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[QUOTE="Waltdods, post: 1743646, member: 2932"]
Man, this is an interesting thought but I think you are over-valuing defense and more recent players.   G, Rautins, and Wes (I assume this is Wes and not Dave Johnson?) are pretty similar players.  Only G offers much off the bounce, and even he was pretty limited to straight-line slashes.  This is basically a souped-up version of the '09-10 team, which was awesome and would have been incredible with Owens in the KJ role and Coleman in the Arinze role.  But I have to think we could do better.

I think the argument for Rautins at the 2 (or really, even G) is pretty good if you're not going back to Bing.  Both are guys who don't need the ball, play good defense, and will hit open shots.  But G at the point and Wes at the 3 really seems like giving up more than you need to.  If you are going to go for defense, I'd think about MCW rather than G, at least if you keep shooters at the 2 through 4 spots.

Generally, I'm not sure there's a huge incremental gain from adding more excellent defensive players in the zone.  The zone's been good to unstoppable every year since 09.  The two best zone teams were probably 11-12 and 12-13, and both of them had some fairly average defensive players getting significant time - Waiters (who was great for steals but gambled a lot) and sophomore Fair in '11-12; sophomore Xmas, Grant, Dajuan (whether his minutes were really significant is perhaps debatable).

Syracuse won a championship with a decidedly average zone team.  The zone was still a weapon.  Adding more spikes to it at the expense of offense seems like a mistake.
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