You have to keep in mind a couple things: 1. We have to want Dwight if Chris Paul comes with him. You can say you don't want Dwight but if it means getting Chris Paul....you take Dwight all day long. 2. Pau is wanted by other teams. TWolves want him to placate Rubio into signing a long-term contract. Memphis wants Pau to pair with Marc. If we can trade for Pau using TJones and a bunch of expiring contracts, then you almost have to do it. Sometime next season Love could get fed up and tell Minny he's gonna opt out the next season. And honestly Minnesota can't wait for him to do that and then his trade value plummet. They're probably not going to re-sign Big Nik. Sooo, just makes a lot of sense if we can get Pau, it might turn into a win-win by being able to flip Pau to Minny for....Love. Which means you essentially would be paying TJones and expirings for KLove. We need to hope that we are the first and only team to the table ready to give the Lakers that package for Pau before Love decides he wants to go. 3. When you look at getting a superstar to add to Harden and upgrading the team...who is available? a. Chris Paul is going to be a free agent and he's better than Lin. b. Dwight Howard is going to be a free agent and he's better than Asik. I know it's debatable but he's better. c. there are no other free agents on the market that are significantly better than what we have starting for us. d. there may be a player or 3 come available in trade that would be better than one of our starters. Those players are most likely to be Pau Gasol and Kevin Love. If one of those guys is available to trade for, you've got to make the trade because they are superstars and they are better than one of our starters in the position that they play. Pau and Kevin Love are a better 5/4 combination than any 5/4 combination on our roster. Pau is better than Asik and Love is better than Motie. And both of those guys are real good. 4. If you can trade or sign a legit superstar big without giving up Asik and Motie...you gotta do it. There are 96 big man minutes available. Superstar gets 33-35 and two other non-superstar guys (Asik and Motie get around 30 a night). Plenty of minutes for 3 stud bigs and it will take 3 stud bigs to knock off a team like Miami and win a ring.
Gasol don't fit this team ....running up and down just going to tire him out. And he's going to be exploited in pick n roll. Dude sucks.
You are going to find out shortly that when you get to the playoffs you can't just run up and down. We will be playing another team with a better record than us that knows how to play the game. If we're ever going to win a ring we've got to be able to run the halfcourt sets effectively and efficiently to go along with our running game. Playoff teams turn the ball over less and score the ball more efficiently than non-playoff teams. By the way, remember SHOWTIME? One old man (Kareem) surrounded by a bunch of gazelles. Same thing is going on in San Antonio right now. We need a great half court big man that can help us when we play that slow-paced team that walks it up and scores, then gets back and doesn't turn the ball over and therefore doesn't let us run on them. We need a half court offense to complement our running attack.
Nice post. I don't disagree with your logic. However, I just like the current makeup of our team and don't want to hurt our chemistry. This team could challenge for the WCF next season as is, and the finals two years from now. Why jack with what's already working well? Look at the growth in Omer's game this season. Everyone thought he'd be barely passable offensively. If he can grow this much in one season, it's reasonable to think he can add even more to his game. Dude's a hard worker. Dmo's offense on the other hand is probably above average already. He can both run the floor and play in the post (and shoot the J). He simply needs playing time and an off-season of bulking up to get his defense squared away. Having said that, I wouldn't mind Pau coming off the bench to backup Omer for a season or two. That makes a lot of sense, especially if all it will take is TJ and some change.
