spycam1
Well-Known Member
I don't think I gave him much of a chance at first tbh. Part of that is because I wasn't too interested in drafting a big when we already had Gobert, Favors, Kanter, and Booker. After the Kanter trade, I decided to abandon any preconceived notions I had concerning Looney and look at him with an unbiased eye. When I did that, I saw: elite length, good lateral quickness (that when combined with his outstanding length, gives him the potential to guard SFs; even DX thinks he will be able to), potential as a floor spacer (42% from 3 on 52 attempts, which is a noticeably bigger sample size than that of Vonleh, Aaron Gordon, Portis, etc.), decent ball handling for someone his size, good intangibles and BBIQ (a positive A/TO ratio bodes well for him).
I think the goal of this team should be to maintain our current level of elite defense while adding improved perimeter shooting to space the floor; Looney offers both potential as a versatile defender and floor spreader, while also showing promising enough IQ as a teenager to learn the nuances of Quin's system.
That's all without taking into account advanced analytics. Every method seems to peg Looney as a stud. I view analytics as a tool to help us see things that we may not see on first glance with the naked eye. These stats are not omniscient, but they can be a great aid in breaking away from the pre-established paradigms and point out potential in a player that we may not have originally seen. Analyitics seemed to point out that maybe there was more to Looney and he was deserving of revisiting.
tl;dr
Looney has long arms and a cool name.
