Lakers too bent on saving tax $ and didn't want to make Klutch/Lebron mad (THT contract). AC /Lebron together had one of the best +/- in the 3 years they were together. What an awful move
imagine passing on Caruso who at this point is legit one of the best defensive guards in the league, giving THT 31 mill, and trading all your depth for Westbrook. has there been a more self-destroying offseason by a Front office ever?
watch the FO overcorrect and like, cut lebron to give reaves a max deal or something. they have to be just killing themselves over this one.
I'm afraid we're going to try to over correct and add only defensive players. I think it's safe to say our priority was 3 point shooters (fail), followed by guys who could defend once upon a time (Ariza, Baze, Dwight... fail). We need guys who can do a bit of both with size and can still withstand the grind of 82 games, even if their strength is on one side. We miss Javale, Morris, KCP, and obviously AC. Guess we'll find out our direction with the next coaching hire.
in fairness, while i did whine a bit about us being such a bad shooting team, i feel like i always said i preferred that to being a bad defensive team. and i was right. this sucks. and i'd rather overcorrect and just bring back nothing but defenders, tbh. lebron, AD, westbrook, and 11 absolute bulldogs. let's win games 88-84. i actually like watching good defense.
Dude lived in beautiful sunny LA and was still so super pale white. He obviously didn’t want to be here. I don’t want players who don’t want to be here.
The part that pisses me off is that Caruso wanted to come back, on a discount and we could have kept him. It wasn’t THT OR Caruso. The dude passed the eye test and the numbers test… smh
35 million dollars isn't some kind of discount. What difference would he have made this season? What difference has he made in Chicago?
He makes the team automatically better through his defense. That's the players you need when you have superstars like LeBron and AD who solves you the offense. That's how you win championships
this has to be a bit. he continues to grade out as one of the league's better defensive guards, and he looks exactly the same without lebron. your argument was that a) he wouldn't and b) others would just step in--wrong and wrong.
He's playing starter minutes in Chicago and frankly his offensive numbers in the playoffs, have been poor. His defense doesn't override that, and once again, taking a 35 million dollar cap hit to sign Alex Caruso, would have been a terrible decision. I'm glad we didn’t make that mistake. Defensive grades and all that are a bit overstated. It's not like he's going to lock down Holliday or Middletown when he was playing. He doesn't produce enough on offense to justify the investment IMO.
He had multiple winning plays against GIANNIS lol Every game, half of the time is spent on defense. Most people don't let this sink in. When you have 2 superstars, you need a guy like him. Because what he doesn't give you on offense (his A/T ratio is 17/1 btw in the series) is easily mitigated by the superstars and he cornerstones your perimeter defense.
