I don’t think he’s helping much on defense or even rebounding compared to Paschall. For every moment where I think, “man it was nice to have another guy with size”, there are ten moments where I see Gay being an absolute traffic cone. Maybe there will be a time where we need a second big more than a big wing defender like Paschall….but I’m going to reject this idea that Gay is/was a good defense. He does some nice thing, but overall he’s bad and it’s what we should have expected given his age. His individual rebounding numbers are better then Paschall, but the team doesn’t rebound better with Gay on the court. Maybe that comes into play if you want Gay at the 5, but in terms of Paschall vs Gay at the 4….it’s a very clear decision for me. Paschall has more upside and has played better this year. It’s going to pain me when he signs a 3/$10 super team friendly deal this summer and it’s not with us.
I didn’t worry about Joe’s age even when he was playing like trash this year because he was coming off the best season of his career…but Rudy Gay was creaky to begin with. We looked at that signing through the most optimistic lender possible…which is fine, but we’ve got to be realistic about the situation. A 5-6 game hot start is not an equivalent of 20+ game stretch of really bad basketball. This isn’t the case of ups and downs during a long season…it certainly looks like Father Time to me.
And again, this is just this year. I don’t have hope for Rudy Gay to turn it up by the end of the year…but it’s not impossible. Rudy Gay turning in two future seasons where he’s productive? Now that seems impossible to me. Even if he makes that end of season jump, this is very likely a bad contract that will burn us one way or another. Unfortunately we’re in agreement that it won’t be Ryan’s wallet that will feel the burn. We’ll feel it in losing future assets or by making the team worse by trading off quality players or having to let them walk.
I don’t really blame the FO for the Favors or Gay signings. In both situations it felt like they just got the best player available and we were fortunate to get them… but both of them were pretty huge whiffs. The process wasn’t as bad as the Doke pick, for example, but a late first round draft pick is much harder to hit on than two MLE signings. Favors cost us dearly already, Gay will also cost us whether he’s the one to be moved or not.