07-12-2025, 01:52 PM
(07-12-2025, 01:34 PM)Smitty Wrote: I don’t see it being a big deal in the regular season tbh. I was being generous when I said less than 30 games that all 3 would be available. We’re talking about 25% of the regular season when this is the case. For all of Gafford’s warts, he’s a really really good regular season Center and he’s basically Iron Man compared to the other two.
It's not the "let Gafford eat" part that concerns me (though that might be part of the problem's cause). I think Gafford will play well, as you suggest. I think this approach limits the development of lively, who, in the "chess, not checkers" sense of things, needs to be inching towards 30 minutes per, so that we can learn whether or not that's who he is before it's time to pay him.
And, since I believe pretty strongly that AD and Lively are going to be the centers in the playoffs, I wonder if it's wise to think of things so drastically in terms of regular season rotation vs. playoffs rotation. I get that you want to reduce wear and tear, believe me. That point isn't lost on me, but I've always struggled with the idea of changing course in the playoffs. In 2011, the team's best lineups in the playoffs were lineups that had played together all season, and that's part of why they out-executed everyone in almost every 4th quarter. If AD is going to play a ton of center in the playoffs, and I believe he is, then to me it makes sense for the other players to learn what that means and how it works, so I hope that approach is given enough time in the regular season to accomplish that (which I suppose is a subjective amount of time that you and I might see differently). Ditto for Lively.
To me, the ideal rotation is for Lively/AD to start, then PJ comes off the bench for one of them, the other remaining to play center. Then, the first guy comes back in to spell the one who stayed, etc. Think of PJW to the bigs as JET used to be for the guards. He gets a big, 30 minutes+ role, as do both Lively and AD. It probably leaves some room to slide Flagg into the 4, even, like maybe with Marshall at the 3? You probably need a good 3rd center in that scenario for depth (that's where Kai Jones would've come into play for me, as Gafford's salary is a bit on the overkill side for a role like that, to say the least). Obviously, this is not going to be their approach to start the year, given the Gafford extension, but it's the path I was hoping for this summer.