Into the Future: Sixers or Blazers

No poll, but this one doesn’t need one. Pretty clear.

And Roy is a far better player than Iguadola is.

Though their owner is indeed a moron for firing Pritchard.

I think its safe to say the Sixers won

I’m kinda surprised at how much of a blowout this vote is. Looking at each team’s roster, they can both make a very solid lineup of young players (under 27)?

Blazers:

PG Bayless
SG Roy
SF Batum
PF Aldrigde
C Oden

Sixth Man: Babbitt

Sixers:

PG Holiday
SG Turner
SF Iguodala
PF Young
C Hawes

Sixth Man: Williams

To me, those are pretty close to evenly matched. Portland definitely has the edge in the 4 and 5 spots but I think overall they are very close, with Portland having a slight edge.

Portland’s front office is also better, but not by that much this year with turnaround artist Doug Collins in Philly.

So, I do think Portland has the better future, but I think the 84%-16% score (when I wrote this anyways) is a little harsh towards the Sixers.

IMO, we were ONLY able to get away with Thad at the 4 for two reasons. 1) solid pressure defense and 2)shotblocking in the middle.

But to be honest, we MISS Reggie Evans. We thought Elton Brand would be a 20/10 big(the 10 being more important here) 6.5 RPG doesn’t cut it. Without a disruptive force like Evans, this team literally falls apart. He created havoc defensively, he bumped his bodies into guys, he was a solid 2nd post defender that year.

Now there’s no Daly, no Evans and Brand’s coming off his worst year of his NBA career arguably at age 32. The Perimeter defense should be top-notched as we have potentially a PG-SG Duo that’s 6’4 and 6’6. Add in Iguodala at that 3 spot and we should look very good.

But are we good enough? The answer is to look at the NBA Finals and the Final-4 if you will, because that’s the goal of all 30 NBA teams. The Lakers and Celtics boost the following bigs:
Andrew Bynum
Pao Gasol
Kevin Garnett
Kendrick Perkins
Lamar Odom
Shaquille O’Neal(this yr signing)
Jermaine O’Neal(another signing)
Glen Baby Davis.

That’s just from TWO of the NBA Finals teams. The Magic have DH12 and Marcin Gortat
The Suns had Robin Lopez and then Amare Stoudemire.

Our best big is a choice of pick your poison: The guy who had the worst year of his NBA career. Or the raw project still developing named Spencer Hawes.

I’m VERY concerned about where we are as a team. Short of Speights pulling something out of his ass, our front-court sucks hard.

You could say our front-court sucks hard right now, but this is a “future” article, and nearly all of our front-court (obviously excluding Brand) is young and not at their prime yet.

If your opinion is true, we still can get away with Thad Young at the 4. Our pressure defense should still be very good and while we lost Dalembert blocking shots, Spencer Hawes blocked 1.2 per game in only 26 minutes, and like I have said, hes very young (22 right now.)

So, I think it’s fair to say the front-court is currently pretty weak, but definitely should improve, with Young, Speights, Hawes, and even Smith all being in their low-20s right now.

Our back-court (1-3 spots) is pretty much set and I’m not worried about them at all.

Nothing wrong with scoring in my book—easiest way to win is if you score every possession.

However, not all of the big men are that one dimensional. Thad Young has averaged at least a steal per game in every season, and Speights+Hawes combined to average 10.2 rebounds per game in only 42.8 combined MPG. Again, these numbers aren’t that impressive, but their all bound to get better as these players start to peak.

Hawes and Young can also both shoot the three well for big men—Hawes is at a career 31.4% and Young at 34.3%. This is good because both don’t need to be clogging the lane in order to score points.