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Message: [QUOTE="champs99and04, post: 2370437, member: 488"] I don't think you're way off in saying Jalen won't be definitively better than Gray this season, I think you're under-estimating the trajectory Jalen could be on. If Jalen makes a leap this year, that won't put him on Gray's level, that will put him well above Gray (assuming Gray doesn't get markedly better himself). The player we saw in the conference tournament, or to some extent in Maui, was a NPOY caliber player. That designation is quite a bit different than being all AAC first team. Granted I'm making some projections here, so in that respect I can't blame you for seeing things differently. Nobody harped on Jalen's poor shooting numbers - or the fact that our offense was abjectly dreadful - during conference play more than me, so I'm fully aware that Jalen as a player had a long way to go last season. He wasn't being held back entirely by the roster, he was contributing to holding the roster back as well. He was also an extremely drifty defender away from the ball, so I'm not trying to paint the picture that he was Patrick Beverly on defense. He was probably the fourth best defender on the team, at best. I'm not sure about your argument that individual offense matters so much more than individual defense. I can see what you mean, of course - you're not taking Marcus Smart over Kyrie Irving, and the relationship between willing your offense to respectability - like a Harden or Westbrook whose usage is obscene - is not inversely proportional to the challenges of hiding a bad defender or two. It's not a zero sum game where Gray being a 9 out of 10 on offense and a 2 out of 10 on defense makes him a net even player. But defense can still be the difference between "indisputably great" and "polarizing." There is a reason Chris Paul is unanimously considered a top ten player in the NBA while Isaiah Thomas is a guy executives simply don't know what to do with. In a certain context, defense can absolutely be as imperative as offense - you're taking the most extreme examples where players are irreplaceable offensively, but plenty of scenarios exist where greatness was absolutely required on both ends for a team to reach their ceiling (Kemba in 2011, Shabazz in 2014). So while Gray is a player who you can hide if you surround him with a bunch of other great defensive players, he's not a player who you will ever be great defensively [I]because [/I]of. That's why Shabazz, even as a junior, despite the similar statistical output, was in a different stratosphere than Gray as a player. He was indispensable to both our offensive and defensive systems, just like Draymond Green is to Golden State. The valuation between players like Draymond and Kevin Love is about the same as it will be between Jalen and Gray. JMO. [/QUOTE]

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