u/ChoicesCat

Let's get one thing out of the way, this team isn't a contender without Leo. It just isn't and it all goes back to the defensive ceiling we have in terms of roster construction.

A lot of the complaints a lot of you have regarding our perimeter defence can be attributed to them overhelping in the paint. It leaves us vulnerable to a lot of kickouts and our guards often do not have the spatial awareness in terms of offball defense to react quickly enough/stay in position to plug in those holes.

Examples of this last night would be all the times Rebecca Allen shrugged off her shooter to help in the paint. Then you might ask why do we overhelp so much in the paint, we should be trusting our centers? The reality is Jonquel Jones isn't an elite rim protector and needs a lot of help. Han Xu isn't much better and in terms other abilities like rebounding, is much worse.

The best defenses like Valks and Mystics can have their really solid defensive wings and guards be so aggressive and pick up opposing guards higher, because they have Shakira Austin and Kiah Stokes (despite all the trolling, Kiah is insanely sound defensively) in the back, knowing their paint defenders can handle those matchups alone if they do get beat. You cannot say the same about Jonquel (or Han). You will often see possessions where JJ is one on one against her target where she doesn't keep her arms up and sometimes kinda shrugs off from even being in front of her target. These things force us to be aggressive with help defense. JJ's defensive fundamentals being so flawed is a much bigger issue than the complaints a lot of you have re: her not posting up in the opposing paint and shooting 3s (which she is good at).

Center is the most important defensive position is basketball because the shape of your entire defense relies on it. So we already start on a backfoot there. Now we do have an elite rim protector in Breanna Stewart. However, for her to be the main rim protector, Jonquel Jones can't be on the floor. Despite her flaws, the only place JJ can defend to any decent levels is the paint and Stewie just being in the paint does lower our defensive ceiling instead of her being a roamer.

A lot of you do correctly identify that our guards aren't great defenders, and as I have said, they don't do well in space. Among them, someone like Astier isn't necessarily that bad at POA, but they definitely aren't as great at navigating screens without fouling as they could be thus forcing our defense to rotate a lot, creating mismatches and the rotator can rarely fully commit to the opposing player in front because they have the idea of help defense in the paint in mind.

The fact that we are so lacking in terms of defensive personnel in both our guards and especially centers limits our defensive ceiling significantly. You need to have elite defensive wings to counter that. In 2024, we had that in terms of Breanna Stewart, Leonie Fiebich, 2024 Betnijah Laney-Hamilton, and Kayla Thornton (who is massive defensively). We also had a really solid in defense backup center in Nyara Sabally. They provided the length, switchablity, athleticism (btw, I saw the idea here that Leo isn't fast or athletic, that is just plain wrong. She covers a crazy amount of space with her length and athleticism) to cover up the defensive weaknesses of our guards and JJ. However, with expansion and the new CBA, keeping players like that has become very difficult. High level 3 and Ds wings are the most sought after archetypes in basketball, every team needs them.

When you have a roster where so much of the cap tied to 4 players, 1 of whom who doesn’t even play (Satou is such a massive waste of cap space right now), you can't keep sought after mid level players. This doesn’t have anything to do with JK being in love with Europeans as some of you like to say. The problem is JK trying to build a really expensive big 4, one of whom doesn't play and was acquired knowing that, and 2 out of 3 of the others being below average in defense for their positions. The fact that he doesn't care about defense when it comes to centers is kinda insane.

That leaves us with very little cap to get great backups. Bec Allen and Gardner are not as good as our 24 wings, but they are still decent for what they cost. With Leonie Fiebich, that is still enough for our defense to be fairly decent. However, without Leonie Fiebich, our defense will never be able to reach to a point of controlling both the perimeter and the paint against elite backcourts that attack both like some want it to be, thus inevitably, they aren't a contender.

But Jonathan Kolb somehow believes that is fine and giving up assests for a backup defensive 3/4 was not worth it to him. He believes injuries will magically go away just for him.

With what Chris has, he decided yesterday that taking away the paint was the ideal option, and in a normal shooting night, that would have given us a chance to win, with otherwise good execution. It is taking a gamble yes, but with roster deficiencies, that's all you can do. I think we have to be realistic about what this roster can achieve defensively.

I can't believe he really did nothing.

The prices for all these trades seem lower than I thought.