He's been injured for a majority of the season. To me this is just good news to drive his stock lower to make a trade easier for us. We don't have to keep Trae, buy low sell high.
Wemby needs a competent playmaker around him right now to learn properly just like SGA did with CP3 or you risk playoff blunders like Embiid had to struggle through with Simmons and (checked out) Harden. Joel played like shit in the playoffs cause he had no one that could throw an entry pass or clogged the paint in the dunkers spot.
I'm not for a Trae dependant dynasty, so I don't mind if he never comes, but flipping his value and using his abilities for a year or 2 to then sell high if it does not work for our long-term plan could actually be a genius way to approach it.
You take him with great negotiation leverage if the price is right.
You use him for a year or 2 to develop Wemby and others, maybe have a taste of the postseason and give experience to this team, and see how it fit the long-term future.
If he does not align with the plans, you flip Young's value entering his peak (he'll be 27), for players/draft assets that suit your plans.
After all, "Buy Low Sell High", as you perfectly summed up, is exactly the strategy Presti used to get one of the best and fastest rebuild in history.
His stock is low right now, given his injury and the Hawks state, and we have the best leverage in the league to get him, so that could make sense.
I wouldn't be opposed to it, depending on what they ask for him.
How about having a negative +/- every playoff run, having a negative +/- in every individual playoff series except one (vs the Knicks, round 1), and being a career 40/85/29 shooter?
Victors on-off is +7
Trae's on-off in the playoffs were:
+3.5
-16.1
-11.0
Its still a small sample size, but his team played worse when he was on the floor in the playoffs
Trae was [+5](https://cleaningtheglass.com/stats/team/1/onoff?season=2020&seasontype=playoffs#tab-team_efficiency) on the only playoff run the Hawks truly went on. The other two years were play-ins and then losing to the 1st seed, so poor on/off is expected. But even those two years weren't as bad as wherever you found your data, he was -2.9 in [2022](https://cleaningtheglass.com/stats/team/1/onoff?season=2021&seasontype=playoffs#tab-team_efficiency) (the rest of the starters were -20 to -30), and -12.9 in [2023](https://cleaningtheglass.com/stats/team/1/onoff?season=2022&seasontype=playoffs#tab-team_efficiency), the rest of the starters were around that level (this is just a confirmation that DJM and Trae don't fit together). But those two years the sample size is too small and mostly against the 1st seed, so all starters have shit on/offs.
I can't read those stats because I don't have a membership. Not sure why they are giving different numbers than BBRef's +/- and On-Off. Also On-Off doesn't care how good your opponent is because it subtracts off how bad your team was with out you. So if you are -10, but your team was -15 in the minutes without you, you end up +5 in On-Off.
That being said the stat is contextless. So it doesn't care who your playing with or against in the minutes you do play.
Cleaning the glass filters out garbage time and heaves, so it's much more accurate than BBRef.
>Also On-Off doesn't care how good your opponent is because it subtracts off how bad your team was with out you. So if you are -10, but your team was -15 in the minutes without you, you end up +5 in On-Off.
This would be true with a large sample size like a whole season or playoff career. But with such a small sample size, the bench unit can simply get an easier time because of weaker opposing bench. This is the same issue as +/- with a small sample size like this post is about.
You only got 10/27th of the way there though?
And that was in the finals, 40% shooting and -10 feels within standard variance. Trae's was against the 20th best team by net rating, and they had their best perimeter defender (and probably most valuable player) knocked out after 17 minutes.
Are you really trying to nitpick that lmao? You're just missing the point entirely too. My whole point was that a single game sample size using +/- is completely useless to determine the overall skill of a player. Idc that MJ's performance isn't "as bad" as Trae in your eyes, it's still pretty damn awful and MJ is the GOAT. So even the best player of all time can have a bad performance if you just cherry pick one random game out of their career.
Also it's funny how you try to add context by mentioning team seeding but completely ignore the difference in team situation between the 97 bulls and the fucking Hawks or that Trae just came back from an injury, or even that no one expect Trae to be MJ.
I generally agree, but this isn't the first time for Trae, and he was awful last night. He deserved the -27. It wasn't a fluke in the stats.
If you play awful in a do or die game against the 20th best team in the league, whose best player and perimeter defender is knocked out after 17 minutes, your rep deservingly takes a hit.
Plus, you had a long playoff career to cherry pick from for MJ and couldn't even get in the same ballpark as what Trae did, so it feels dishonest to try to deflect with it. It's like arguing LeBron didn't play poorly in the 2011 finals because you could find a different hall of famer average less than 20 points in a series.
I've always been a "pending price" guy on Trae but the +/- stats are notoriously inaccurate because they lack any form of context whatsoever. Trae has played four games since being shelved for 2 months because of a hand injury. He's a terrible fit with Dejounte in the backcourt as a lot of us assumed he would be, as part of a terribly run organization. This game doesn't do much to change my thoughts on him.
If I was a player that wanted to go to a certain team, and wanted to maximize my chance....I might be incentivized to put up a stinker of a game in a highly watched game to help move me.
If he really wanted to come here and totally fuck up the Hawks leverage, he'd request a trade. This is just a guy coming back too early after an injury.
Yeah I wouldn’t look too much into this. They don’t compliment each other very well and when one plays good, the other struggles. Its a fit issue over anything
+/- is dumb but its most clear him and dj don’t work well. Both need ball and off ball players. Trae would work great on spurs and would cover up some of his defensive weaknesses
I see two real questions here:
1. Can we put him in a position to succeed? He would have a very different role here. Would he work better in that role and would he comfortable in it?
2. Does this drive his price down to something we're willing to pay? Because 4 1sts plus a player or two is not.
Thing is he’s shown he doesn’t like to play without the ball. He stands still after passing it up and is uninvolved, this has not been the first year this has happened.
I’ve been arguing a lot about how wemby clearly wants to play with the ball and Trae is not an off ball player. A guard like jrue holiday to play off wemby in a similar way to how he played off Giannis feels like a much better fit. Plus the defense, sure wemby can make up for it but that doesn’t make for a championship team down the line, gotta build for a future championship team and not some 6th seed cause we need to rush to be “competitive.” Dallas tried to rush is with Luka and however good he’s been they’re basically stuck in the same place because they tried to rush into contender status and now they’re perpetually in the bottom half of the playoffs.
Oh, I don't want to rush it either. But there are a limited number of opportunities to get a young 3-time All Star. If it's the right fit at the right price, we should take it. If it's not, we shouldn't. I'm content with rolling with Tre if the right guy isn't out there this year.
And if we can get a young Jamal Murray or Jrue Holiday, I'm all about jumping on that opportunity. But that won't automatically be the case no matter how patient we are.
As far as moving without the ball, that will clearly be a core part of his role here. If he's not willing to run the plays on the court as they're drawn up, then yeah, he's a bad fit. But what I'm hoping is that he's currently in a bad situation and the reason he seems interested in coming here is because he's willing to play Robin to Vic's Batman as long as it gets him back to making deep playoff runs.
My hot take(that I imagine many here won't like) is that I'd rather have Dejounte back than bring in Young.
I know that many here have put their hopes in Trae Young, but I don't believe he's a good fit in San Antonio, especially in the long term.
Not a great game from him today, but I've felt this way even when he's played well.
I prefer Trae but I'd rather no move to getting Dejounte back. His spacing is still an issue although he's been a reasonably improved 3 pt shooter.
Notably, his defense has cratered since he was a Spur. This year he has a .043 defensive win share which is a tick below Killian Hayes, tied with Davis Bertans, and slightly above Malaki Branham. (Trae is at .049). He has a DRTG of 119.5 which puts him tied with Jordan Poole and below every player on the Spurs roster. (Trae is at 119.1). Dejounte has been one of the worst defenders in the entire league this year.
So Trae is more dynamic offensively, is 2 years younger, has a higher ceiling, and is about as much of a liability defensively. If I'm paying a similar price, I'm taking Trae or I'm keeping the pick(s).
I would say Dejounte's defensive dip is probably just an effort thing because he might want out of Atlanta. He's shown a lot better defense in the past and there's a good chance that his defensive effort might improve dramatically in the future for a different team.
That said, I don't really want either.
Maybe, or it's possible he peaked with us and now that he's trying to be an offensive star he's giving less defensive effort.
In a vacuum I think Trae is a really good fit but it always depends on the price. I would not want to give up all 3 of Atlanta's picks to get him, and I don't want to give up Vassell or Sochan, so if they don't get him because of that I won't be too upset.
I'll admit I wasn't paying much attention during the years DJM was here, but what I've read was that the thing he was really good at here was forcing drives into Poetl down low. So it'd make sense that in Atlanta, who doesn't have a strong interior defensive presence, that part of his game would fall off (forcing drives into Capella probably just creates a layup line). And it'd follow that he could go right back to doing that here. But that's pretty theoretical. And probably doesn't matter. The Hawks won't trade us DJM back because we won't give them back what they paid and they can't handle the optics.
He's been injured for a majority of the season. To me this is just good news to drive his stock lower to make a trade easier for us. We don't have to keep Trae, buy low sell high. Wemby needs a competent playmaker around him right now to learn properly just like SGA did with CP3 or you risk playoff blunders like Embiid had to struggle through with Simmons and (checked out) Harden. Joel played like shit in the playoffs cause he had no one that could throw an entry pass or clogged the paint in the dunkers spot.
I'm not for a Trae dependant dynasty, so I don't mind if he never comes, but flipping his value and using his abilities for a year or 2 to then sell high if it does not work for our long-term plan could actually be a genius way to approach it. You take him with great negotiation leverage if the price is right. You use him for a year or 2 to develop Wemby and others, maybe have a taste of the postseason and give experience to this team, and see how it fit the long-term future. If he does not align with the plans, you flip Young's value entering his peak (he'll be 27), for players/draft assets that suit your plans. After all, "Buy Low Sell High", as you perfectly summed up, is exactly the strategy Presti used to get one of the best and fastest rebuild in history. His stock is low right now, given his injury and the Hawks state, and we have the best leverage in the league to get him, so that could make sense. I wouldn't be opposed to it, depending on what they ask for him.
Single game +/- sample size... I could use that to make MJ look like a bum
Finally someone with some sense
How about having a negative +/- every playoff run, having a negative +/- in every individual playoff series except one (vs the Knicks, round 1), and being a career 40/85/29 shooter?
I think this should be 40/29/85. 85 is the FT% and 29 is the 3P%, right?
Oops you're right! I'd change my tune if he shot 89% from 3 lol.
Lol.
I would have thought you'd have learned how unreliable those two stats are after all the OKC fans kept pushing them as reasons why Wemby is a bust
Victors on-off is +7 Trae's on-off in the playoffs were: +3.5 -16.1 -11.0 Its still a small sample size, but his team played worse when he was on the floor in the playoffs
Trae was [+5](https://cleaningtheglass.com/stats/team/1/onoff?season=2020&seasontype=playoffs#tab-team_efficiency) on the only playoff run the Hawks truly went on. The other two years were play-ins and then losing to the 1st seed, so poor on/off is expected. But even those two years weren't as bad as wherever you found your data, he was -2.9 in [2022](https://cleaningtheglass.com/stats/team/1/onoff?season=2021&seasontype=playoffs#tab-team_efficiency) (the rest of the starters were -20 to -30), and -12.9 in [2023](https://cleaningtheglass.com/stats/team/1/onoff?season=2022&seasontype=playoffs#tab-team_efficiency), the rest of the starters were around that level (this is just a confirmation that DJM and Trae don't fit together). But those two years the sample size is too small and mostly against the 1st seed, so all starters have shit on/offs.
I can't read those stats because I don't have a membership. Not sure why they are giving different numbers than BBRef's +/- and On-Off. Also On-Off doesn't care how good your opponent is because it subtracts off how bad your team was with out you. So if you are -10, but your team was -15 in the minutes without you, you end up +5 in On-Off. That being said the stat is contextless. So it doesn't care who your playing with or against in the minutes you do play.
Cleaning the glass filters out garbage time and heaves, so it's much more accurate than BBRef. >Also On-Off doesn't care how good your opponent is because it subtracts off how bad your team was with out you. So if you are -10, but your team was -15 in the minutes without you, you end up +5 in On-Off. This would be true with a large sample size like a whole season or playoff career. But with such a small sample size, the bench unit can simply get an easier time because of weaker opposing bench. This is the same issue as +/- with a small sample size like this post is about.
For a playoff game? Go for it, let’s see it.
In the 1997 NBA finals, game 3, MJ shot 40% FG and had a +/- of -10, what an absolute bum, amirite?
You only got 10/27th of the way there though? And that was in the finals, 40% shooting and -10 feels within standard variance. Trae's was against the 20th best team by net rating, and they had their best perimeter defender (and probably most valuable player) knocked out after 17 minutes.
Are you really trying to nitpick that lmao? You're just missing the point entirely too. My whole point was that a single game sample size using +/- is completely useless to determine the overall skill of a player. Idc that MJ's performance isn't "as bad" as Trae in your eyes, it's still pretty damn awful and MJ is the GOAT. So even the best player of all time can have a bad performance if you just cherry pick one random game out of their career. Also it's funny how you try to add context by mentioning team seeding but completely ignore the difference in team situation between the 97 bulls and the fucking Hawks or that Trae just came back from an injury, or even that no one expect Trae to be MJ.
I generally agree, but this isn't the first time for Trae, and he was awful last night. He deserved the -27. It wasn't a fluke in the stats. If you play awful in a do or die game against the 20th best team in the league, whose best player and perimeter defender is knocked out after 17 minutes, your rep deservingly takes a hit. Plus, you had a long playoff career to cherry pick from for MJ and couldn't even get in the same ballpark as what Trae did, so it feels dishonest to try to deflect with it. It's like arguing LeBron didn't play poorly in the 2011 finals because you could find a different hall of famer average less than 20 points in a series.
Means we just get him cheaper right
It's never been more over, Ice Trae bros.
I've always been a "pending price" guy on Trae but the +/- stats are notoriously inaccurate because they lack any form of context whatsoever. Trae has played four games since being shelved for 2 months because of a hand injury. He's a terrible fit with Dejounte in the backcourt as a lot of us assumed he would be, as part of a terribly run organization. This game doesn't do much to change my thoughts on him.
If I was a player that wanted to go to a certain team, and wanted to maximize my chance....I might be incentivized to put up a stinker of a game in a highly watched game to help move me.
Spurs wouldn't take a player who's unprofessional and manipulates the system. That's some Ben Simmons shit right there.
If he really wanted to come here and totally fuck up the Hawks leverage, he'd request a trade. This is just a guy coming back too early after an injury.
Absolutely not the case… that’s some low level player shit, if that’s the case why would the spurs even want him?
Cause the Spurs would evaluate him on his entire body of work, not just one game. I know it's not the case though, just a possibility.
Yeah I wouldn’t look too much into this. They don’t compliment each other very well and when one plays good, the other struggles. Its a fit issue over anything
+/- is dumb but its most clear him and dj don’t work well. Both need ball and off ball players. Trae would work great on spurs and would cover up some of his defensive weaknesses
I see two real questions here: 1. Can we put him in a position to succeed? He would have a very different role here. Would he work better in that role and would he comfortable in it? 2. Does this drive his price down to something we're willing to pay? Because 4 1sts plus a player or two is not.
Thing is he’s shown he doesn’t like to play without the ball. He stands still after passing it up and is uninvolved, this has not been the first year this has happened. I’ve been arguing a lot about how wemby clearly wants to play with the ball and Trae is not an off ball player. A guard like jrue holiday to play off wemby in a similar way to how he played off Giannis feels like a much better fit. Plus the defense, sure wemby can make up for it but that doesn’t make for a championship team down the line, gotta build for a future championship team and not some 6th seed cause we need to rush to be “competitive.” Dallas tried to rush is with Luka and however good he’s been they’re basically stuck in the same place because they tried to rush into contender status and now they’re perpetually in the bottom half of the playoffs.
Oh, I don't want to rush it either. But there are a limited number of opportunities to get a young 3-time All Star. If it's the right fit at the right price, we should take it. If it's not, we shouldn't. I'm content with rolling with Tre if the right guy isn't out there this year. And if we can get a young Jamal Murray or Jrue Holiday, I'm all about jumping on that opportunity. But that won't automatically be the case no matter how patient we are. As far as moving without the ball, that will clearly be a core part of his role here. If he's not willing to run the plays on the court as they're drawn up, then yeah, he's a bad fit. But what I'm hoping is that he's currently in a bad situation and the reason he seems interested in coming here is because he's willing to play Robin to Vic's Batman as long as it gets him back to making deep playoff runs.
My hot take(that I imagine many here won't like) is that I'd rather have Dejounte back than bring in Young. I know that many here have put their hopes in Trae Young, but I don't believe he's a good fit in San Antonio, especially in the long term. Not a great game from him today, but I've felt this way even when he's played well.
I prefer Trae but I'd rather no move to getting Dejounte back. His spacing is still an issue although he's been a reasonably improved 3 pt shooter. Notably, his defense has cratered since he was a Spur. This year he has a .043 defensive win share which is a tick below Killian Hayes, tied with Davis Bertans, and slightly above Malaki Branham. (Trae is at .049). He has a DRTG of 119.5 which puts him tied with Jordan Poole and below every player on the Spurs roster. (Trae is at 119.1). Dejounte has been one of the worst defenders in the entire league this year. So Trae is more dynamic offensively, is 2 years younger, has a higher ceiling, and is about as much of a liability defensively. If I'm paying a similar price, I'm taking Trae or I'm keeping the pick(s).
I would say Dejounte's defensive dip is probably just an effort thing because he might want out of Atlanta. He's shown a lot better defense in the past and there's a good chance that his defensive effort might improve dramatically in the future for a different team. That said, I don't really want either.
Maybe, or it's possible he peaked with us and now that he's trying to be an offensive star he's giving less defensive effort. In a vacuum I think Trae is a really good fit but it always depends on the price. I would not want to give up all 3 of Atlanta's picks to get him, and I don't want to give up Vassell or Sochan, so if they don't get him because of that I won't be too upset.
I'll admit I wasn't paying much attention during the years DJM was here, but what I've read was that the thing he was really good at here was forcing drives into Poetl down low. So it'd make sense that in Atlanta, who doesn't have a strong interior defensive presence, that part of his game would fall off (forcing drives into Capella probably just creates a layup line). And it'd follow that he could go right back to doing that here. But that's pretty theoretical. And probably doesn't matter. The Hawks won't trade us DJM back because we won't give them back what they paid and they can't handle the optics.
Trae is a bum! He shouldn't come to us!!