Those 2 switching defenses of Boston and G.S. finished tied for 4th best in the league this year. You seem to think that is a choice they are making and a lot of the time you actually have no choice but to switch. If you do not switch onto Curry he is going to obtain space and pop an open 3 every time. Therefor you must have big men that are capable of defending on the perimeter or you are going to get torched.
True. However, they are making the choice to 'switch everything' because that is Stevens' philosophy, and it has been stated many times that he prefers players who can do exactly that, which is why Swedish meatballs plays so much, I guess
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G.S did have some trouble on the boards against O.K.C. no doubt. Those same bigs that were giving them trouble on the boards were also being heavily exploited on the perimeter on the other end. Adams worked his butt off trying to keep up only to watch a million 3 balls hit in his face.
Cleveland only had a small inconsequential rebounding advantage over the final 3 games of the finals. The real problem was Cleveland shot the lights out and G.S. didn't. Over those 3 games G.S. missed 31 more shots than Cleveland did. As the old saying goes the NBA is a make or miss league and that eventually cost the Warriors the title.
Rebounding in the foreseeable future is going to be harder to come by from your big men simply because they are being forced to defend away from the hoop. Either they follow the screen setter out to the 3 point line or stand there and watch them free up a shooter and jack 40+% 3 balls in your face. With that said it is far more important to have quicker more mobile bigs that are capable of defending out to the perimeter than it is to have monster rebounders in most instances. If I had a choice I would still keep a monster or 2 around so you can play both ways and change play styles some but I fear teams are going to immediately target any slow less mobile big the second you stick them on the floor.
I'm sure that the Warriors would have liked to have been able to grab as many offensive rebounds off of those 31 misses, as you said, but that's not their philosophy, I suppose, hence why they play small for the majority of the time, but beyond that the Cavs outrebounded them in 4 of the 7 games, including games 6 and 7, and if you really break it down, it wasn't so much the total rebounding differential between the two teams that made the difference - it was the fact that Cleveland had two guys averaging over 10 rpg in Lebron and Thompson, at 11.3 rpg and 10.1 rpg, respectively, while Golden State only had one double figure rebounder in Draymond Green at 10.3 rpg, with their second best rebounder being Andre Iguodala at 6.3 rpg. That's very telling, imo, and you just can't win that way, in my view
. They even lost the rebounding battle in Game 7 by 9
. Wow.
In terms of your description of having big guys who can defend on the perimeter, rebound, and block shots, etc., that sounds like such guys from this past draft as Jakob Poeltl, Thon Maker, Pascal Siakam, and Cheick Diallo, as well as undrafted guys like Jarrod Uthoff, Daniel Ochefu, and Tonye Jekiri, imo.