re: Are Pels better offensively without AD? *VERDICT IS IN*

The offense is certainly not better with Davis off, but it probably is more balanced. That is mostly out of necessity. Outside of Davis, Evans, and Ajinca (so strange to type that), there is no one healthy right now who has a clear advantage on there defensive mark most of the time. The ball movement was necessary for the team to score. They had to generate open shots. I think some of the ugliness on offense last night was the team trying to figure out how to reincorporate Davis, and ended up deferring to him in the extreme (30 FGAs was a career high I believe).

Some of this is the guys natural inclination to defer to the star and just get out of his way. Some of it is on Monty who was clearly feeding into it. Basically every set was designed to get Davis the ball, which sounds good, but ends up with the rest of the players standing around and not getting into a rhythm. Gordon in particular was atrocious. Gordon has to figure out a way to contribute when he is not the focal point of the offense, but there is also no excuse for Monty not drawing up more than 2 (per BSS recap) plays to get him an open 3. He has been one of the best 3pt shooters in the entire league this year and not utilizing that type of weapon is just not smart on Monty's part. The low number of 3s attempted in the game shows how much the offense changed in this one.

I'm hoping this was mostly just shaking off some rust and and getting Davis back involved, because a team that shares the ball like they had been and utilizes a healthy Davis would be near-impossible to stop.