It's baffeling to just about anyone, fans and media alike.
I know the defense wasn't great, but it sure as shite can't be much worse than CJ's.
and i know his on/off stats were pretty bad and likely the reason for sitting later in the season when we got more into playoff rotations.

The big thing i liked about Hawkins was he made the effort to try to rebound. You don't always have to get the rebound to make a difference. Challenging from behind and preventing the offensive rebound is just as good as getting the rebound yourself. That's something Trey and Herb have always done, and we finallly started seeing it from Zion too. Hawkins did the same.
He's learning on the defensive side, and he'll always have a battle on that end b/c of his small frame in 1on1 situations with bigger guys, but being smarter and just being in the right place is the best he can do with his size, talking about off ball defense, and that can make a world of difference.

He's not quite the ball handler CJ is, that's something he needs to work on so he can get off shots easier when run off the 3 point line, but if he's playing with Zion and another creator like Murray or Sexton (or BI this year), then i don't see the big difference between CJ and him being in the game.

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Posted by shel311

McKinney, Texas

Member since Aug 2004

111219 posts

Posted on 5/2/24 at 10:23 am to TeddyPadillac

quote:
It's baffeling to just about anyone, fans and media alike.

Crazy thing was, I don't even think it was him playing due to injuries then going back to not playing due to team being healthy again.

In the 16 games before the SAC/LAL in season tourney games, he was averaging 14ppg on 42% from the field and 40% from 3.

Then we played SAC in the IST and he got a DNP. Then we played the Lakers and it was essentially a DNP, but he played garbage time in the 4th quarter.

To my knowledge, no one returned to the rotation those 2 games, so why did he come out?

After that, he got somewhat consistent minutes again from mid Jan to the end of Jan, and in 22mpg he averaged 11ppg on 46% from the field nd 45% from 3.

Then inexplicably, he was done, no more consistent rotation minutes for the rest of the season for...reasons?

Final 24 games, 9.5mpg, 3.3ppg on 30% from the field and 28% from 3. And important to point out, he didn't play poorly and slowly lose minutes. He just lost them all at once.

This post was edited on 5/2/24 at 10:26 am

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Posted by GOP_Tiger