Anthony Davis Discussion: Thanks For The Ring AD!!!

So in this slippers vs Pelicans game, all 3 former Lakers are not suited up.

Glad to have AD.

 

Wow. Can you imagine how out of our gourds we would be now if we still had all of them and yet again hurt and out and ruining another season at the start?

 

Especially if we decided NOT to trade for AD. And just ended up paying KCP more.

 

Surgery = out till the start of next season, no? Wasting another year of Bron's contract?

 

no way

without AD they are a 7-8 seed at best. lebron is too old to carry this team on his back and the rest of the guys aren't going to shoot lights out every night. without AD this team is screwed

 

I'd say we should judge this at the end of the season.
If both Ingram and Lonzo are out half the season with injuries, it will be hard for me to defend them much longer.
But that being said, AD's not looking too healthy either.

 

Lonzo and BI are role players. Nothing to defend. Lakers have a future league MVP, DOPY and Finals MVP.

 

Role players don't average 27 PPG.
BI has kept that up for about 15 games going back to last season.
When will it become a pattern for you? At 20 games, at 40?
If he's injured all the time or his DVT flares up then none of this matters but if he stays on the court 70 games plus then I think he'll be a serious scorer.
Even if BI becomes an all star, it doesn't take anything away from AD... I don't see why so many here feel compelled to belittle Ingram.
If he can form a strong pairing with Zion the Pels will be a good team.

 

Hell no . We knew when we signed Lebron year 2 would be our best opportunity to win it all ... and it sure does look like it .

 

Lonzo and BI may still have a lot of potential but I'm so relieved they're someone else's problem now. I never again have to worry about whether they're gonna put it all together and consistently play at an elite level.

 

Role players. And its 10 games into the season. Slow your roll with the 27 points a game.

 

BI has averaged that for 15 games including the 6 games last season.
Maybe you can list all the role players who averaged 27 PPG for 15 games and then suddenly stopped, never to duplicate that again.
I'm not saying he'll keep up that pace, especially once Zion is back, but a 20 PPG average is not unreasonable to expect.

 

Here's my list:

L
L
L
L
W
L
L
L
W
L
W

Looks like the Lakers list when he was on the Lakers.

 

I love Ingram's potential but people need to get serious. It seems the ones who love Ingram are the young Lakers fans.
https://www.basketball-reference.com/players/i/ingrabr01/gamelog/2020/
6/9 games, he's had a negative +/- while on the court. If he's as good as his stats suggest, he should at least be able to carry his team enough when he's on the court. I don't expect the Pelicans to be a great team but they were predicted to be a playoff team. What happened? The three Lakers pieces are 3/5 of the top players in the Pelicans and have not performed well or are constantly injured. Where have we experienced this before? They are injury prone and inexperienced players not yet able to help win championships.

Ingram is an excellent ISO player but his hot start is very misleading. Does anyone realistically believe he can shoot 47% from three for the entire season? Give it more time and it will average out to eventually 35-37% and then the numbers and efficiency he is putting up will change A LOT.

No one likes to mention the fact that Ben Simmons was in the same draft... Look at how much Ben got paid. Are you willing to pay Ingram that amount or near it to keep him? Because that's likely what you are looking at if you want to retain him.

With AD, what I like the most is the fact that outside of Embiid and KAT, AD has a distinct advantage over any other frontcourt team. Every other game, we can rely on AD to dominate the opposing frontcourt. We couldn't rely on Ingram to do that. It's much easier to find guys like Ingram, Ball, and Hart in free agency than a guy like AD. How many Josh Hart's and Lonzo Ball's are in the league? How many AD's? That's part of why LeBron and Ingram didn't work at all. Ingram needed the ball whereas AD doesn't because AD is capable of making an impact without the ball and still play elite defense on the other end.

I'd love to keep Ingram but mentioning him in the same breath as AD is laughable. Ingram would be lucky to achieve 1/4th of what AD will accomplish in his career once it is all said and done. Lonzo Ball, time to call it what it is: A talented point guard who will be injury prone. So really, what did we give up for AD that we couldn't replace? If we lose AD, how do we replace him? I don't know if we can.

 

You're being too generous. Ingram was out the last two games vs Houston and LAC.
Pelicans only lost to the Rockets by six points... Totally a winnable game.
Pelicans beat the Clippers "deep" roster with PG having a sensational game.

They played two very competitive games against two top Western Conference teams without Ingram and Lonzo Ball.

 

this is the important part. all the folks pining for BI like to point out that AD didn't lead NO to glory. well, he led them to wins. his current production (which is being poo poo-ed by this crowd because he's the ripe old age of 26, i guess?) is better than BI's career-high stretch. AND he's one of the very best defensive players in the game. think about this.

anyway, i won't go so far as to call ingram a "role player" as that implies (usually) a lower usage player that does the little things. my issue with him in la (and with randle and clarkson, for that matter) was actually that they were NOT role players. they were high usage players whose production didn't positively correlate to wins. a good analog would be monta ellis. he averaged 25ppg for two years, helping GS win a total of 60 games in the process. teams just couldn't win while playing ellis in his optimal role. that was and is my concern with randle and ingram. they're both monta-ing it right now in NY and NO.

 

Exactly. Monta Ellis is the perfect role model for players who put up numbers just because that's all they can do. People associate numbers with winning when it simply isn't strongly correlated any longer. Rudy Gobert doesn't put up exciting numbers but he's infinitely more important to a team than Brandon Ingram when you look at the totality of what he provides. A casual basketball fan would have taken that stat-loving Monta Ellis over Rudy Gobert 99/100 times. There's a reason why the Warriors became so much better once they got rid of Monta Ellis and started allowing Curry to take over. Another player worth mentioning is Andrew Wiggins.. Can score the ball and put up points but who the hell wants to watch them do that all the while their team gets destroyed by 15-20 points every night?

 

in fairness, wiggins seems to be turning a corner, but yeah, same deal. they want their 30 million back. and they'd have gladly traded him and okogie and a million firsts for AD, too.

 

Wiggins PER was around 12-13 for his entire career until now, Ingram has a similar PER to Wiggins now in his 4th yr vs. Wiggins 6th yr, also this is Wiggins 1st yr ever to have a positive VORP (which is I guess is some sort of net different between Def +/1 and Off +/1) ingram had a positive vorb in yr 2 and its the same # as current Wiggins. People need to stop pinning wins and loses on 1 guy, its just like AD for the AD fans, when he won the 2 season its him "carrying the team" then when they lose although with the same personnel the next yr its "supporting cast sucks" or AD carried them against Por when it was Rondo/Holiday as well lighting up Cj/Dame and making them work on both sides of the floor. The only difference between this yrs Wiggins and Ingram in relations to W/L column is this guy name Karl Anthony Towns, one has em the other doesn't. To comment on Gobert, take Donovan off that Jazz team and see how much winning Gobert does as lead guy with his crazy advance stat #s