A way too early Spurs rotation outlook
I know it's really early to dive into rotations, but hey, it's the offseason, so let's get a conversation going.
Thursday evening my initial objective for this writing assignment was to look at all 29 NBA team rosters and see which players could be realistically traded into the Spurs’ $7.9 million room mid-level exception, if the Spurs didn’t use the exception to sign a free agent.
I wrote down a few names, but then I started thinking, if the Spurs were going to trade for someone into their exception, they’d most likely have to give the other team draft capital to get a deal done.
My next question was, how many minutes is this player going to get, and is it worth sending draft assets for that player if he isn’t going to play a lot?
That led me to creating this minutes outlook based off a roster formation piece I wrote on Monday.
To get these minutes projections, I used last season’s minutes per game as a starting point for the Spurs players, and the two new players on the team, Chris Paul and Harrison Barnes. Seeing as how the Spurs drafted Stephon Castle with the 4th pick, one would expect him to also get rotation minutes.
Mathematically, whatever minutes the players play, the total minutes between the five players who can be on the floor during a given game has to be 240 minutes (48 minutes x 5 player positions).
Wemby played almost 30 minutes last season, so I projected him to go up to 35 minutes, seeing as how he’s the best player on the team. For the rest of the players, I kind of went a little less than what they played last season, except for Zach Collins, because if Wemby does get a bump in minutes at the 5, Collins would theoretically only go into the game to give Wemby his breaks.
As I kept tinkering with the minutes to keep the total at 240, I kept trying to find a way to provide minutes for either Julian Champagnie or Malaki Branham. I ended up with 15 minutes for one of those players.
And that’s where this gets interesting in looking at whether the Spurs sign a free agent with the room mid-level exception, or look to trade for a player into that exception - is that player going to be an upgrade over Champagnie or Branham? Will that player be okay with potentially playing only 15 minutes per night?
If it’s a free agent like Cedi Osman, he would basically keep his role from last season. If player ______ isn’t a better shooter than Champagnie, or if the player doesn’t have more size than Keldon at the 4, then whatever player(s) the Spurs may sign, will likely be on the roster for additional depth, but maybe not in the 10-man rotation.
When you look at the other nine players in that lineup above, who are you going to take minutes from? Those players would all be expected to be key players in the rotation.
Your Turn
What do you think? Who is getting too many or too few minutes in the minutes projection? It’s July and the offseason, so we might as well look at these types of questions.
Leave a comment with your thoughts on the minutes rotation if you’d like.
Maybe one more move to be made before training camp. As it is the roster gives Pop some stealth tanking cover.
Interesting if Sidy gets enough run to maybe replace KJ. Depends on his D and shooting. Right now KJ is still the better player.