re: Zach Harper in The Athletic Grades Our Offseason - D+

quote:

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Every fan last offseason "they need more shooting, that's not going to work".

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Yeah, that definitely was NOT the case.

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And I do think, if you looked at the message board fandom to determine the upcoming team’s likely season, the Pels would be solid playoff teams or borderline contenders based on the optimism of offseason fans going back over a decade. Offseason optimism is real.

There is a lot of assumptions and best case scenarios going around. And more for this upcoming season than most.

We are, in truth, relying on quite a lot of assumptions to become the team a lot of people are talking about(5ish seed):

- Willie Green being not just an upgrade, but a really great coach out the gate.

- Graham and NAW being able to step in as full time starters together and produce a net positive back court.

- BI and Zion to both take leaps and learn to be complimentary with one another and not the next Embiid/Simmons awkward combo.

- BI and Zion to step up defensively or us risk having amongst the worst defense in the league given our starting unit.

- JV being able to take more threes and mid rangers and continue his success from last season.

- Hayes to take another step forward

- Murphy being able to buck the trend even the best rookies face, which is being a net positive player year one.

- Our bench performing better than last year.

There’s a scenario where very little of our best case scenarios happen, and for me it’s not exactly wrong for national writers to just assume the best case view we all want to assume. Much like the fights we got into last season about articles like Lowe’s splashing cold water on our roster.

quote:

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Every expert and fan last offseason "they need more shooting, that's not going to work". And while spacing didn't really slow the offense down because Zion is amazing, they weren't wrong either.

This offseason Pels swapped non shooters in Bledsoe and Adams for good shooters in Graham/JV. They also more than replaced Lonzo's catch and shoot production with Murphy. So they addressed the major complaints of last offseason pretty well yet they are some how worse?

I get why people aren't excited about swapping Lonzo for NAW, but NAW will be a better fit than Lonzo, because all of the things we needed Lonzo to do but he was a afraid to try, NAW will do. And he looks so good it's worth mentioning again, Trey Murphy will more than replace Lonzo's catch and shoot production.

Anyone thinking the Pels are worse has no clue what they're talking about.

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That's putting a lot of faith in Murphy as a rookie. We got marginally better at best. I think JV is an upgrade over Adams. Graham is still pretty much a boom or bust type. Many are making him out to be Steph Curry. He is not a knock down shooter, or has not been yet. He could be a nice upgrade or could just as easily be just average. As someone said earlier, a lot depends on the improvement of NAW and Hayes. Also, I think the biggest potential for improvement lays at the feet of Willie Green.