Game Report - Wolves v. Suns

[Lipoli390]

I wanted to add a couple observations about Nowell. First of all, I was impressed by how he got after it defensively. He was never tested much defensively in college because they played a zone. But he moved well laterally last night and showed good instincts. Second, he is bigger than I thought and very fast with and without the ball. He looks like a player. His shooting was off, but he was a highly accurate shooter in college so I'm not worried about that.

[Monster]

Monster -

Regarding Wiggins, good question about what selling high on Wiggins really looks like. Honestly, I don't know. My sense is that his value is significantly higher now than it was before this season started based on his consistently high quality play so far this season. But his starting point before the season was really low as we all know, so I'm not sure what we could get for him. Before the season, I think we would have had to give up a future 2nd round draft pick to get a team to take on Wiggins' contract (absorbing it or swapping a shorter-term contract). Now I think we could swap him for a shorter term smaller contract and actually get a lottery protected 1st roundpick in return. I could see a team like Charlotte swapping Batum and a future top 10 protected 1st for Wiggins right now. Of course, I could be way off. My timeline is ASAP before he regresses. Having said all that, I'm not totally dismissing the possibility that he's turned some corner and that what we've seen from him this season so far is permanent. I'll go further and mention that watching him complain the the refs a lot last night about the bad calls against him was a sign that he's a different player than he's been. Talking to the guy who sits in front of me last night, we couldn't recall the last time we saw Wiggins complain to officials. Our take was that it shows he cares. And with Wiggins that's more than half the battle.

I think Jim was correct about the bad spacing and I agree with your combo platter assessment. But the lack of ball movement and player movement were as bad as the poor spacing.

Thanks for the response. If the best we can do is that Batum deal (I know the hypothetical deals are hard to come up with) and a lottery protected first...no at this point I'll take the chance that Wiggins is sorta for real. If you are playing percentages the reality is that Wiggins total resume suggests he is going to put up some nice scoring stats especially as a featured player on a roster. If you want to deal him I would keep playing this thing out longer (like probably through the whole season then explore it more in the offseason) than deal him now because...yeah I still don't think we would get enough to move him and make it worth it. I think we have seen enough to know he probably isn't going to revert back to the Wiggins we have seen the previous 2 years. Last year's Wiggins made him nearly untradeable. I think we are headed towards having a 2016-2017 Wiggins on our hands that also plays better defense and plays with more effort on both sides of the ball. If he does that for the whole season...the value both in trade and for the team if he stays. Also rebuffing underwhelming trades now probably makes teams think you have faith in the guy which might up the value more. I just don't see Wiggins reverting back to being terrible like last year. I didn't even think that was going to happen before the season started and we are seeing some pretty good things so far. Also...wouldn't it be nice to have some constants on this team? The turnover of this franchise is mind boggling. Yeah I know it feels weird to say having Wiggins here as a constant but...again maybe we have something there. I kinda want to find out.