N.O. via West-Cal

"Herb shoot awful tonight and he still was the only player other than Jose with a positive +/-. Herb was the only reason our defense wasn't cover your eyes horrible tonight."

I am open to trading Herb. Heck, I am open to trading anyone on a team as abysmal as this one, but I think that even in these days of advanced metrics, defense gets overlooked. At least with Herb, you have somebody playing good defense, making things difficult on your opponent's best wing scorer. Aside from Herb, does anyone on this team play defense? Jose does, but he doesn't start, and he can be a matchup problem because of his size. Anyone else that I am missing?

In short, I hate it that Herb has not been able to (1) stay healthy or (2) recapture his 40% 3PT shooting, but don't undervalue what he does provide, especially with us having so few players who can D up.

Very interesting post. I know we are bad on defense but hadn’t thought so deeply as to why.

A couple of things based admittedly on the eye test:

1. Zion is sometimes hilariously lazy in closeouts. It’s anecdotal but I bet you could with some Hardenesque lowlights from him.

2. I don’t seeDQ as all that bad a defender. He most stays in front and holds his ground and he is at least a pretty good defensive rebounder. Also not terrible on closeouts. I’d enjoy seeing some advanced stats on him to see I might be onto something or perhaps to show that I am letting my basketball crush on DQ skewing my opinion.

3. This is more hope than anything else, but I would think that an all time defender like Dumars would value and be able to evaluate defensive ability/potential going forward. I have this sense that we could be decent in short order if we could improve just a little on defense and add a shooter.

No need to overstate it, but the president could have said nothing and chose instead to make vile, nonsensical comments about a double murder in a way that centered the tragedy on himself when he had nothing to do with it. In short, the president embarrassed himself.

It doesn’t mean you have to change your policy positions or start voting for Democrats. But this is an easy one. Trump screwed up.

I’m not disagreeing. But I’d rather not take the Bengals route where we find a QB and get him killed every year because we just get playmakers and skimp on offensive lineman.”

The saints haven’t skimped on OL is the problem; they’re just not that great as a unit. We can upgrade the guards without using a R1 pick.

Yeah, I’m catching up and see that others have raised this issue. This will likely be one or the rare decisions I read all the way through.

I don’t know exactly how I feel about this one, but I remember thinking that Wong could be limited to its facts. For example, I don’t think the Chinese were here illegally bc of the absence of comprehensive immigration laws.

I love this board. Hardly anyone wants to address the issue, which is that when you lose independents, you lose elections. Of course, this very MAGA board is mostly pleased with Trump, but independents see sticky inflation and things they probably didn’t vote for, such as the ICE raids, extrajudicial assassination of likely drug dealers, and a chaotic tariff regime. I bet some first term, pre Covid Trump style prosperity would work, though.

:lol:

I have had this same thought many times. So true.

No hate here toward BI at all. I don’t think he is a #1 that you can build around.

:lol: