The nets did well with the Kyrie trade after everything he's done to torpedo his value.
I really had high hopes for him and wasn’t a huge fan of unloading him for Mitchell. But man what a screwup that was. Imagine Mitchell and Brunson on this team?
Not sure how much better we'd actually be. Brunson probably wouldn't be having the season he is with Spida taking the ball out of his hands at the end of games...and our backcourt defense would be rough any time they were on the court together.
Anyways the problem with Mitchell was more about the draft picks than RJ, as even if we had included RJ we'd have needed to include too many future picks to ever be able to afford someone even better than Spida
...and I don't think Spida will ever win a ring as his team's clearcut best player.
Got nothing against him, but RJ Barrett kind of stinks.
RJ is tricky because parts of his game are really bad still, while others have progressed immensely. He & his trainer have talked about the way they focus on a single part of his game each offseason; rather than gradually working on all of his skills each offseason the way most players do.
So it's possible that he just hasn't yet focused on his finishing in the paint or shooting off the bounce, and that's why we haven't seen him progress in those areas the way his C&S, handle, & footwork have evolved. Cause if he were just an average finisher at the rim, his efficiency would be fine.
That way of building his skillset may also be why he seems to need the first two months of each season to figure out how to use his new skillset in live-game-scenarios before things start to click over the holidays and his post-Dec-1st (or post-Jan-1st) #s take off.
But yeah, atm he's still super inefficient and a mediocre defender.
