1. Overreliance on Blake Griffin
When the Brooklyn Nets added Blake Griffin, he was supposed to be a luxury who might be able to drink from the fountain of youth in the borough while surrounded by superstars.
Instead, he’s become a routine 25-minute per game presence over the past several weeks, logging 27 minutes apiece against Milwaukee, Dallas and Denver this past week.
For a player who was famously acquired to be a spice, not the entire dish, and who’s dealt with durability concerns over the past several years (to say the least), should we be worried about how essential Griffin is becoming?
Anything that results in more DeAndre Jordan would be a bad thing for Brooklyn, and we’re worried that the trust factor Griffin brings to the floor will lead to more stress and more minutes for him once the curtain rises on the postseason.
The five-man unit featuring Griffin, Durant, Irving, Harris and Jeff Green has outscored opponents by a remarkable 20.4 points per 100 possessions over the course of the season, though it hasn’t been deployed terribly often. We’d rather see a world in which Steve Nash takes advantage of this unit’s potency in designed stretches of rest time for Harden rather than one in which he makes Griffin a 27-minute-per-contest focal point of his playoff rotations.
The more rest for Griffin the better, considering he’s already shouldered more responsibility than he was brought here to handle.
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