It’s annoying Yak getting such a disproportionate amount of hate, he’s had a bit of a rough patch but I don’t think he was even that bad tonight relative to the rest of the team.
Consider that we have to watch:
Gary getting swatted driving into 7 footers at the rim and chucking up contested middy’s 5 seconds into the shot clock.
Precious playing with oven mitts and severe CTE preventing him from making any sensible decisions on the court in his 4th year
6/8 games going down 16 or more
Darko sending out Otto for garbage minutes while giving the world’s longest leash to the previously mentioned players
I get being upset with the front office for putting this sad sad sad product on the court but at this point it feels like people are just crying about yak because it’s an easy way to shit on masai for making that deal.
Lol is this Jak’s agent, what the hell? He’s playing poorly as is the rest of the team. He also just signed a rather large deal when he’s at the level of a backup.
Not all of it is his fault. He was tested to a team with a bad fit and received a pay. Sucks that he can’t catch a pass though
The entire team deserves heat, not just Yak. Scottie played terrible, OG played terrible, Pascal wasn’t good, Poeltl wasn’t good, Gary was bad. No one gave any effort or hustle all game.
We can complain about shooting and roster construction all we want, but the team simply got beat by effort. The Magic aren’t a good shooting team, they don’t have a great offence, yet they were energetic and running and active on defence.
This one was 100% on the players, not the FO.
You might get 5-8 games from Jakob like he did against the Pistons - other than that, he’s not anything life changing. $20m is steep for him but at this point its somewhat refreshing to know we have someone not named Scottie Barnes signed past this summer Lol. Lot of the issues currently with him also surround the shit shooting we have out on the floor which makes spacing tough for him and ends up with congested lanes. He’s not the worst part about this roster - if we want to start somewhere, get rid of Precious/McDaniels/Garett Temple/Otto and then find out what the plan is with GTJ b/c he looks like he’s not really bought into this system and his play is showing it.
Yak is a minus -13 right now.
Not just bad, but one of the worst centres in the league.
Orlando wins the last 11 years = 34,22,21,33,42,25,29,35,25,23 and 20…
Stop crying it’s one game ffs
I can’t speak for everyone, but my displeasure with the Jak trade is about how much we gave up to get him.
Ultimately the Raptors turned Kyle Lowry, Khem Birch, and 4 draft picks into Precious, Thad, and Jak.
Grady needs G-League time. That’s what our current struggles come down to.
The team really should have 2 more losses than we do. 4-10 or maybe only one if we take the Chicago game. 5-9.
I guess we should hold off for about 6 more games, get a quarter of the way through the season and see where we stand.
There is so much noise right now between new system, new point guard, new bench, and returning players, half still trying to figure everything out.
Every game they come out so flat.
The starting 5 are +5.6 net rating and have played together about 18% of the total min played and that lineup has only been available for 10 of the first 14 games.
The next most played lineup has only played about 5% and that’s the starters with Gary instead of OG and that’s only happened in 7 games.
Trying to protect Grady’s min they have played him with Dennis yak and pascal with gt and that lineup has been -16 net bad. So 6th man and 3 starters and Dick, and they’re getting drilled.
Then Grady with the starters but in for OG and it is way worse -50.5.
So really trying to develop Grady at the NBA level is killing us.
(Note those Grady lineups are the 4th and 5th most used 5 man lineups!)
Insert Otto or flip yak for Gary and the lineups are really good again.
Developing even 1 raw rookie costs a lot.