NovU wrote:cavs4872 wrote:I still believe a lineup of IT-Wade-Bron-Love-TT wouldn't have been bad; whatever you lost with Kyrie you make up for with IT and Wade.
I think that would have been just horrible. Post trade Isaiah/Wade have been just as expected, trash. TT is dearly being missed though.
At one point Isaiah had risen to a 59% true shooting rating (I believe 42-37-90 shooting percentages), 3% below 2016-17, and just 1% below Julius Randle for the most efficient scoring on the Lakers based on season percentages (during the stretch he played, several players were much better than their season averages). Then Isaiah's game sunk, and he pulled out to get surgery. Possibly the decline marks the point when his hip started playing up again, but for a time he was dramatically better than he was in Cleveland at least in shooting. He was also getting a good number of assists and a fair assist to turnover ratio during that stretch, and his DFG% was low (as it was in Cleveland). After the decline, it became more of a turnover to assist ratio. But he definitely showed signs that he could have been a decent player again.
I thought Dwyane Wade played reasonably well by numbers during the IT stretch. There was a stretch of about 15 games where he posted Cavs version IT like shooting numbers when he was playing alongside Tristan Thompson when IT was not playing. During the IT run, I felt offensively and defensively he should've been in the starting line up (it seems he and Wade developed a friendship in Cleveland so the chemsitry might have worked as well). Since he was traded to the Heat, he had a horrific TS% of 46%. Even in Cleveland, IT's TS% was 2.5% higher at 49%.
During the IT stretch when Cleveland were 7-8, there were 5 other games Isaiah didn't play in. I believe 3 games prior to IT joining the team and 2 additional games when he was not permitted to play back to back games out of concern for his health status. In those 5 games, Cleveland went 0-5! Cleveland were going through a bad patch with or without Isaiah Thomas. Repeatedly, the media in Cleveland cited the full stretch of games as incriminating of Isaiah, including the 0-5 he didn't actually partake in. During the first 5 of those games, I noticed LeBron James also had really bad games by his standard but the media gave him a pass and singled out Isaiah Thomas for the deficits. In the subsequent 10 games, LeBron picked up his game but Thomas didn't.
Actually, pre-trade both Dwyane Wade and Isaiah Thomas were the two lowest players on the Cavs during the 15 game stretch in terms of defensive field goal percentage, despite the media insisting time and again (including that idiot Colin Cowherd, who made up a proven fabricated storyline in a Lakers game against Portland in his indictment of Isaiah) that Thomas' assignment was having their way with him offensively. According to Cowherd, the other teams coach was telling them to just give it off to Isaiah's assignments. Unfortunately, while not true for the season as a whole, it ended on a bad note in that regard by Rajon Rondo; the same twit who repeatedly hit him and elbowed him in the face in an earlier game (that somehow earnt Thomas an ejection) because Paul Pierce felt slighted and insulted over a video tribute planned for Thomas. But on the whole, it wasn't true. If anything was true, then Isaiah was weak in his lateral defense allowing assignments to run around him. For most of the season up until that Rajon Rondo game, his opponents had similar shooting percentage to his (40-41%). They would have been shooting a lower FT% than Isaiah on the average on fewer free throws, so the TS% might have been equal or worse than Thomas'. Thomas was repeatedly blamed for all of their defensive woes when it was more often than not players at other positions who were doing the scoring.
