This. J mike is a 7th 8th man off the bench if we are serious aboit competing
Forget ranking it this way. Only a handful of teams have unlimited budgets to be able to do this. Minutes will be dictated by match ups and position needs on a game by game basis not some rank order of talent.
J Mike could absolutely be on the floor for his same 26 mpg and not hurt us if we had a combination of 4 significantly better players on the court with him. That’s the way we have to think about it. We don’t have the money to drastically upgrade everything.
How would that play out? The blueprint has to involve buying a center and a PF. No purchase of established 4 and 5 means we’re going to suck again. Full stop. Landing these things is far from a given, but if we do, the front court (4-5) is instantly upgraded a lot because the bar for significant improvement is very low.
Now look at the other positions to play alongside J Mike’s natural position at the 1. At the 2 this year we had Francis/Powers/ Zrno. I think there’s good reason to hope Wooten can help more than Zrno. There’s also at least reason to hope TF and Powers would improve with another offseason in our system and playing with a better front court. While the 2 spot wouldn’t project to be drastically better if this is what we run with, but it would project to be at least slightly improved and there’d be a chance of more than this.
Now look at the 3. I don’t understand the focus on small guards because this is a spot I personally think we could get much better value in the portal as our 3rd impact for our addition than at PG. We often played a guard in this spot because we no true wing and everyone stunk here on D except Buchanan and he ended up sliding around 3-5 because our frontcourt was a disaster. Buchanan will likely end up doing the same this season and serving as a filler back up for multiple positions and ultimately netting 23 or so minutes in this role (the back ups are trending to be weak which may not be a bad thing if it means we’re planning to pony up for our main rotation guys). I want a Caleb type added to the team for this spot for our 3rd major “purchase”. Someone Pike has hand picked as a lockdown defender with length and some handling skills but inefficient scoring metrics pulling down the price tag. Not necessarily a starter on their previous team. Doesn’t matter. Something like this would be a major upgrade over what we played at the 3 this year. How massive cannot be overstated. We got no help D whatsoever from the 3-4 spot. Nobody shot the ball well anyway so there’s not much to trade off.
Add these things and in my opinion we’re a lot better even if J Mike were to play an identical role. To your point - if we bring Ogbole back to start and add a Buchanan level PF to replace Grant and round out the roster that way we are royally screwed. I’m just saying - the possibility of J Mike playing significant minutes is not a catastrophe scenario - really depends who he’s surrounded with.
