RIP Bayton
Rest in peace Bayton. January 2020 to January 2020. It was fun while it lasted.
Actually, never mind. It kind of wasn’t.
The era of pairing of Deandre Ayton and Aron Baynes in the starting lineup has come to a dramatic and abrupt end after three games of the Monty Williams experiment.
Dario Saric returned to the starting lineup and Ayton, not Baynes, was the center who came off the bench.
That being said, it was Ayton who played starter minutes seeing 30 minutes of court action compared to Baynes’ 18.
I know many NBA teams do this kind of thing where they don’t start players who routinely play more overall minutes, but in my overly-simplistic brain, it seems to make sense that you play the best players the most, and those players should also start.
Being taken out of the lineup seemed to shake of Ayton’s confidence at first. He mostly just took up space and floated around on the court for a while before an emphatic block got him going.
I’m a huge Aron Baynes fan wrote an article about him being a super hero, but Monty Williams might be over-thinking this starting lineup.
The Rubio-Booker-Oubre-Saric-Ayton starting five has only been seen once this season: the first game when the Suns blew out the Sacramento Kings. Sometimes the simplest solution is the best.
Regardless of the starting lineup, there is another player who needs starters’ minutes: