I know you guys hate this but David Lee is a big park of this teams success.
I totally disagree with this. David Lee produces below the rate of a replacement level player. Let's address though:
SCORING
Yes, Lee scores pretty well. But this is completely offset by his defense. What does it matter if he scores 20 points if the person he is guarding scores 25? Which brings us to.....
DEFENSE
It is not JUST his one on one defense. It's not JUST that whoever he guards scores at will. He is also horrendous with rotations and help D. He doesn't rotate to help his teammates when he is supposed to. And when he does rotate, more often than not, he does it when he isn't supposed to....which leaves one of his teammates in terrible position which leads to buckets. I am not exaggerating when I say that between the 25+ points that the guy he is guarding scores a game, and the points that the opposing team scores because of the rotations issues I just described, Lee is responsible for 35+ points scored by the other team.
That completely offsets the 20 points he scores.
REBOUNDING
Now his 9+ rebounds a game look nice in a vacuum. But is he really bodying up other big men and grabbing rebounds that a replacement level player wouldn't be getting? I do not have last year's stats, but during Lee's first 3 years as a Warrior, the Warriors as a team grabbed a higher percentage of rebounds when David Lee was on the bench than we did when he was on the court. There could be multiple reasons that this could be the case, but just goes to show you that his rebounding is very overstated.
PASSING
Now this is an area that David Lee excels at. He is an excellent passing big man. We always said we needed a big man that we could run the offense through at times, and Lee provides that. The only problem is, we seem to be doing that exact thing with Bogut now, so where is Lee's value here?
Overall, David Lee's negatives far outweigh his positives. And I am not even discussing his contract, which is a whole other problem in itself. I just strictly am talking about him the player. And him the player is someone that I strongly believe can be replaced with an average, run of the mill PF and we would suffer no drop off. In fact, I think replacing Lee with an average offensive and defensive player would make the Warriors even better. An AVERAGE player.
I strongly believe the Warriors are hurt by David Lee's play more than we are helped by it.
