[KINGS] Comments that don't warrant their own thread (Redux)

Streaky shooting isn't reflected in averages. As others have said, he was very up and down in offensive performance. He's not elite. He's all hat and no cattle and he and DDR annoy the hell out of me with their respective games and are not compatible with the Perry vision, and I want them GONE! asap.

I’m not sure what your expectations are here. Outside shooting is high variance. And this applies to elite shooters as well. Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, Kevin Durant, etc pull up their game logs they will have horrible shooting games and great shooting games. LaVine is absolutely elite with his efficiency and the scoring he puts up. Even if he dropped closer to 40% he’d still be elite, 45% is a notch above that. 51% from a guard who shoots a high volume of 3s is wild.
 
I’m not sure what your expectations are here. Outside shooting is high variance. And this applies to elite shooters as well. Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, Kevin Durant, etc pull up their game logs they will have horrible shooting games and great shooting games. LaVine is absolutely elite with his efficiency and the scoring he puts up. Even if he dropped closer to 40% he’d still be elite, 45% is a notch above that. 51% from a guard who shoots a high volume of 3s is wild.

Especially when you rank that shot quality vs. result. Dude's a bucket getter, but yeah, he has to be more aggressive. He flat out deferred at times when the team was probably better off just have Zach launch over the shots they ended up actually getting.
 
Especially when you rank that shot quality vs. result. Dude's a bucket getter, but yeah, he has to be more aggressive. He flat out deferred at times when the team was probably better off just have Zach launch over the shots they ended up actually getting.
I think this will improve with continuity. He was thrown into a system he wasn’t familiar with, playing with players he wasn’t familiar with midseason. After a year working with these guys and a training camp I’d expect him to be much more comfortable and same with a guy like Domas who the offense runs thru a good amount.
 
You think a guard should be averaging 7 rebounds a game? You could count the number of guards who do that on one hand with fingers left over. I would guess about 60% of SFs don't get 7 rebounds a game.

YES! I think LaVine, a guard, should average 7 rebs a game! In other words, he should DOUBLE his current output. The guy was an absolute wuss in the rebound department. He's a 6'5" phenom of an athlete and his rebounding would be double if he had the grit and the want-to to do it. He consistently ran away from rebounds last year. Consistently! Begone, Lavine! Begone!
 
YES! I think LaVine, a guard, should average 7 rebs a game! In other words, he should DOUBLE his current output. The guy was an absolute wuss in the rebound department. He's a 6'5" phenom of an athlete and his rebounding would be double if he had the grit and the want-to to do it. He consistently ran away from rebounds last year. Consistently! Begone, Lavine! Begone!

This is... silly. I'm absolutely not LaVine's biggest fan, but there's plenty for which to criticize him without making absurd demands of his game.

Also of note: his rebounding numbers likely saw a modest decrease with the Kings as a function of playing alongside the best rebounder in the entire NBA.
 
This is... silly. I'm absolutely not LaVine's biggest fan, but there's plenty for which to criticize him without making absurd demands of his game.

Also of note: his rebounding numbers likely saw a modest decrease with the Kings as a function of playing alongside the best rebounder in the entire NBA.
you’d also be wasting Lavine’s explosiveness in transition by asking him to crash the defensive glass every possession but, hey, seven boards a game or he’s a scrub!
 
YES! I think LaVine, a guard, should average 7 rebs a game! In other words, he should DOUBLE his current output. The guy was an absolute wuss in the rebound department. He's a 6'5" phenom of an athlete and his rebounding would be double if he had the grit and the want-to to do it. He consistently ran away from rebounds last year. Consistently! Begone, Lavine! Begone!

Did you consider that possibly the Kings coaches instructed LaVine to not crash the boards and to run/leakout in transition any chance he got?
 
YES! I think LaVine, a guard, should average 7 rebs a game! In other words, he should DOUBLE his current output. The guy was an absolute wuss in the rebound department. He's a 6'5" phenom of an athlete and his rebounding would be double if he had the grit and the want-to to do it. He consistently ran away from rebounds last year. Consistently! Begone, Lavine! Begone!

Well, it's obvious to me that your biased and your letting your love for Lavine affect your judgement. OK, just kidding! I personally have mixed feelings about him. I can't argue with his production stat wise, but my question would be, are you going to be there when we need you, because last season, he wasn't. Having said that, last season was a mess, and I'm not sure Michael Jordan could have come into this mess late in the season and looked good.

Regardless of whether you, or I like him or not is immaterial. He's going to be here for a while because no one is going to touch that contract, at least not right now. Screaming and yelling about it isn't going to change that. My hope is that Christi is able to get him to be more aggressive. It appeared to me that he was trying to hard to fit in last season. He needs to go out and play his game. As far as his rebounding goes, there are only a handful of guards in the NBA that average 7 boards a game.

All I would ask of him is to play hard, and play to his strengths. Don't try to turn yourself into a PG. Make the right pass when it's there, but other than that, just play your game and let Christi and Perry decide whether it fits what their trying to do.
 
Well... the guy being a top 5 shooter in the league in an era where it seems like all anyone cares about is shooting and also all but untradeable tells you everything you need to know about the rest of his game. He can't be gone soon enough for my taste.

I’d say it’s his contract, not his game. Can’t make 50 mil in the current era unless you are a top 10 player.
 
I think it's also incredibly dumb to make sweeping generalizations about the efficacy of a LaVine/Domas duo when:

The HC got fired
The franchise player of 8 years got traded
-The 2nd in command (Wilcox) left mid-season
-The lead assistant (Loucks) left mid-season
-Domas was hurt for a good chunk post-all star break and tried to rush back before he was ready.


Not that I think this is some hidden 50+ win team or anything. But I think the whole squad does deserve to just have the slate wiped clean heading into next year. The Kings could not have had more off-court drama than they did last year; just getting back to a sense of normalcy is going to be a massive improvement for the product on the floor
 
I think it's also incredibly dumb to make sweeping generalizations about the efficacy of a LaVine/Domas duo when:

The HC got fired
The franchise player of 8 years got traded
-The 2nd in command (Wilcox) left mid-season
-The lead assistant (Loucks) left mid-season
-Domas was hurt for a good chunk post-all star break and tried to rush back before he was ready.


Not that I think this is some hidden 50+ win team or anything. But I think the whole squad does deserve to just have the slate wiped clean heading into next year. The Kings could not have had more off-court drama than they did last year; just getting back to a sense of normalcy is going to be a massive improvement for the product on the floor
The main glaring problem seemed to be Zach is atrocious at running the pick and roll. I mean, just a crazy amount of passes at Domas’ feet, flubs, poor decisions. I guess maybe it gets better with a training camp, but seems like they really need to get Zach out of that quasi-PG role. His role with Domas needs to be more Kevin Huerter and less Malik Monk.
 
The main glaring problem seemed to be Zach is atrocious at running the pick and roll. I mean, just a crazy amount of passes at Domas’ feet, flubs, poor decisions. I guess maybe it gets better with a training camp, but seems like they really need to get Zach out of that quasi-PG role. His role with Domas needs to be more Kevin Huerter and less Malik Monk.

They talked about it a little bit though. LaVine said he's not used to the big operating without the ball and he's spent most of his career as the primary initiator. They said they had to learn each others tendencies, where LaVine likes the ball, how he cuts, etc. And it sounds like they had like 5 practices the 2nd half of the year lol, so obviously not a lot of time to drill the 2 man game

Im confident they should mesh incredibly well. Their skill sets SHOULD make each other better
 
They talked about it a little bit though. LaVine said he's not used to the big operating without the ball and he's spent most of his career as the primary initiator. They said they had to learn each others tendencies, where LaVine likes the ball, how he cuts, etc. And it sounds like they had like 5 practices the 2nd half of the year lol, so obviously not a lot of time to drill the 2 man game

Im confident they should mesh incredibly well. Their skill sets SHOULD make each other better
The team was still learning how to integrate DeRozan, then midseason you have to integrate LaVine. Then you put a guy like Monk in a role where he’s the one who has to initiate and organize the offense when he’s not a pure PG and has never played that role before. And despite all this chaos the Kings finished #7 in ORTG on the year. I think top 5 or even top 3 is a real possibility.
 
The main glaring problem seemed to be Zach is atrocious at running the pick and roll. I mean, just a crazy amount of passes at Domas’ feet, flubs, poor decisions. I guess maybe it gets better with a training camp, but seems like they really need to get Zach out of that quasi-PG role. His role with Domas needs to be more Kevin Huerter and less Malik Monk.

Being elite at pick and roll doesn't necessarily just mean passing out of it. The best pick and roll players these days shoot or drive out of it. Overall he's usually in the same basic range as Fox and better than Monk according to ball handling percentile. Last year LaVine was almost 20-30 percentage points lower than most seasons.
 
Here is some musing for the long hot off season. I was thinking the other day, probably with too much time on my hands, about the optimism of the last season. Many thought that the Kings had improved over the lineups of the previous two seasons that had resulted in 48 and 46 wins, respectively, maybe being able to knock on the door of 50 wins. DeRozan was a dramatic improvement over Harrison Barnes in scoring, also a top clutch scorer with Fox. That team looked impressive on paper. Alas, we all know that the dream turned into a nightmare. Still, what if one puts the last season totally aside and compares this team, since they seem to be running it back, with that team, with all of its optimism. The huge change is Fox to LaVine. Quite apart from the issue of Fox’s debacle of leaving, LaVine’s contract, and wishing that the Kings had gotten much more than LaVine, LaVine is a top level shooter, better than Fox (a good scorer). They’re not the same player, but one could compare them, all of the other mess aside. In fact, on a recent episode of Eddie Johnson and Justin Termine, discussing Fox’s new contract, which pays him more than LaVine, Fox did not come across well. I was thinking after their assessment that LaVine could look like the better player, at least equal, overall. (I know, but for the Kings handicap, Fox would probably have made more All NBA selections, which Eddie and Justin were looking at—and Fox is probably going to explode on the national scene in San Antonio). LaVine’s incredibly efficient 23.3 points per game (even with the 22.5 for the Kings and that mess), was top 14 in the league, better than Steph Curry. If the Kings double down on LaVine as a scorer for him to get just a few points more up to 27 per game, which he has done, he would be in the top 8, ahead of Jokic. For the team at the end of last year, which played above .500 under Christie, Schroeder is a much better point guard than they had. If one compares the team starting this year with the team starting last year, LaVine is a better shooter than Fox, and Schroeder is a better pure point guard than Fox, and also speedy. Since Fox was inconsistent on defense, it could even be that LaVine and Schroeder are better on defense than Fox and Huerter. Together, LaVine and Schroeder are arguably better than Fox and Huerter. The other three are the same. So is it possible, imagining that in the offseason and preseason that they figure out a way to play together well, is it possible that this team looks better than the team that started last year?! About which people were quite optimistic?!
 
^ violates the Stepien rule unless I missed us adding an extra 2028 or 29 pick. And why do that right after we signed Schröder?

Unless we were starting Keon, Keegan and added a third defender this makes no sense to me.
 
^ violates the Stepien rule unless I missed us adding an extra 2028 or 29 pick. And why do that right after we signed Schröder?

Unless we were starting Keon, Keegan and added a third defender this makes no sense to me.

Schroeder shouldn’t be a starter on a team with playoffs aspirations you make the trade and have him come off the bench. I’d rather do Lavine and picks which allows us to start Keon/Keegan then we can try to get a 3 and D guy using Derozan and Monk

Derozan, Monk, and a pick for Grant and Thybull

Young/Schroeder
Ellis/Carter
Keegan/Nique
Grant/Thybull
Sabonis/Jones
 
Schroeder shouldn’t be a starter on a team with playoffs aspirations you make the trade and have him come off the bench. I’d rather do Lavine and picks which allows us to start Keon/Keegan then we can try to get a 3 and D guy using Derozan and Monk

Derozan, Monk, and a pick for Grant and Thybull

Young/Schroeder
Ellis/Carter
Keegan/Nique
Grant/Thybull
Sabonis/Jones
The point isn't whether he is starting its the money he's been given. We can't afford him with Young. And I doubt Atlanta would be selling him for another expensive guy, speaking of then adding Grant we'd be a tax team (which we can't be this year) and still looking at 6-8 seed at best. That lineup looks really expensive and maybe nets you 4-5 more wins than the one we have today, best case? Would rather develop our young guys and acquire picks than ship picks out to wind up with that.
 
The point isn't whether he is starting its the money he's been given. We can't afford him with Young. And I doubt Atlanta would be selling him for another expensive guy, speaking of then adding Grant we'd be a tax team (which we can't be this year) and still looking at 6-8 seed at best. That lineup looks really expensive and maybe nets you 4-5 more wins than the one we have today, best case? Would rather develop our young guys and acquire picks than ship picks out to wind up with that.

So we’re looking at a journeymen being our starting pg for the foreseeable future smh, I’d rather develop the young guys too but we’re not doing that and we’re the front runners for Westbrook now as well. I was just throwing out Grants name I’d rather get Washington a Washington for monk deal just seams perfect for both teams but we’re not hearing anything about Dallas trading him which is odd
 
So we’re looking at a journeymen being our starting pg for the foreseeable future smh, I’d rather develop the young guys too but we’re not doing that and we’re the front runners for Westbrook now as well. I was just throwing out Grants name I’d rather get Washington a Washington for monk deal just seams perfect for both teams but we’re not hearing anything about Dallas trading him which is odd
Ideally that is a year or two max and we draft a high level replacement. He's the fifth option in our starting lineup Kuminga trade or not, frankly aside from the fact I think he should be closer to $10m per (but again, possible quid pro quo going with his agent who reps Keon and Keegan), I am not alarmed at this right now. We need a vet presence that knows their role at that spot right now so we can determine what to do at the other 4 spots where we have considerable more cap dollars and draft capital invested.
 
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