SameOldNudityDrew wrote:longstrangetrip wrote:CoolBreeze44 wrote:khans2k5 wrote:Wiggins and KAT are the decade long building blocks. They aren't going anywhere if you can keep them. Butler/Wiggins/Towns are the building blocks for the duration of Butler's next deal. Everyone else is expendable and can be replaced. You don't trade Wiggins so you can keep Teague. You can't complain that this offseason was full of short-sighted moves and then argue we should trade Wiggins at any point. He's 22. He's still 4 years away from hitting his prime. I just don't get the Wiggins attitude on most of this board. He's the premier iron man in the league behind Lebron at this point and he's already a good scorer at 22 in a league run by older, more experienced players. What's he gonna look like when he becomes that older more experienced player? A virtually unstoppable offensive force? He's really good for a 22 year old. Sorry he's not Durant or other top 3 players when they were 22, but his floor right now is a damn good #2 option which fits perfectly with Towns who is setup to be a #1 option.
Wait, did I write this? :d
Come to think of it, has anyone ever seen Khansy and Cool together at the same time? Hmm...
I also believe Butler/Wig/KAT are the building blocks of this franchise, and that Thibs won't want to trade him in the future. But does anyone think OkC wanted to trade Harden...of course not, they
had to. And there is a scenario out there where Thibs might have to trade Wig. PG is a vitally important position in this league, and if Tyus doesn't convince Thibs that he can be given the reins, I think Thibs will be forced to keep Teague for 2019-20 (one of the reasons I still think Thibs blundered in making the Rubio deal...Ricky seems like the kind of guy who might have taken to home town discount in order to win a championship). We'll be over the cap, so there's no chance of picking up a good free agent PG, so I think in that situation Thibs would keep Teague over Wig. But I don't see this as the tragedy some here do, because I think Wig would be very marketable and would bring back some excellent lower-priced talent (and draft picks) to pair with KAT, Butler and Teague.
In case you were interested in what the guys at fivethirtyeight think Wiggins is worth:
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/carmelo/andrew-wiggins/
These are just projections, in part based on Wiggins' past performance, and in part based on factors outside of his control. So they are not perfect, but they are usually fairly accurate on these. One example where they were somewhat wrong: last year they predicted a pretty nice step up for a certain former #1 pick, but that didn't happen. They're predicting another, somewhat smaller, step for that player next year, in part because the history of #1 picks suggests he's likely to improve. That player is Andrew Wiggins.
I get that Wiggins can score a lot of points. I get that he's crazy athletic. I get that he's young. I get that his perceived value in the league right now is way higher than how fivethirtyeight values him and that's what matters when it comes to his possible tradeability. For now.
But the advanced numbers are hard to ignore, and as analytics continues taking over the league, Wiggins' value is going to drop unless he makes huge steps toward becoming a more versatile, impactful player soon.
Right now, the numbers guys like fivethirtyeight see that he is not a net positive contributor on the floor. His total plus/minus has been a negative all three years he's been in the league. He's young, and part of that is a reflection of the team, but the trajectory for him in this area is not pretty. They don't project a positive plus/minus from him until 2020. And his WARP actually
decreased to .1 games last year. In addition to the concerns about his hustle and competitiveness, to the worries about his defense, to the rumblings about his lack of production in anything other than scoring, these stats from number nerds are another bit of evidence that make me skeptical about Wiggins, as much as I really WANT him to pan out. He's a fun player to watch, and he's already such a great scorer at a young age. I'm really hoping the move to the 2 and playing alongside more vets will help him a lot.
His value is still high. He could have gotten us Paul George this offseason. He probably would have been enough to get Butler straight up.
But when he's making 25 million, when he's a year older and we can't rely as much on his youth to keep people believing in his potential, unless he's made a big improvement, all of this evidence is going to make a 5 year contract look less like a tradeable asset and more like a liability and his trade value is going to go down. I'm not saying we shouldn't pay him what the market thinks. But I am saying that I would really expect to see some serious improvement from him this year to justify that money or I would start keeping an eye out about possible trades while we can still get something very good in return.
