I’d have a lot of questions and reservations about Gordon. Sure, he’s a defensive upgrade vs. our alternatives, but by how much? And what are the downsides?
He’s a better rebounder than Joe for sure. But he’s an adequate-ish rebounder for position, and not necessarily great. And comparing them is harder because he’d only be replacing some of Joe’s minutes and then other people like Green and Royce.
This is a guy looking to be a #2 option. Does that make sense for us? The huge knock on Donovan is how inefficient he is. Gordon has a worse TS% than Donovan, which is even worse comparatively because he’s a 4 and not a 2. His TS% is lower than Crowder’s both for career as well as last year. When you have much higher efficiency players like Bojan, Conley, and Gobert, do you really want to have the second leading scorer’s offensive be occupied by that kind of efficiency? Could you imagine Jae Crowder being our second highest scorer? Because that’s what it is. He had a career year last year from deep at 34.9%. He’s career 32.1%. Are people going to respect him in a way that allows our offense and spacing to work? If they leave him open, do we want him being a high volume 3PT shooter?
For those more attuned to his defensive prowess, how good is it? How much of an impact would it make in a game above Ingles’? How big is the drop off in other areas?
Tl;dr I just don’t see the positives he brings outweighing a lot of realistic problems that would likely only get recognized in hindsight.
