J. Kyle Mann

And I think teams, in terms of the way they look at the personnel around the league, were thinking, at least this is my assumption based on some of the stuff we saw, that, oh, if it didn't work for this other team, and our play style is obviously very similar to theirs because a lot of the league is playing the same way, then why would they be any different for us?

Why would this player who's struggling over there be different over here?

That's kind of really changed over the last two seasons.

There has been a wild divergence in terms of what teams are going after, which teams are focusing offensive rebounding, which teams are falling into more mid-range offense, which teams are like how they're guarding pick and roll, what your defensive shell looks like.

There's a lot of variety in the league right now.

And I wonder if we have a little bit of a lag in terms of the way that some of these players are understood, how they might apply to your context when...

What CJ McCollum was doing for the Wizards is just not very applicable to any winning team because of the personnel that they had and the state that they found themselves in.

And I'm not trying to say scouts forgot about that, but I kind of wonder if they were indexing on some of the wrong things and missing the fact that this is a guy who can, in a very tense situation, put the ball on the floor, wiggle his way around a defender, and through several lines of defense to actually make something happen.

And how many teams in the league could use a guy like that?

How do you feel about the death of the middle class, JV?

I'll be honest.

This is not an ivory tower, my friend.

That's not how this functions.

But if you want to build me a tower, handyman that you are, you and the carpenter can team up on it.

I would trust you.

Well, plus the movement shooters who actually work right now are like Nikhil Alexander-Walker.

It's like you're a movement shooter, and even then you're bothered in the playoffs, but also you might be the best defensive player on the floor.

So that's kind of what it takes to succeed in some of those capacities now.

Well, first of all, we didn't do that.

We didn't make those business decisions.