Agreed it's frustrating. He looked very raw in SL, but out of all the bigs I saw him compete against he was the superior athlete, clearly. Just his shot was terrible. It looks like he's worked on that. It does irk me when people slam young projects who could even be entering the draft
this season (not only LJC, but KA too), then go crazy over guys who are even older than they are and competing against inferior athletes and very young kids in the NCAA. At least LJC was not competing on what in reality is a juvenile amateur league in the NCAA and KA was in the NBA!!! Jeshhhh!
I will be upset if he's not brought over and we do pick up Bonner again (well for a shooter if we are honest it should be Bertans, bid Bonner adieu) but the Kmarts, A.Miller, and Rasual Butler's of the league.
I am starting to doubt Pop even wants to
really develop a real supporting cast for Kawhi and LMA, if they keep bringing old farts and not developing the younger guys. That should be a priority. In fact if Manu and TD return it should be mostly for mentoring and leadership of youngsters at this stage, not for us to have the oldest team in the NBA to ever make the playoffs, surrounding LMA and Kawhi with the aged big 3 + all the old farts we can pick up in FA.
I know you are not a fan of Simmons, but I do like him bc him and KA play very well together. I felt we would probably have been better served not picking up Kmart at all and just spent all those Kmart minutes on Simmons. He could have improved in those 200 minutes or whatever Kmart consumed, or he could have shown that he wasn't going to stick around the league, but
at least you find out something. It's not time wasted. Either way it was a worthy investment of time. There were games Simmons flat out looked better than Kmart. If neither of the two was going to make a difference this season why waste all that time with Kmart? I felt in fact he made us worse.
I thought when Kmart came in was really when the team started to get in disarray. Pop got into some terrible lineups and experiments that altered chemistry and I don't think the bench really ever clicked in the last part of the season. He wasn't worth it! We were playing tremendously well then Kmart comes in and the bench played the worst they had played all season plus they were terrible in the playofffs. Their chemistry was altered with all those Kmart minutes. Pop should have just committed to KA with them, coached them up in aggressiveness, add a full dose of Simmons for all those Kmart minutes and call it a season.
I eased up on being critical of Kmart in the main boards bc ppl assume everything I write is on KA behalf (heh a lot is, but not all) when in reality I think we should have just continued developing Simmons and leave it at that. Kmart never convinced me he was even better than Simmons and he didn't convince Pop either. A lot of fans were hoping he would edge out KA from the rotation but he wasn't good enough for that. I think he wouldn't have even edged Simmons out.
/sigh huge rant I know. sorry. Bottom line I do agree LJC needs to come over and Pop has to make some space for developing within the win now at all costs mentality for the big 3. The two things need to be reconciled. We could be a better team in the short and long run if he committed to developing at least one you g player with potential each season... (I could go on a rant about the pick ups of Days Nd Ayers too, which I guess you would equal to low ceiling pick ups of much older players like JSimms. I hope JSimms doesn't turn out like them, but yeah 27 yrs old next season, meAntime there are young guards in this draft we could be taking.... but nooooo! Draft and stash per par, + a bunch of old dudes)