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I think we need to shake up the roster...

As much as I hate to say it I think Ingles will likely be traded. He looks like he's cooked. I think we'll ship him off to a team that's just looking for an expiring contract.
Honestly, if this is who he is now, then I’ll be mourning the loss of who he was regardless of whether he plays for us or not.
 
Quin built a death star with a little area that a shark with a laser beam on its head could shoot and blow up the whole thing. When we started this, Rudy and Favors were playing together. This defense caught the league off guard and we were able to even drop this down to just having Rudy be the only part of this and opened up that little laser-beam area. But everyone knows where to shoot the laser beam. Adding Hassan allows him to block those laser beams. It sounds stupid to everyone but I think a blown up death star sounds more dumb.
 
My mind is definitely open to the idea that these dudes are a little too comfortable.
Yes, but is their mind open to that? I mean, we sucked because they "weren't in their own beds" and "couldn't get comfortable."
 
As much as I hate to say it I think Ingles will likely be traded. He looks like he's cooked. I think we'll ship him off to a team that's just looking for an expiring contract.
Koala Joe needs to go or wake up and find another gear, if he still has one
 
Yes, but is their mind open to that? I mean, we sucked because they "weren't in their own beds" and "couldn't get comfortable."
Should I start the thread about the ridiculous ways this team will suffer in mid-season because of the politics and personal ambitions surrounding All-Star selections? That’s also become a recurring theme.
 
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The problem is that the league has figured out how to beat the Jazz. Any team that plays a mobile big, stretch-5 or small-5 can move Rudy out of drop coverage. Then the rest of our guys get exposed defensively and can be hunted for mismatches. Jazz can tell these guys to play harder on defense, but they're limited in what they can do.

One solution to this that wouldn't require wholesale changes to the roster would be to bring in a secondary rim protector who can rotate down when Rudy gets pulled out. Maybe Rudy Gay fits that description, not sure. Otherwise, this would be a Jerami Grant or Christian Wood-type player at the 4. I keep hearing rumors that the Rockets would be willing to trade Wood, and I'm assuming they want picks.

The ideal guard to pair with Donovan Mitchell would be someone who can play both on and off the ball on offense, but who can also guard switches. So that would be more the Shai Gilgeous archetype than the Mike Conley or Jared Butler archetype. From that perspective, Desmond Bane would have been a good pick for the Jazz in the late 1st round a year ago. I can also see why the Jazz tried for so many years to make Dante Exum successful. If he had panned out, he'd be ideal next to Mitchell. Nonetheless, Conley is very good and the Jazz love him, so he's not going to move. If the Jazz had someone like Derrick White in their rotation, I think they'd still play him as the 4th guard in their rotation. It's more likely that the Jazz will try to make a fix on the wing.

With Rudy pulled out of position, the guy that gets exposed the most defensively is Bojan. He was getting killed in pick-and-roll coverage by Kyle Lowry, and guys like Duncan Robinson and Tyler Herro were easily getting a step or two on him to create open shots. Against the Nuggets, Aaron Gordon destroyed him in isolations and post-ups. Bojan is just a limited defender. Good coaches know to go at him and put him on an island. I'm not sure what to do about him tbh. He's like our version of Carmelo.

The other thing teams do against the Jazz is switch 1 - 5 on defense. This stymies the Jazz's ball movement and exposes our system players, which include Joe and Royce, as they can no longer score or move the ball well. The solution here would be to replace one or both of them with a more effective 2-way wing. The pie-in-the-sky archetype here would be Jaylen Brown, which obviously won't happen. The problem is the entire league is hot for 2-way wings, and I'm not sure what the Jazz can get here. The value of guys like Miles Bridges, Mikal Bridges and Keldon Johnson is through the roof. This again is where Rudy Gay can make a difference. The expectation is that he can make an impact defensively and also put the ball down and attack on offense.

If Rudy Gay can prove himself as a help defender on the floor next to Rudy, and if he can prove his ability to make plays offensively against a switching defense, then I think you're going to see Gay take some of Bojan's and Royce's minutes against teams that know how to exploit the Jazz. Otherwise, I could see Bojan or Joe getting traded by the deadline.
 
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The problem is that the league has figured out how to beat the Jazz. Any team that plays a mobile big, stretch-5 or small-5 can move Rudy out of drop coverage. Then the rest of our guys get exposed defensively and can be hunted for mismatches. Jazz can tell these guys to play harder on defense, but they're limited in what they can do.

One solution to this that wouldn't require wholesale changes to the roster would be to bring in a secondary rim protector who can rotate down when Rudy gets pulled out. Maybe Rudy Gay fits that description, not sure. Otherwise, this would be a Jerami Grant or Christian Wood-type player at the 4. I keep hearing rumors that the Rockets would be willing to trade Wood, and I'm assuming they want picks.

The ideal guard to pair with Donovan Mitchell would be someone who can play both on and off the ball on offense, but who can also guard switches. So that would be more the Shai Gilgeous archetype than the Mike Conley or Jared Butler archetype. From that perspective, Desmond Bane would have been a good pick for the Jazz in the late 1st round a year ago. I can also see why the Jazz tried for so many years to make Dante Exum successful. If he had panned out, he'd be ideal next to Mitchell. Nonetheless, Conley is very good and the Jazz love him, so he's not going to move. If the Jazz had someone like Derrick White in their rotation, I think they'd still play him as the 4th guard in their rotation. It's more likely that the Jazz will try to make a fix on the wing.

With Rudy pulled out of position, the guy that gets exposed the most defensively is Bojan. He was getting killed in pick-and-roll coverage by Kyle Lowry, and guys like Duncan Robinson and Tyler Herro were easily getting a step or two on him to create open shots. Against the Nuggets, Aaron Gordon destroyed him in isolations and post-ups. Bojan is just a limited defender. Good coaches know to go at him and put him on an island. I'm not sure what to do about him tbh. He's like our version of Carmelo.

The other thing teams do against the Jazz is switch 1 - 5 on defense. This stymies the Jazz's ball movement and exposes our system players, which include Joe and Royce, as they can no longer score or move the ball well. The solution here would be to replace one or both of them with a more effective 2-way wing. The pie-in-the-sky archetype here would be Jaylen Brown, which obviously won't happen. The problem is the entire league is hot for 2-way wings, and I'm not sure what the Jazz can get here. The value of guys like Miles Bridges, Mikal Bridges and Keldon Johnson is through the roof. This again is where Rudy Gay can make a difference. The expectation is that he can make an impact defensively and also put the ball down and attack a switching defense on offense.

If Rudy Gay can prove himself as a help defender on the floor next to Rudy, and if he can prove his ability to make plays offensively against a switching defense, then I think you're going to see Gay take some of Bojan's and Royce's minutes against teams that know how to exploit the Jazz. Otherwise, I could see Bojan or Joe getting traded by the deadline.

Bingo. The problem is we have 67 guys that can ordinarily shoot the **** out of the ball, and one and a half guys that can guard more than a chair. When we miss shots, or when teams have the personnel to pull Rudy out and exploit everyone else on D, we lose games. This isn't complicated. We are a death star with multiple thermal exhaust ports: (1) lack of positional versatility/perimeter defense (we have a lot of short guys that can shoot and score, and a couple of really tall guys that can defend okay, every medium-sized guy we have is old and slow) which makes it easy on both ends for teams that can switch 1 through 5; (2) mentally weak (just screw around with us a bit and we'll lose our **** and go ballistic); (3) way too dependent on shooting (we are inevitably going to have games where we don't hit shots; makes it hard to win when you can't defend and slug out an ugly win in those circumstances).

We really don't need Bojan Bogdanovic, but some other team surely does. FInd a trade that makes sense.

We are far too all in on what we like to do from a roster construction perspective.
 
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The idea of a shakeup is tough for a few reasons:

1- limited assets… not a lot of young players or picks.
2- money crunch… normally you could find a deal where you take on a little salary but in any deal we’d very likely be shedding some salary.
3- we have solid vets we’d trade but we’d want solid vets now… so we want a more useful solid vet.
4- we’d likely need two deals to rebalance the roster… which means have to find more trade partners.

Example… you could probably get something done around Bojan for Smart… maybe. But then you need to move JC for a wing or forward… how ya gonna do that. JC for Smart does nothing for Boston.

We have our guys… they need to figure out whatever this bull **** is.
 
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