Technically it’s Kyrie + Lively because losing our depth at the deadline also helped us tank to keep our pick. I’d much rather have our rookie center (who’s been completely AWESOME so far) than the old core back which already reached its ceiling in 2022.
fun_hung
joined 1 year ago
Also severely underrates the difficulty of playing both good offense and defense lol. Even notable two-way stars like Giannis, Embiid, and Tatum are rarely elite on both ends simultaneously, because it’s really fucking tiring to exert yourself to that extent. We’ve also seen offensive stars like Blake Griffin have late career defensive resurgences as role players, because as it turns out it’s easier to play defense when you don’t have to carry your team on the other end.
Embiid’s scoring drops in the playoffs because he has the most defensive responsibility of any superstar along with AD and he makes the right call every year to focus on defense in the playoffs, which gasses him out too much to maintain his regular season production. All that being said I think guys like Lavine, Mitchell all have more defensive ability than they get to show if scoring weren’t such a huge priority for them.
Real story is AD has been less aggressive offensively since he started playing the 5 full-time, likely due to all the wear-and-tear of carrying the Lakers’ defense on his back every night. Back when he was the PF and had McGee, Dwight, Gasol, and Drummond to soak up contact at the rim he was very consistent offensively, and it’s no coincidence that LeBron (who plays the 4 now) has taken up a lot of AD’s old scoring load.