The Westbrook trade is bad not because CP3 is better. It's not even because we had to give up a bunch of picks (assets). It's bad because he can't shoot and therefore we have to fully committed to small ball. We don't need another PG. Harden is our PG. We only need a decent backup PG. What we need is a shooting guard who can shoot. Gordon is okay. But he needs to come off the bench. We need a very good, if not a star, SG. House doesn't cut it. A guy like Paul George would be perfect. I've said it multiple times. The mistake started at trading for CP3. We gave up the future for a window of 1.5 years with a HUGE injury risk. Once that humongous contract was signed, it's the beginning of the end. The only possible players we could get from trading him would be another equally horrible contract, such as Westbrook or Wall. When we got Westbrook, there was no choice but getting rid of all players who were taller than 6'8. Tonight's game was telling. We shot 42% from 3, while the Lakers shot 30%. Turnover numbers were even. We even got a huge FT differential advantage of 39-16. (Can you believe it? It's the Lakers.) That should look like a sure fire winning sign for us. But we still got blown out. Why? Because we could not get the rebounds. We were too small. Too tired to box out giants. We gave them tons of second chances. And we got only ONE offensive rebound at the other end. And did I say we couldn't make 2pt shots?
Half of our FGAs are 3s, which is about the normal proportion. The problem is, we only had 65 FGA. Part of it was because we had so many FTs. But most of it was because we couldn't get the rebounds.
Yeah, remember people were saying that the Lakers didn't have the speed to stop our small ball offense? They thought it would be an easy series. Lakers couldn't shoot from outside and they couldn't keep up with our all out offense. Turned out we didn't have the personnel to counter their adjustment and got shut down after Game 1.
It's because Westbrook has killed our spacing(I disagree with you about the Chris Paul trade but dont have to get into that).
It's funny how before WB trade, we all unanimously hated him and when he came over, people started saying how we would fit in seamlessly just cause he was a Rocket. Guy has always been fools gold.