I think it was the result of the change in his physique and the added muscle he put on to get stronger on defense the offseason prior. He was smoking layups and easy shots from the start. And it never got much better. He's pretty much always been a subpar free throw shooter. That I think is mental.
I know you are trolling when you use Jalen and reliable in the same sentence. Your ragebait will not work.
Of course kd is a major upgrade over green. Still having fvv as your pg comes with its difficulties. His main strength is being consistent and not negative. But he doesn’t have much upside either and the fact that he can’t go to the rim is making the lives of defenses a lot easier. Jabari also can’t create advantage by himself. So we are left with Amen, Sengun and kd to create an advantage. There is enough juice there to carry us in the regular season with consistent contribution from Jabari and fvv. My expected scenario is we’ll look very good regular season. As playoffs go, we’ll see the limits of the roster and Ime’s offensive creativity, which is probably not much. I wish ime would experiment more during the regular season but he is not that type.
He has been playing with an injured ankle for several years now, he finally got surgery on it so expecting him to be better. This team will likely have more players with missed games than the previous team, Jalen and Dillon were iron men, but we will have a more developed Reed Shepherd and Cam Whitmore. The depth this team has will help, we have Tari, Reed, Cam, and Tate/Holiday as insurance. Jalen consistently showing up may not have been a good thing, because he was just not good. DFS addressing his ankle issue also hopefully has positive results.
My ONLY issue with this trade is Jalen is 23yrs old and KD is 37yrs old. If KD was in his early 30's I would be fine.
A large part of that is Jalen himself for not showing massive improvement in 4 yrs. He got way too comfortable as the King Rocket when really he should have been living in gym and working his ass off. Maybe this trade is the wake up call he needed.
Um, that was literally our biggest weakness last year. Generating enough offense, especially in the half court when we don't have transition or second chance points. I don't know about other people, but swapping Brooks with DFS seems like a fairly lateral move to me. I was mostly against trading for Durant, thinking it would take more of our assets to get him, but despite all of the reasons I haven't liked Durant over his career (there are quite a lot) swapping JG for him in every possible way helps us with generating offense and helps us with half court offense. Combined with one more year of hopeful growth and maturity from Sengun, Smith, Reed and especially Amen- we may not be an offensive juggernaut, but we should be better than last year.
