Are you thinking playoffs?

Either way injuries and what not shake out, I do think the front 3 of the Warriors is nice to have.

Not the most important thing ever in the universe, but it’s important. Injuries will happen. Having people capable of producing when given minutes is helpful.

 haha, Maybe not perfect but I’m pretty sure it would be better, I recognized the need for world population control about 1969 and “they” still haven’t figured it out.

well if as was reported DLee wanted to come here and woulda refused to sign an extension for any other location it seems we might have had the upper hand in dealing with the knicks so we shoulda put up a better fight at keeping rudolf and finding a way to make the deal?

sine qua non

 a Latin legal term for “(a condition) without which it could not be”

Didn’t realize about the Morrow/Carney contracts. Wasn’t sure where to look those up, Yahoo! has Carney listed as making slightly more than Morrow this year.

Morrow has been my favorite Dub these last two (dark) years. I’ll be rooting for him to get better and earn that cash. :D

but the Nyets kinda overpaid, I bet the Warriors could have kept him for less…until those East-coasters stuck their nose in our business

10.8 per game in the NBA, 13.8 per 36. That’s pretty good.
But great way to use 1 guy to show that a stat is flawed. That isn’t a good argument, especially when all of the other numbers agree with it.

There’s a good chance that Amundson is a better rebounder than Turiaf (he’s below average for a big man), but those numbers don’t prove it.

For guys who get their minute load, it is. I just looked up their career per 36. Lou is 10/36, Turiaf is 7.9/36. You shouldn’t use per game numbers for these guys because of their back up nature. Per minute production has shown to hold up as well.
So basically, Lou gets 2.1 more rebounds per 36, grabs 3.7% more of available rebounds and is coming off his second best rebounding season.
Lou isn’t just a better rebounder; he’s a much better rebounder.

Let’s say you have two equally-capable players. One of them is having a bad night – does it make sense to bring the other one in?

No. Barring an external circumstance, there’s no reason to think the second equally-capable player will be more successful than the one who’s struggling. He’s no more likely to get hot than the guy you’re pulling out.

You talk about us having “scoring depth” last year, but really, that’s not true. We had a lot of guys who put up decent per-game numbers because we had a lot of injuries, so a bunch of players had games where they were out there for a lot of minutes and somebody’s got to take those shots.

Replacing Mags with Lee doesn’t hurt our ability to score. Replacing Tolliver, Turiaf, and Moore with a healthy Beidrins, Amundson, and Wright doesn’t hurt our ability to score – it helps it.

At the swingman spot, you’re replacing Morrow with D. Wright. That’s a small offensive downgrade based on last season. (Morrow had a better TS% and scored a whopping 4 more points per 36 minutes). CJ Watson is more than adequately replaced by Reggie, who’s a better volume scorer and has better efficiency. (For all the talk of CJ as our backup PG, let’s remember that he’s really not a PG. He’s a small shooting guard).

With improved scoring at so many positions, it seems bizzare to fixate on the loss of Morrow and say, “oh, wow, our scoring is going to take a real hit.”

There were stretches when the Warriors will actually force a low % shot, but could not grab the rebound. How many times did we see the opp. team have 2nd, 3rd, and even 4th chance shots? We grabbed 753 offensive rebounds last year but gave up 1100 ORB.

We did lose some off the bench scoring options yes, but we really have no excuse to be absolutely dominated on the boards again. Which should mean less possessions for our opponents and more possessions for us.

As for defense itself, we gave up a 52.5% eFG% to our opponents last year. So not only do we give up possesions by not getting the board, we allow them to convert at a decent clip, and at a clip higher than us (we shot at 51.4 eFG% last year).

Either way, with a starting 5 of Curry, Monta, DWright, Lee, and (healthy) Biedrins. That should actually better offensively than last year. Hopefully BWright can come back healthy, Reggie will be here the full year, and Amundson should be more than serviceable off the bench. Really the one thing that has me worried is who the back up point is. I sure hope Lin is a quick learner and proves he can play in the NBA.

I see the big flaws that we still have.

We were dead last in defense and rebounding last year. We could score points but god helps us if we tried to stop them on the other end, and heaven help us if we wanted to pick up the rebound even if the other team missed. We still have Monta guarding bigger 2s, but now we have a bigger front court to help cover that up a little bit.

We did lose some depth yes, but we better have a healthy season this time around.

Do I see the team as is as a playoff team? Not unless a few guys together have some breakout years, I am sticking with a mid to late 30’s win total.

Or them to be above average defenders suddenly? Durant’s year 2 to year 3 improvement was really special. You shouldn’t expect that kind of improvement out of anyone, let alone 26 and 24 year olds. Curry a little bit, but Durant’s improvement was just silly.

It’s pretty normal for a player, especially a guy who enters straight out of high school, to spend a couple of years figuring the game out and developing. Therefore, I look at his first two years and don’t see them as being a function of what we can realistically expect of him – any more than KG’s or Kobe’s or Jermaine O’neal’s first two years were indicative of who they really were as players.

Then we had 2007, which seemed to continue the solid growth, and was a very good year.

Then he got hurt. He wasn’t fully healthy in 2008-09, even when he was playing. I write off injury seasons when looking at projections for healthy players.

And that brings us to last season. We basically have two full seasons of developed, healthy Monta. 2007 and last year. In 2007 he was very good. Last year he sucked.

The question becomes which is more likely to be the case this year?

Last year he came in with a bad attitude, saying all the wrong things. A lot of us worried that he would play selfish ball, and he did. He tried to do too much. He also had a coach who played him too many minutes, and refused to reign in his worst tendencies even when he was hurting the team.

This year, he seems to have a great attitude. He sounds like he trusts his teammates. His coach has already said he’s going to reduce his minutes to a more reasonable number. He’s likely to be playing off the ball more, which will place less emphasis on his often suspect decision-making. And while he won’t completely assuage my fears about selfish play until I see it on the floor, pretty much every indicator short of that is pointing in the right direction right now. It’s a good reason to be optimistic.

So I don’t see 2007 as an outlier, so much as I see two possibilities for a healthy, mature, Monta Ellis: 2007 or 2009. Which one of those guys is going to show up this year? Obviously, it’s hard to know for sure … but all the little signs points to him “getting it” this year, and that gives me a solid cause for optimism.

I could be wrong. But all the red flags waving in our face last season are no longer there.

no and we should be worried about them either. The indicators are just constructed from historical data and don’t mean anything other than a glimpse of what happened in the past. If you wanna focus on the past we won what 26 games last year?

I don’t know if you could say he hated young bigs, but he definitely seems to have a pattern of not doing much with post players who wanted to be a part of the offense but couldn’t shoot threes. He would find use for hustle guys who would rebound and be content to get most of their points on put backs, but didn’t like to have two of those guys on the floor at the same time.

Hard to say how Nellie would have done this year but with post players like Biedrins, Amundson, Wright, and Udoh looking to be a part of the rotation I think the Warriors might have run into some problems.

Oden is injured RIGHT NOW. The team is already talking about limiting his minutes, hoping he’ll be back at full strength by the midpoint of the season.

Whereas everything we hear about Biedrins is that he’s completely healthy and ready to go.

As for Wright, the addition of Amundsen means that we don’t really need a lot from Wright. There’s more reason to be concerned about Wright, since it’s less clear that his injury is completely healed, but he’s a player we got nothing from last year. If we get 500 high-quality minutes from him (eg, he’s still injured for large chunks of the season) that’s a net plus for us. If Portland gets 500 high-quality minutes from Oden, that’s a (small) step backwards.

Camby? In the last six years, he’s played in more than 63 games exactly zero times.

Wright has serious injury issues and I’m not really expecting much out of him this year, anything the Warrior’s get will be bonus. There are some questions about Biedrins, but he was fairly healthy in his career before last year and at least he’s fully healthy right now.

Roy, Camby, and Oden represent a much more important chunk of that team. I’m not saying it’s rational, just that for some reason I’m not that high on the Blazers this year. But I’m sure I’ll be plenty wrong on a lot of the teams positions.