That’s the risk with taken the “falls in the draft” guy. It has happened at least 4 times that I can think of with the hornets. Each time, the reason why they fell became apparent.
As fans, I think we tend to always assume the “the coach is against him” line of reasoning. JB has nothing against him, I imagine. If bouk could contribute he would be in. The danger of always having the treadmill team, is it doesn’t allow for development of non-star talent especially immediately. You are basically playing every game like it is April and you are trying to be the 8-5 seed.
I don’t necessarily believe JB has anything against Bouknight. I think that’s more of a commentary of JB’s overall mindset as a coach. Being that, he’s hard a young players and will make it as difficult as possible to get minutes. Unless forced.
I don’t think we can speculate anything on Bouknight since we haven’t seen him play this season.
I know the response to this will be “well how does Lamelo fit into that powell?”.
Melo did not and has not played major minutes, or consistently. JB last year quickly pulled Melo when he didn’t play well. JB will bench Melo well into the 4th. Melo averaged around 28 minutes per game last year and may be averaging a few more this year.
For context, I wanted Sengun. So not seeing Bouknight drives me nuts. Drafting a guy at 11 we’re not going to play instead of a guy who will be a ROY contender in Sengun. In my opinion, he’ll contend for ROY at least.
Borrego needs to do a better job at riding momentum and hot streaks. It seems often we are on runs and he calls a timeout to make a change. Then it seems sometimes he does the exact opposite and will stick with a unit too long, leaving guys out of game too long, etc.
It is frustrating, I agree with you.
Its a learning thing but it is wild sometimes. Worked out last night. Also helped that Randle and Barrett combined for less than 15 pts
I won’t defend or say that I always understand JB’s rotations, but Bouk is a tough one because in order for him to get minutes it would have to come at the expense of either Cody or Oubre, and given how well both have played I don’t see how he could justify pulling back on either. Even Ish has fallen out of the rotation of late so it’s tough to find minutes. Now with that said, I did think there was an opportunity when Terry was out to get him some run.
My biggest concern is that we get to the end of his four years and still don’t have a sense of what we have in him as was the case with Monk. If a guy never plays consistently it’s hard to truly evaluate how good he really is. At some point you owe it to yourself to play a guy enough so that you can make an informed decision about how to move forward. But I trust he’ll eventually get his shot.
Apologize in advance, Tolstoyesque length post - Cliff’s notes: might be about prioritizing by who they need to evaluate and when.
I think this is absolutely fact and one I often cite as part of the “we don’t know what happens in practice” chunk of the equation. But to your point, that could even be more damning as to why Bouknight isn’t getting PT and we wouldn’t know.
And in that vein, I don’t know that we have enough insight into JB’s mindset as a coach either. What I mean by that is contrasting his/Mitch’s relationship with Cliff/Cho’s. Much of what we learned later is that those two were very much not on the same page. Mitchell v. Monk is something often cited. I get concerned when folks try to put Monk and Bouk in the same basket for a lot of reasons but the biggest is that coach/gm relationship delta.
This post rattled something free for me that mashed up interestingly with the above. Of primarily G/Fs, Gordon and Terry are going to get run, that’s why they’re paid ~27mm per year on average. Beyond that, we have Cody, Kelly, Bouk. We have a season and a half to evaluate Kelly, we have this season only before we need to make a decision contractually on Cody. We fortunately have at least two full years before we even need to look at the first contractual decision on Bouk and that one will be a rubber stamp no matter. And if you had to prioritize getting a read on someone, I personally would prioritize some of the year to figuring out Jalen’s future because he’s going to be an extension question before anyone other than Cody (and Miles but to me, that’s a different decision bucket).
So mashing the two threads into one, JB and Mitch may well see things eye-to-eye and they are prioritizing whom they need to get a read on from a strategic point of view. And with that, the more they can see on the guys they need to make decisions on in the near term, while using GSO to develop the next flight, the better.
Totally agree with your point about needing to prioritize the timing of those evaluations. That’s why I’m not sweating it too much with Bouk yet as it’s still extremely early for him.
I do share your concern about Jalen though. I’d like to see more of him because I think he’s talented. But hard to see where those minutes will come from, especially once PJ is back.
Last night Cody and Jalan took some of Hayward and Plums playing time .I feel like we going to let Hayward walk at the end of his contract and use Nicks money to resign these guys like Miles Cody , Jalen , Melo . But i still don’t know if we will have enough to keep these guys happy .
Cap management will come into play