Paraphrase Lowe’s podcast the other day, going over the mid teams in the East

-27th in offense, 8th in defense, all their important players besides Scottie Barnes and Jakob Poeltl are going into free agency.

-Played an idiosyncratic style under Nick Nurse, moving towards a more traditional NBA style- however are now bottom 10 in turnovers, used to pride themselves on protecting the ball, and still can’t make any shots.

-28th in 3 point shooting, 29th in mid range shooting. However, +13 per 100 possessions with Scottie, Pascal and OG on the floor, who have only played 147 minutes so far. “That’s something? What the hell is this team? I still don’t understand this team”

-Darko injecting more shooting, ball movement, have enjoyed watching the new offense but teams can duck under and switch 95% of things that they are trying to run. Worst half court offense in the league and 12 points below league average, worse than Portland.

-OG has been out and team can’t function on either side of the floor without him. His shooting is very important and without him and Gary Trent Jr in the lineup, when the team already sees a bunch of switches and unders, very difficult to execute for Scottie and Pascal without spacing

Scottie looks outstanding even though they are getting destroyed in the Scottie bench units, his jumper looks like a different animal. Pascal is adjusting and things are starting to normalize for him on offense.

Dennis has been fine- but it’s year 2 hovering around .500, championship seems like a distant memory, what’s the direction of this one team? You don’t always need to pick a direction, but now these contracts are ticking ticking ticking to expiration…

Siakams and OGs future is talked about around the league, and they’ve turned down a lot of stuff for OG, teams want him he’s a tank can guard 1-5 positions and shoot catch and shoot threes at 40% on volume, get you 15-20 a game, that’s a very valuable player.

Seems like they would lean to keeping OG- so what is the best you can get for Pascal to compliment Scottie?

Also what does that mean for Jakob Poeltl? He did a lot of stabilizing with the hand off usage and screening and defensively last year, this year the hand off usage is down for him and he’s obviously not a spacer, so if you’re not using him as a hub like that, and you’re getting good minutes in the small ball lineups, what is his place long term because they just gave him a contract and also traded a first for him

Somethings gotta give eventually because it has to. Even if it means more guys leaving in free agency. Sometimes that’s an okay thing to do- in this case it does not seem like it would be okay.

Theoretically Zach Lavine fits what they need, he takes the ball and puts it in the basket far away, but is owed a lot of money and teams also bring up the ACL injury from a couple years ago.