It's almost like we built offensive and defensive lineups Lawson (O) // Beverley (D) // Terry (O) Harden (O) // McDaniels (D) // Thornton (O) Ariza (D/O) // Brewer (O/D) // Dekker (?) Motiejunas (O) // Jones (O/D) // Harrell (D) Howard (D/O) // Capela (D) // Williams (?)
I think everyone is underestimating the impact losing Josh Smith will have on defense. The western conference is a wrecking crew of power forwards. His defense on power forwards in the playoffs was huge. Terrance Jones is a terrible defender, and Donuts is slow laterally and can be foul prone. Plus neither of those guys rebound very well. How do we make up for the loss of Smith defensively and for rebounds? He was pretty good at defending well without fouling too. I hope Morey has something up his sleeve to get a defensive minded, rebounding back-up power forward.
and health. I don't think that knee was 100% last year. Good thing about Bev is I think this trade would hurt most players/piss them off. With Bev I actually think he's gonna go harder
So what is your point? we made it to conference finals with Terry and Pablo. Lawson is quicker so he will be better than those 2 guys so our defense has improved from that stand point. Oh and did I mention Lawson can ball on offense. In addition, Bev was playing alot of minutes last year and you can't sustain his type of play for long minutes. Lawson and Bev won't have to play alot of minutes every day so I will definitely see improvement in Bev's defense and overall game. Also D-Mo will be back. This is my opinion, but I think D-Mo defense is underrated because he is very good getting in position for defense. His defense was missed in the playoffs.
We did lose Smith who was good defensively for us, but replacing Terry with Lawson definitely doesn't hurt us defensively. Just gotta find someone to fill that PF void since, you know, the west has all these crazy good PFs now (Aldridge, Duncan, West, Dirk, Anthony Davis, Griffin, Green?)
10th in defensive efficiency w/o Howard for half the season. Replace Black with improved Capela. Less of offensive burden for Ariza. Replace older Terry with prime Lawson. Improved Motiejunas, T Jones. Not to forget McDaniels. Lots of reasons to believe we can improve actually.
My point is YOU said we played good defense in the playoffs and I call B.S...we were fortunate in playing teams like the Mavericks who were even worse on Defense then we were...
If Harden can improve defensively, Lawson can too. Apparently Lawson is a good motivator, he could tweet himself. When your defense is poor on a team with Championship aspirations and major tv time...his defense or lack thereof will be magnified.
We did play good defense when we needed to with Brewer, Ariza and Harden lineup. We can do the same this year by adding Bev to the mix. I am not saying that we were an elite defense but we were an average good defensive team. With your question of surviving defensively? I think the teams we are playing against will be surviving defensively with Lawson and Harden on the court same time creating Havoc. We just need to float defensively and with Ariza, Brewer, KJ, Howard, and Bev we can definitely do so.
You hope Dmo is healthy and can improve. Smith did okay. Got abused by Griffin, he abused an old and slow Dirk, and against GSW he was invisible.
Motiejunas is O/D too. His defensive rotations are quite good. Rebounding is a huge weakness. Harden can be put in the O/D category too. I hope Terry will re-sign with us. I am not sure that he will be satisfied with a lesser role. We need his experience, wisdom and shooting. It will be interesting to see if Williams will sign here, or will Chuck choose us.
We don't have to against most teams, but we may not survive facing elite teams. That's why we are not favored to win it all. I have gone from a ring or bust fan to someone enjoy the process, so I have no problem with it and hope the team develop and surprise.
I don't disagree with you that last year Bev was not very good on D (well, at least what we're used to). Honestly, I think this is because he was playing too many minutes. He needs to be playing less than 30 mins a game to get the maximum D output from him. And ALL the Rockets looked terrible in that game. They played a very sloppy, uninspired game that night. Not giving anyone (especially Bev) a pass but every NBA team plays a handful of games like this each season.
