dagger wrote:You cannot possibly make a judgment on this frontcourt without looking at the other three players on the floor. And you cannot make an educated judgment without knowing Bosh's and Bargnani's ceiling, especially the latter.
I think you are looking at the wrong way. You think our defense is bad because of our backcourt and other players not named Bosh/Bargs are horrible defenders. Thus you replace them and all of sudden our defense improves. IMO defense starts with your big men. You can put Artest/Bowen on the wings and our defense will only marginally improve. You put a good defensive big men in and that will have greater effect on your defense.
dagger wrote:Let's put it this way. If you put Andre Iguodala or Danny Granger on the court with Bosh and Bargnani instead of Jason Kapono, would we win more games? If we put a real defensive stopper on the wing instead of Jason Kapono, would our interior defensive presence be stronger?
I don't know what will happen if you put those players in and neither do you. I can tell that you when we remove Bargs from the equation our defense DRAMATICALLY improves.
Calderon-Parker-Moon-Bargnani-Bosh in 208 minutes have OFF: 1.09 DEF: 1.16
Calderon-Parker-Moon-Bosh-O'Neal in 142 minutes have OFF: 0.98 DEF: 0.96
That is difference of nearly 10PPG per game! All I did was remove Bargs and kept everybody else the same. Now if we did the same with Bosh and kept Bargs in the lineup, I'm not sure how much our defense would improve. But I doubt it would be any worse then when they played together.
dagger wrote:The whole premise of the thread is flawed when removed from the context of the entire lineup on the floor because we know that the 4 and 5 are our most talented positions now, not the least talented.
How is it flawed? Anyway you look at it Bosh/Bargs front court is failure. Look at the stats. Look at our wins/losses. I gave you stats which show we do better when WE DON'T play Bosh/Bargs together. Statically they maybe putting up great numbers but that doesn't translate to much because DEFENSE which is HALF THE GAME and doesn't show up in the stats except for Points Against. And you can conveniently put that on our other players (calderon, kapono, etc).
MEDIC wrote:Hmmmm.....Detroit was 3-9 last month. Must mean that theteam can't win with Hamilton, Prince & Wallace as their core.......
I'm glad you brought that up because it actually proves my point. Detriot is like 6-1 when they don't play with RIP but AI. They are like 3-0 when they don't play with Stuckey but AI/RiP. They are like 5-2 when they play WITHOUT AI but Stuckey/RIP. I think they have losing record with AI/Stuckey/RIP.
What does that tell you? Forcing your team to play with your two identical players because they are your most "TALENTED" players hurts your TEAM as whole and leads to LESS wins. Any resemblance to what we are doing here?