The funny thing is if the FO had spent the last few years surrounding Gobert and Mitchell with defensive-minded 3&D long athletic wings and guards and a PF who could play small ball C instead of obviously defensively-challenged "shooters" like Bogey and Conley, and trying to polish turds like Royce, Oni, et al, we would have been odds on favorites to win it all for more than a couple of years, and would have likely been the team to buck that trend even last year. But our team-building has been crap. I know these players are harder to come by but it is kind of obvious the plan was to overload the offense with long-range weapons, and the defensive scheme was entirely "funnel to Gobert" with zero emphasis on any kind of D beyond that, as evidenced in the Dallas game plan designed to make other people play D instead of just Gobert as to minimize his impact and exploit the fact that NO ONE else can play even passable defense on the entire team. In this way we could have built around Gobert, and Mitchell, and been real contenders. But the plan is inherently flawed and once the other teams figured out the chinks in the armor, well we were done for. And this season you saw all teams develop essentially the same game plan against us to wild success as our collapse was partly our own doing, with loss of confidence and effort and focus and inability to adapt at all, but also because the other teams in the league have us figured out and know how to neutralize our defense entirely, and how to stop our offensive flow, and Snyder has no clue how to adapt to it now that we are exposed.
But the idea that you could not build a contending team around a player like Gobert is garbage. It all depends on the pieces involved, and since we went all-in on non-defenders, and other professional teams figured that out (shocker, right?) then we were done for. Even something like a Brogdon for a Conley, or finding a way to go after a Grant instead of Bogey could have been a difference-maker, or enough of a disruptor to stop the whole scheme of lure Gobert away and attack our ****** defenders non-stop.
Fact is building a team like that could have been done, but we did exactly the wrong things to do so.
