What's your minutes breakdown. Here's mine. Backcourt Carter 37 Harris 34 Dooling 15 CDR 10 Frontcourt Simmons 27 Boone 26 Yi 24 Najera 21 Lopez 18 Hayes 15 Williams 8 Anderson 5
It's a good start. as a general rule of thumb, I think you have to assume that two players will be hurt at all times, and by the end of November two players will prove that they suck. Everything is really up in the air right now, I think.
The new offense supposedly requires a lot of fresh legs. With the Nets Vince has averaged from 36 to 38 so I assumed he would be in the middle there. Devin averaged 33 with the Nets last season and that was with Marcus as his back-up.
I thought that was how you projected 34 for Devin. It's possible that he'll average 34, but only if once every few weeks he will suffer some minor injury and play 15-20 minutes. 90% of the time I think he'll play around 38 minutes a game. Remember, last year he was still vaguely hurt, and if you look at the game logs, only twice in the month of March did he play less than 35 minutes (one game at 17 and one at 24, don't remember why), and that was tempered by two games of more than 40 minutes. In Devin's first game, he played just 20 minutes off the bench, and in the month of April, when the Nets were eliminated, they cut back his minutes to an average of just 31, including just 24 on the last day of the season.
With all that depth, I'm hoping that playing times will be more spread out, especially at the beginning of the season. That might help avoid those nagging injuries some of which come from playing with fatigue. But I'd expect VC to play as much as he wants.
Nothing will surprise me. The team is very deep with players that can be productive but not standouts. If Yi is Boki-like defensively, Coach Frank now has more options than he has had before. Again, I will predict that, as usual, two players will get injured in training camp, and it will take most of November to identify two other players that just suck. At that point, I think the rotation will stabilize a little bit. I think this is going to be a fascinating year, simply from the persepctive of the growth (and possible failure) of so many players. They will all have arcs not unlike individual characters in a season-long TV series. Some will improve; some will fail; some will become villains; some will become heroes. Through it all, though, the team as a whole will gradually improve and come together, since the team is greater than any one player. But we have no idea what will happen in the season finale: who will still be on the show? What will happen in the cliff-hanger? Will Buffy and Xander get it on?
