Dennis is a scorer. He is fairly resistant to injuries for such a small guy, plays a lot of games. He's not a playmaker, just not who he is, but other than that he's really helping us right now.
What an amazing turnaround from the beginning of the year. Dennis is on fire! Loved that defensive play the most- breaking up that inbounds pass at the end of the game.
I remember the main complaint about DS during his 1st stint was his inability to find AD for easy buckets , especially compared to Rondo the prior season. His energy on D was appreciated though
Because, again, he is not a PG. In fact, he is quite bad at facilitating even for a SG. As a scoring undersized SG, he is probably one of the better ones, especially considering his contract. Had he signed that 84M contract, however, I would be of a very very different opinion.
an important thing to keep in mind regarding contracts is that sometimes they have a reverse effect on production. what i mean is, had dennis been paid 20 per, we would have intentionally built our team to maximize his talents and featured him more offensively. so his numbers would have been better, and it wouldn't have looked so bad, imo. because he ended up playing as a backup on the mini mle and then on a vet min, his teams weren't/aren't as invested (literally) in his success. i really think both we and he would have been better off if he had accepted the offer. we wouldn't have lost assets for nothing, he would have played better here, etc.
You are just saying this because you think it would have prevented the Russ crap. Which is true. But Dennis at 20 per, being featured would be awful.
i think when we offered him that deal, he was basically playing like a 15-18 million per player--this is the going rate for 6moy types, right? he was our starting pg, and people quickly forget that we were actually really good that year when we had our guys (and iirc, one of our worst stretches came when he was out). right now, he'd be in the second year of that contract (and we're not even sure the 4th was guaranteed). and, as you said, we wouldn't have russ. i don't know; the parallel universe i imagine has us in better shape with a slight overpay on russ than 45 million on schroder to drag us down last year and be a solid 25mpg bench player this year. worst case, we'd have been paying schroder 21 million for a similar role and impact.
why what? his performance in two games doesn't change my time machine ideas about whether signing him would have been better for the long-term health of the franchise. he could be a dnp-cd tomorrow, and i'd still think that signing him would have preserved a workable salary structure and prevented the russ trade. even if he was terrible, his 20 per contract would have been much easier to move than the 45 on russ. and it would have been much less of a national talking point, which has also hurt our efforts tremendously.
Kind of amazed the Lakers "should" have won with Lebron, Bryant, and Schroeder having some subpar games. Westbrook was trick and treat as usual but overall was a positive but on the bright side there just needs to be a few things changed - i.e. have Reaves available and this would have been an easy win. Dinwiddie stepped up and we didn't have the complement like reaves and Schroeder/Bryant couldn't pull it off like they had been. Part of it was probably scouting as well - Dallas double Lebron hard and gave Bryant mid range shots which he seemed oddly uncomfortable taking and bet on Schroeder falling back to earth - it worked
He didn’t appear to have a great game, only 4-11, but he ended up with 18/8/8. That steal was fantastic though, finally we make a clutch play like that instead of a big blunder. Sunk all the clutch free throws too.
He's turned to freakin Reggie Miller at the FT line: feels like they're always going to go in. Both him and Lebron have improved at the FT line significantly: not sure why they cna't get that 3pt percentage higher
And finished that drive while getting the foul after the steal too. That was big time, and not an easy make. Props on the clutch free throws. Great ending!
