After practice on Saturday, Patrick Patterson was asked about his desire to start:
As a competitor, I want to start. As a basketball player, I want to start. As a person who loves the game, as a kid growing up, I’ve always wanted to start in the NBA. It’s not extremely important, the most important thing is that I’m playing, so whether I start or come off the bench, that’s the most important thing in my opinion. If I start, I start, if I don’t, I don’t, but at the end of the day I want to start.
His pairing with Jonas Valanciunas, which was a subject of discussion in Tim Chisholm’s column, was also brought up and the Kentucky man elaborated on how he expects the potential PF-C starting combo to work on offense:
He’s a traditional big man so his ability to score around the rim. My ability to space the floor, allowing my man to come and guard me and freeing up opportunities and space for him. When I drive to the basket, looking for him for a lob or dump-off pass whenever his man helps.
Finally, when asked about his role in the offense and whether it’s changed, he hinted that not much has changed on offense
The offense is somewhat the same, but they’re adding little tweaks here and there, so it’s still a learning process.
Defensively, there appears to be a lot more focus on defense this time around, but then again, I can pull out very similar quotes from 2014 training camp and we all know how the defense looked then:
From the jump, the coaching staff has been preaching defense.
Everyone’s starting to understand the defensive scheme a lot more, we’re buying in a lot more, we’re focused on defense a lot more, and I think we had a great training camp. Everyone bought in, everyone was focused, we had a lot of fun.
Here’s my take on Patterson:
He should be coming off the bench, not because he’s worse than Scola, but because we need him in the second unit more than the first. His offense and floor spacing are more valuable when compared with lesser offensive players like Ross and Joseph, than they are with Lowry and DeRozan. There’s less pressure to come off the bench, and he’ll pass up less shots when playing with the bench than he would with the top three players on the roster.
Now you might think starting Jonas Valanciunas and Luis Scola is defensive suicide and would slow down the offense. I’ll look at it the other way – Scola gives Valanciunas more freedom to roam the paint on defense looking to make defensive plays without having to always worry about the glass. With Patterson being a “wingy” player, Valanciunas and Patterson lose a lot of 2-on-2 rebounding battles, which they’d win with Scola around. They might get run off the court in some matchups, but you adjust there as needed.
On the offensive side, I don’t see an issue – yes, we’d be playing slower basketball, but overall I think we’d be getting higher percentage looks, and chances for more possessions. All I’m saying is that Scola/Valanciunas is worth a shot and isn’t as bad as it might seem on paper.
