What made Deke good last year is he was able to concentrate on defense with JH on the floor and Hayes came off the bench when Deke would go out. Assuming there is truth to Morey's notion of a near All-star caliber PF coming in this player would definitely start putting Hayes to the 2nd unit. Having Hayes and Deke as your 4/5 subs makes for real scoring problems on the 2nd unit and opens up lots of opportunities for opponents to double off of them. I appreciate and love Deke, but, if he comes back, I would like to see him only in the game with a scoring 4.
Deke didn't play because Sloan asked JVG to bench him. Oh yeah, asked that Snyder be benched too or did it have something to do with JVG's usual 7 man rotation shrinking in the playoffs. JVG is gone now and might still be here if he'd put Deke on Boozer. Now we will never know.
Yeah Yao played shutdown defense against guys who could shoot a 15 jumper and drive the ball around him. I can see why deke never got any playing time.
That's right, I forgot about Deke's tremendous offensive output that we were stifling over on the bench. So while Boozer ran around him much like he did Yao, Boozer would have had fits stopping his powerful hook.
Yeah I agree Yao got torched but he did score on the other end, but the fact remains that Deke was effective against the Jazz in previous games. Go back and look at Yao's minutes per game in the regular season vs the playoffs. Then take a look at Deke's. Maybe fresher legs could've got one big rebound we needed at the end of that series. What was it 5 straight rebounds by the Jazz?
