I may be turning the corner. The fever dropped to 100 and my throat is improved enough to eat. I have a persistent cough, but I don’t feel nearly as sick. If there are no relapses I should be back in business soon. 🙏

They would be decent backups behind a star C. Not so much with a middling C like Mitch. But that’s not what is relevant here. The question is: what about if you have to go a long stretch with one of them as a starter because Mitch blows out his foot again? When you have guys like Embiid, KP, Jokic, Gobert, Wemby, Bam, AD, Giannis, Turner, and others going against Precious and Sims?

Jokic’s backups are DeAndre Jordan (100 years old), DaRon Holmes and PJ Hall (6’8″ and 6’9″ and bad).

Anthony Davis’ backup is Jaxson Hayes (not so bad, but no starter…)

Bam’s backup is Thomas Bryant (ugh)

If Jokic or AD go down, their season is over. Who are they supposed to bring in? The same isn’t necessarily true if Mitch goes down.

And again, none of those guys are anywhere near as injury-prone as Mitch who has played 1800 minutes only once in his career. In his next best season he nearly made it to 1600. He’s never even managed to play 30mpg in a season, he gets hurt playing reserve minutes.

– Jokic has played over 2000 min every season except his rookie year when he played 1700+

– Bam has played over 1800 min every year except his rookie season. He’s been over 2000min four times

– Surely the famously injury-prone AD is on par with Mitch? Nope. The most Mitch has played in a season is 1848 min, AD has cleared that all but 3 times in his long career. In one of the misses he played a whopping 2 fewer minutes.

Second, I think that in the past it was true that competent backup big men have been relatively easy to acquire, but now it’s different. In the past we drafted Mitch in the thirties and he was good enough to be our starting center, and still took years to get paid a normal NBA salary. But the market has changed. Teams with good quality real centers are doing well (for example, Philadelphia, Denver and Minnesota) and other such teams like Miami and the Lakers are as good as they are because they have a quality center. Even the Knicks are an example of how good big men can work for a team. Other teams are noticing this. OKC just hired iHart for a large salary and there’s not much on the market for us as a backup. This reflects a real change in the NBA market for centers.

Finally, I don’t think Sims and Precious are so bad as backups. They don’t have much offense, but they defend and get rebounds. That’s probably as good as what half of the teams mentioned in posts above have.