He doesn't shoot the 3 or defend the perimeter. Centers like him have become useless in the modern nba
This new nba makes a lot of people (who are used to post play centers) uncomfortable and bad mouth Danny, but Danny isn't going to get a non modern center who can't shoot the 3
Many teams in the NBA still play a style that fits big men like Dwight. This reminds me a lot of when a few of the TOP NFL teams had young bootleg QBs and it was all the rage only way to build in NFL. Trends come and go.
Yeah I really don't get this at all. Look at the top 15 centers in the league, very few of them stretch the floor. Look at the top 20 rebounders in basketball, very few of them shoot more than 1 three a game. This notion that the league is changing is pretty silly. I mean even Golden State and Cleveland start a center that has no range at all, and Cleveland actually plays him a lot (4th most mpg in both the regular and post season).
I wonder who is in your top 15 centers.
Its not all about shooting. Guys like Bogut are valuable to modern teams because they can set good screens and pass. Others can defend the PNR pretty well. Others shoot.
Dwight does none of these things well. Plus guys like that dont play starter minutes, and are benched come crunch time. DO you really wanna be paying Dwight Howard to play less than 24 minutes? If it was for the minimum, sure. But at his price no way.
Players do what players do. People can ramble on all they want about three point shooting bigs being the future of the NBA - but the fact is that Boston (as the #1 seed in the East) struggled to get by lowly teams like the Bulls and Wizards - and the team's total inability to control the boards had a hell of a lot to do with that.
Lack of interior size and defense didn't help either, since we were routinely getting killed on offense by lowly guys like Markief Morris and Robin Lopez - guys who have no business having big scoring nights against any team that calls itself a contender.
Horford and Olynyjk were out there happily shooting threes away, but we still struggled mightily to win those two series. Why? Because as much as you can live by the three, you can also die by the three. We have a lot guys like Crowder and Bradley who are core pieces on out team, and who's only offensive game really is taking threes and long twos. When those jumpers aren't falling, your offense falls apart - and you can see that from our Playoff run. In those games where Crowder and Bradley struggled with their jumpers, we general got blown out.
I like that we have plenty of shooters, and I get that threes are efficient (more points per shot), but they are also a higher risk.
You need balance in this game. When your shooters are hitting shots that's great, but when they aren't you need a big old dude who you can pass the ball to 5 feet from the basket who can just dump that thing in for an easy two. If anything I think that is even MORE important now, because the fact that the NBA has gone so small means that a guy like Dwight has an even bigger advantage down low then he would have in the past. You get him the ball down low against somebody like Tristan Thompson and forget it - put two on the board.
You need that - it allows you to switch things up and make your game less predictable. Boston was so predictable because everybody knows we are going to give it to IT. And once he gets shut down everybody knows the next plan is to throw it out to the perimeter for a jumper. That makes it easy to defend us - go small so you can use foot speed to switch rapidly and contest the perimeter.
Put a big like Dwight or Monroe down low at the center spot, and teams cant afford to risk gong small - they'll just get punished on offense every time.