When I wrote my preview there were two guys I excluded from our core: Jackson and Willie. I did not view them as viable components of a perennial contender and 50+ win team. I thought I might be wrong about Willie about 10 game mark. I would have been happy to be wrong!
But like the stretch before the all-star break last year in which he was double figure rebounds, it was unsustainable. Willie is not who we need him to be even with 100M reasons to be. If Willie was who we wanted him to be and needed him to be, and who he claims to be, we would be 12-8 or better. Easily! I think Joerger and front office is resigned to the fact he will never be an enforcer. That is how they can watch him get beat consistently in pick and roll and on the glass and leave him out there. They know he's not that type of player and never will be. They have accepted his weakness in lieu of better options, until MB3 and Harry command more minutes.
What Willie does is out quick other centers to mixed results. But he's afraid to block shots because of a past finger injury, gets pushed around fighting for rebounds, and creates little to nothing out of the high post. I heard this interesting insight the other day: Your center on D is just as important as your PG on offense. Think about that. A PG is very important for your offense to run smoothly. Similarly your center is equally important for your defense. Our defensive efficiency is 20th. Last year it was 27th. I do not see any way we become Top 10 defense with Willie anchoring our defense and boards. It is an impossibility.
I would be remiss to mention Willie is one of the worst FT shooter in the league (34-68 for 50%). Look what Harry did the other game out of the high post, making six sweet dimes. How many of those passes does Willie make? I would venture to say one or zero. So this is who Willie is. He's an expendable flawed player who talks big in lieu of substance. He's frankly a fraud. To be fair an improvement between this and last year is he is keeping his balance better and less inclined to speed up his decision-making in response to pressure. He used to fall down once per game. He doesn't fall down this year. That's something. His scoring efficiency improved for the first 10-15 games but has regressed of late coinciding with his unfocused and apathetic nature.
TS%
52.9% last year
53.5%% this year (MB3 56%)
Rebound rate
14.2% last year
14.6% this year . (MB3 14.2%)
Block rate
3.1% last year
1.5% this year (MB3 4.5%)
Assist rate
13.7% last year
11.3% this year
The conventional sentiment is Willie is a much improved. The numbers do not bear this out. His scoring (+1.5 PPG) and rebounding (+1.1 RPG) is up year over year because we are playing at faster pace. His TS% is especially poor given the number of easy shots his guards get him. His block rate is half and his passing is resulting in less assists. So what to do? Keep hitching your wagon to a highly flawed player? My hope is he plays like he did earlier in the year to raise his value and we dump him to the first sucker. I would send him with Yogi and/or Jackson and filler to the Wizards for Otto Porter.
Otto is a legitimate 6'9". We need his size on the wings to matchup with bigger scoring wings. Otto is also a shot maker with bit of a post game and athlete to boost our fast breaks. Boggy and Shump are good defenders but they often give up 4+ inches against scoring wings. Don't get me started on the futility of Jackson as a defender or Joerger's recent non-defense defense of his playing him over my man Troy Williams.
Otto is being underutilized on the Wizards so I am not concerned about his poor stats. We would have overpay 8-10M per year for his services but that is better than paying 8-10M per year and more for Willie the Fraud. Off the top of my head here are Western conference wings whom we have a hard time matching up against. Otto would solve this issue while improving our league best transition game and league best three point shooting. It is a match made in Hoop Heaven
.
Guys Otto Can Check Better than Anyone We Have:
- Durant
- Draymond Green
- Luka
- Harrison Barnes
- Paul George
- Tobias Harris
- Joe Ingles
- Gallinari
- Rudy Gay
- Mirotic
- Andrew Wiggins ( a garbage player who seems to go off against us)
- Brandon Ingram
- LeBron
There is a lot of length on this list. We need a player to match up against this length while improving our half court offensive efficiency. Otto can be this guy. Otto can play spot minutes at power forward. Exling Willie can be addition by subtraction once we feel comfortable and confident with MB3 and Giles taking all of the center minutes. If the Wizards do NOT have an interest in Willie via trade, which would be understandable, we should still make an effort to trade for him since there will be almost NO teams besides ours able to take him into our cap and still have cap space next summer for a max player.