Everyone knew the Raptors were losing Leonard, but each subsequent champ has been expected to be the favourite the next year, and none of them came close. Maybe the Sonics break that trend, but it’s incredibly difficult to be objective and draw useful lessons at this point in the season.
KOC loves his offence, sometimes to a fault, but it’s effective. It’s fair to ask how it would look with eg Seattle’s roster, but ideally teams avoid that kind of experiment.
Flo (like BB) adapts his gameplans and calls to put the players he has in the best place to succeed against that week’s opponent. That approach is fairly rare, but it’s valuable because it’s effective, not because it’s unique.
Definitely seems to me like the Vikings are trying to get more balanced as opposed to emphasizing what makes them unique. Lot of different ways you can talk about what the current NFL “meta” is (I wish there was more time spent on that personally), but I don’t see the Vikes as a team that are trying to do something drastically different to counter the prevailing strategies and roster types out there today. They’ve tried to bolster the running game and drafted a screen/yac wr to get away from being so dependent on down field stuff on offense, and they brought in two pass rushing DL that will probably have them blitzing less frequently on defense. So if anything, it seems like they’re trying to be more balanced and shy away from what made them unique last year. I think there’s always a lot of value in going against the current meta (e.g. Eagles/ravens running focus), but the teams that do that well also happen to be insanely talented roster wise. If you can do something most teams aren’t built to stop and you can do it well, you’re going to have a lot of success.
Everyone knew the Raptors were losing Leonard, but each subsequent champ has been expected to be the favourite the next year, and none of them came close. Maybe the Sonics break that trend, but it’s incredibly difficult to be objective and draw useful lessons at this point in the season.
KOC loves his offence, sometimes to a fault, but it’s effective. It’s fair to ask how it would look with eg Seattle’s roster, but ideally teams avoid that kind of experiment.
Flo (like BB) adapts his gameplans and calls to put the players he has in the best place to succeed against that week’s opponent. That approach is fairly rare, but it’s valuable because it’s effective, not because it’s unique.
Definitely seems to me like the Vikings are trying to get more balanced as opposed to emphasizing what makes them unique. Lot of different ways you can talk about what the current NFL “meta” is (I wish there was more time spent on that personally), but I don’t see the Vikes as a team that are trying to do something drastically different to counter the prevailing strategies and roster types out there today. They’ve tried to bolster the running game and drafted a screen/yac wr to get away from being so dependent on down field stuff on offense, and they brought in two pass rushing DL that will probably have them blitzing less frequently on defense. So if anything, it seems like they’re trying to be more balanced and shy away from what made them unique last year. I think there’s always a lot of value in going against the current meta (e.g. Eagles/ravens running focus), but the teams that do that well also happen to be insanely talented roster wise. If you can do something most teams aren’t built to stop and you can do it well, you’re going to have a lot of success.