Originally Posted by Smitty10
Nope, the situation was much worse. If you had lined up the two teams, one with 5 starters, 1 freshman and one walk-on(none of the 7 taller than 6'6), and then line up this team with 5 starters and 5 Freshman ((4 players 6'9 or taller) and predicted which one would do better, EVERYONE would've chosen this one because they had a better situation.
Oh yeah, and XW played great last season, Josh was a known when he was healthy which he was coming into this season, Crosby improved toward the end of last season and no matter how you rate Baby D last season, what he's done so far speaks for itself. That makes only one(two if you count Crosby so I will) starting positions with a big question mark compared to 3 that season.
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Well let's do that comparison. Since we're talking about a team with only 5 starts + 1 freshman + 1 bench player, that team didn't exist until January. And at that point we knew KD had the heart of a lion, SS was the real deal, KP was a monster down low, our SG was a player on both ends of the court, and Pierre could flat out play with anyone.
Coming into this year we have 3, not 4 players, who are 6'9" or taller (XW, Pierce, Kostas). 2 are freshmen. True freshmen centers are notoriously projects so we could reasonably assume Pierce was unlikely to contribute. That puts him on the all-airport team. 1 weighs in at 205 pounds, which is 30 pounds less than 6'7" Cunningham and 20 pounds less than 6'5" Trey Landers. Tall, yes, a beast in the middle, no. And the third is a freshman wildcard who no one still knows what exactly we've got. And our PG were widely expected to be abysmal (but I expected to be just OK).
Which team would I have taken? The one with 5 players. All day, every day.