russ doesn't think he's in the front court and sticks to guard things. That's going to instantly fix AD inappropriately assaulting this team? Orrrrrrr.... is that still going to happen because the front court is..... less than desirable?
At least dog **** would scare the other teams. Don't want to step in it, don't want to smell it. Rockets front court ain't scaring anyone!
@JayGoogle , the funniest thing about Ihart , is that he might actually be able to shoot. But when we try to do anything offensively with him its always PnR with him trying to be a finisher. He's not that athletic or strong enough to finish consistently at the NBA level right now.
We probably should have offered our MLE to Jamychal Green. Morey tries too hard to be creative, and he is, which is partly why he’s great, but sometimes we miss out on good pieces and end up with nothing. Jamychal would have been able to play both forward positions with toughness, isn’t scared to shoot the 3, has playoff experience, was affordable and wouldn’t have ended up on a rival.
