Am I crazy for wanting to draft Bender instead of acquiring Okafor? I wonder if there was some way to package our other picks and get a guy like Hield with the 8th pick or something.
I certainly think you are.
Not crazy at al. Well, maybe the drafting Bender part, but not on Okafor. This is a dude who you'll have to design your whole offense around to get a positive contribution from, but he's not talented enough to justify doing that.
For every bucket Okafor gets, he'll be taking a bucket away from IT, Crowder, Bradley, etc. I get that people are desperate for an other offensive option, but Okafor is far too flawed on both sides of the ball to justify giving up our best asset for
Trade Rozier, 16 and 31 for Noel and we'd be much better off in the long run, even if we have to give Noel 10$M a year next summer.
This just isn't true, If Okafor comes here Coach Stevens is not going to build the offense around him.
He's going to have one of the best post up options in the league to dump it into when he wants. Last year Okafor played 30 mins a game and avg 17.5 ppg. My guess is that next year if he was on the Celtics he'd play 27 mpg and avg about 16ppg and his fg% would go up to around.530%
When we got beat by Charlotte you saw how nice it is to have an unstoppable post precense on your team. It's a great option. He's 20 coach decides how much he shoots.
Okay. Well if you don't build your offense around him, you'll be playing a guy big minutes who's a pretty large net negative. Outside of interior scoring, there's not a whole lot he does very well. In order to get a positive contribution from him, you have to feed him the ball in the post consistently. Stevens is an excellent coach, he knows it's either you heavily feature him on offense or he doesn't play very much. Stevens may end up playing him off the bench if he comes here, as it's probably the best way to feature him while he plays without changing your entire identity.
Btw, Okafor was constantly given the ball to ISO guys on the low block in Philly. That's how he got the numbers he had. If he plays 27 MPG instead of 30 and gives you 16/6 instead of 18/7, he's obviously still going to be heavily leaned on. There's no question that a player with his elite post skills can be useful. But his flaws outweigh that skill, especially when using his greatest skill requires so much adjustment from every one else. He's gonna be a good player in this league. But he's just not a good fit for the C's, especially if it's gonna cost us more than #3 straight up.