I have a million thoughts on this and it won't be super organized so I'll just approach this from different points and different levels:
- I read on Twitter last night where someone said that when Zanik was an agent, that Ilyasova was a client. If that's true, it's interesting.
- Ilyasova's been on the market. We could have signed him much earlier, but we haven't.
- We have to maintain another guy on the roster, and they had to be signed by today, so instead of the 10-day dance, we got a guy who's a legitimate NBA player.
- The flip side of this is that had we felt we needed another legitimate player, we could have signed him sooner (see the same issue with RHJ).
- That said, we didn't need to waive Shaq. So under the argument that Ilyasova is just the most available/best guy to meet league roster-minimum criteria, you could also just say that we could have just kept Shaq, so to some degree you're thinking that he's more serviceable.
- If we were to have signed him during the summer, we'd have been happy to have him as a 9th man and assume he was taking Niang's spot.
- Niang has surprised this year.
- Ersan can rebound. The last three years, he's averaged 9.8 rebounds per 36. To give a comparison, the closest (rotation) player to that who isn't Gobert or Favors is Royce at 7.4. Niang is 5.8 and Bojan is 4.6.
- Rebounding is a problem, even though we're a good rebounding team. I've said this for a long time because we can get outmuscled when it matters, because we rely on our style of play to pick up rebounds, so that's easier to disrupt and becomes more problematic in the playoffs.
- That said, Ersan won't be playing down the stretch, so this plus is more limited, but it does allow us to throw a changeup every once in a while if needed.
- I think he'll get minutes. I don't think, initially, that it will be because of him filling a specific spot such as being 9th man, but because we'll enter an easier stretch and I think we'll load manage to a degree. I do think we need to load manage Favors, and even though people don't believe he'll play the 5, I'd like to see him used to load manage Favors and to also see what a real 5-out lineup looks like.
- Continuing from above, Ilyasova's known to shoot the three, so I think running a 5-out with him vs., say, Morgan, definitely changes things because Ersan is probably going to be defended tighter on the perimeter. Just a guess. I'd also be curious how much more he is defender on the perimeter vs. Niang by reputation alone. Open Niang threes are fine, too, I'm just curious.
- We do need more depth because you never know when you'll need it. I know there's an argument that we need to see what's there with our end of bench guys, but I'm not super optimistic. I don't know that I see Morgan being able to do anything more than spot duty. I'm somewhat more curious about Oni, but I don't know that I see Brantley being very rotational at this point.
- Ersan seems like a likable guy and good locker room presence. He doesn't seem like he's going to rock the boat if he's not playing. He's probably happy to be on a roster.
- We still have weaknesses that we haven't addressed, but I don't see this move having any bearing on that. If there's an available wing piece out there that we pass on, I think we pass on it because that's what we were going to do, and not pass on it because we think "ah, well, we've already got Ersan, so..."
- We're going to sign OPJ.