u/LJ8QB1

This is obviously assuming Duren will be back(would be shocked if he isn’t)

The teams three biggest strengths last year were

STL and BLK rates(both league leading)

PTS in the paint(league leading)

Offensive Rebounding(#2)

Changes made in the offseason:

In

Ebuka Okorie
John Collins
Isaiah Joe
Gary Harris
Taurean Prince

Out

Tobias Harris
Isaiah Stewart
Caris LeVert
Marcus Sasser

Tobias and Stewart are directly being replaced by John Collins and Paul Reed and whether they are better or not individually they have different strengths and impact certain areas better than the other undoubtedly.

For Tobias and Collins its the finishing, rebounding and block rates

Tobias shot 59% at the rim last season with a higher ast’d% than Collins who shot 75% on more volume and dunked the ball 4x more than Tobias did

Collins for his career has a 8% ORB to Tobias’s 3.5

Their career block and steal % are 1.5 and 1.3 for Tobias and 3.0 and 1.1 for Collins

He may not be a better player than Tobias overall bc of other issues but on this team he can bolster their strengths in these areas more than Tobias did.

For Stewart and Reed it’s the rebounding and the steal rate.

Lineups that included Stew last year were worse defensively because they were bad at defensively rebounding and weren’t forcing turnovers as much. So he was getting blocks

Stewart himself has an insanely low steal rate at just 0.4 per 75

Paul Reed is unique in that he is the best big at getting his hands on the ball in the entire league and it’s not even close.

Among Forwards or Centers he led them in steals rate even over guys like Kawhi and Ron (Ausar was listed as a guard)

He was the only player in the entire league with a 3.0 block per 100 and 3.0 steal per 100 and he’s the only player to do it twice in the last 4 seasons.

He also held a 18% DREB and a monster 15% OREB(led the team) in comparison to Stewart’s 13% DREB and 7% OREB

Levert should be one of clearest examples of addition by subtraction ever. He was signed to be offensive help and was instead one of their worst offensive players like pretty clearly. Surprisingly good on defense though.

The halfcourt offensive rating dropped a whopping 10 points with him on. Comfortably the worst among anybody that play real minutes. He had multiple months where he and Daniss basically terrorized the bench’s offense.

Being able to replace those minutes with Isaiah Joe(one of OKC’s best HC players) and Okorie minutes is a godsend by itself and will help turnover economy and efficiency both things Levert was terrible at positively impacting.

Whether it translates into the postseason will be a question until it does but regular season they have a formula that will work