Smart is enough of an "adventure" as a point guard, already, and people want to entrust that important role to Terry Rozier? Yikes. Fasten your seat belts.
Personally, I'd like to see Brown start. I'm still not there in terms of being a fan of this, but he proved last year that he's a decent spot-up shooter and he did play well with the starters during whichever month that was, plus he already has some good post moves. Can we at least have one post player in the starting five? Please?
What's wrong with Rozier starting at PG? He lacks experience, but he's better equipped to play that position then Smart is IMHO. He's a comparable playmaker, a better ball handler, is far less turnover prone, and has superior natural quickness that allows him to match up better against quicker guards.
He just needs to show us that he can do all that with consistency (rather than in flashes).
Smart is (IMHO) more suited to the SG spot due to his size, less impressive ball handling skills, and his tendency to struggle at times with decision making. Maybe he'll improve his decision making and ball handling this year, hard to say though.
While I agree that he has better physical tools to play, and certainly defend, point guards, the guy is just not someone you want running the show, imo. A few passes aside, he largely has tunnel vision and plays completely out of control the vast majority of the time. You want stability from your backup point guard, right? Well, then Rozier is not the answer, imo. He does have some nice dribbling moves, yes, and he does rebound, but he just looks like the classic case of Ainge taking a guy who is really shooting guard in a point guard's body, not to mention the fact that neither he nor Smart have ever even shot 40% from the field. Yikes. Which one will finally break on through to other side and become a terrible, but not hopeless, if that makes any sense, outside shooter this season? Oh the drama! Does this not bother anyone else? Aside from rebounding, this is a serious problem, imo. We could have gotten a better point guard in the second round this year for crying out loud. Ugh. I know that he's shot poorly during each of the last two years, even though I wouldn't call 19 games a season, but how about CJ Watson, who was released by the Magic? He's, again, more of a combo guard, but he has plenty of experience, is a good defender, iirc, and played well off the bench for the Nets and Pacers. I would have much rather gone with him than Shane Larkin, lol. Sigh. Captain Barbosa is still out there, too. Hey, maybe we should have gone after Jordan Crawford, hehe . Always liked that guy, if only because he dunked on Lebron, haha, and he even dropped 21 on the Warriors last year, albeit in a blowout. That has to count for something, right?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKlHamWpRK4
To be honest, I'm still cutting Terry Rozier quite a lot of slack right now (in terms of his comfort running the offense as well as his shooting percentages) based on the fact that he has played very few minutes over his career, and that his role and playing time have been quite honestly all over the place.
To put into perspective just how little Rozier has played as a Celtic, if you take ALL of his regular season minutes and all of his playoff minutes for the last two seasons, and add ALL of those minutes together, you get 1,950 minutes of total NBA experience.
Divide that by 82 and you a 23.78 - meaning if you took all of the minutes Rozier has played in two full regular seasons + two full playoffs and compress them all into a single regular season, he'd still only have averaged 23.8 MPG.
Do he same with Smart's and you get 81.64 - so Smart has literally about 4x the NBA experience Rozier has in addition to having the benefit of having very steady minutes (he's ever averaged < 27 MPG for a season) and a very steady role he's started or been a 6th man his entire career).
Also despite limited opportunity, Rozier has actually shot pretty well in the playoffs has tended to up his game in the Playoffs 12.5 Points Per 36 on 40% FG / 37% 3PT / 82% FT) which I think is pretty solid given his general lack of experience.
Perhaps even more impressive is his career playoff Assist:Turnover rate of 3.27 which is actually a VERY high number for an NBA PG. To put it in to perspective, Chris Paul has pretty much dominated that stat through his career, and has a career average of 1.4 AST:TO. Marcus Smart's career AST:TO rates are 2.3 in the regular season and 1.88 in the playoffs - which is closer to what is expected for a shoot-first PG or a combo guard. Rozier's playoff AST:TO rate of 3.27 is approaching elite for an NBA PG. Obviously it's a tiny sample size so we can't draw too much from it, but it's an encouraging figure none the less given he actually did play quite a bit in the playoffs last season.
He played some seriously nice defence against Wall and Beal in the Washington series too - when Wall was blowing by everybody else pretty much at will, Rozier took it on himself to accept that challenge - and wall was struggling immensely for much of that time.
He also has a career +1 Net Rating, +0.1 VORP and -0.6 Box Plus Minus in playoff games - all indications that he's actually been at least holding his own out there in the big moments, which I think is also a nice sign for a kid with such limited experience.
So watching how Rozier has stepped up in the playoffs gives me some genuine hope that he can really flourish into a special all round player given a consistent role and consistent minutes, which he will get this year as the full time backup at either the PG or SG spot. Hopefully he can show more of the same and prove that those playoff figures are more than just a fluke.
But anyhoot, the flashes I've seen from Rozier (even if they are only very brief flashes) give me more hope about his future as a PG then I get from Smart's 3 seasons so far.
Hopefully Smart can up his playmaking / ball handling ability and up his shooting ability and prove me wrong!