Building Around Cooper: A Backward-Looking Thought Experiment

[meistermatze]

Say it with your chest! Great stuff here vfromlmf. Glad to know there's another one in the trenches with me. Agree with everything here but felt like one of your comments in particular needed a little more attention...

Sorry, you guys, I don’t want to be mean, but I think you’re missing the point here.

Of course, PJ is a very good NBA player and, in a vacuum, for example, a much better player than Dort.

But the NBA is all about fit. If you have Flagg, who plays 40+ minutes in big games, and you also have PJ, who does almost exactly the same things as Flagg, just mostly worse, when does he play? They don’t really complement each other, so their strengths are redundant and their weaknesses get exacerbated.

Sometimes this can work if the rest of the team compensates for it, so strengths and weaknesses level out. That’s where Naji comes into play, another problematic piece, because he is also an okay creator, a great inside player, high usage, and a bad outside shooter. Exactly like PJ and Coop, who obviously has the most upside.

For the same reason, Christie is a future building block, because he has a different skill set. He complements Coop better than those two and is cheaper. That’s why you have to prefer him over Naji and PJ, even though they are better players than him. Sounds counterintuitive, but it’s really that simple.

If those are three of your five best players and they also command that kind of money, that’s poor roster construction. Yes, PJ, Naji, and Flagg together are a more talented trio than, for example, Flagg, Dort, and Max Christie, but the latter group excels at what they do best, spacing, off-ball play, and defense (Dort obviously, Max to some extent), which amplifies Flagg’s strengths, especially his inside game and high usage, makes him better overall, and vice versa.

Yes, you need backup players with similar skill sets to your stars, like Flagg. And if Naji or PJ were paid like backups and were fine with 12–18 minutes a game, great. But they’re not.

So they are not what a team built around Flagg needs.

Full stop.

TLDR: It may be okay to keep PJ and Naji for now because you want to accumulate talent and assets. That’s fine. But if you want to build a contender, they cannot be around for the reasons given. They have the same strengths as your star player, Flagg, and the same weaknesses. So they can’t really play together, but they are too good and too expensive to just be backups.

It’s not a matter of talent. It’s a matter of fit, timeline, and money.