Yeah, as many of us have stated, KJ's absence of playing time is the big puzzlement for me. I look at this in terms of the alternatives.
Starting with the assumption that KJ is best suited for the off-guard position, here are the other players are the other options there:
Gelo
Mullins
Gill
Clayton
Green
(Reid and West are the clear PGs in my view. While Clayton can serve in that role as well, based on him frequently playing at the same time as either one of them. )
I immediately remove Gill from consideration - he clearly is not ready to be a contributor just yet. So we are left with Gelo, Mullins, Clayton, and Green.
Gelo is a better rebounder and shot blocker than KJ. KJ arguable has a better outside shot, but is less aggressive to the basket. For me, this is a wash between the two. Different strengths/weaknesses, but not enough to swing the needle clearly in either direction.
Green: as shown from the one game where he went off from 3, he clearly has huge upside as a scorer, but seems to have lost his touch. Definitely not as good of a defender. If he was consistently accurate from deep, I can see the logic in playing him, but with his shot being off as of late, I give the edge to KJ here.
Mullins: equal defender, but less of an offensive threat, at least in my mind. But he is shooting .553 overall, and is .364 from 3pt, both of which are better than KJ - I would not have guessed that to be true.
Clayton: here is where things don't make any sense. Clayton is an offensive liability. He is .250 from the floor and .250 from deep. He may be a decent defender, but I don't think of him as significantly better than KJ in this aspect.
With this roster, I would have Gelo and KJ split time at SG. Mullins is a little bit of an x-factor - I didn't expect his shooting percentages to look that good. If Green were to find his shot again, I can see him getting more time than KJ as well, but as it currently stands, leaving KJ out of multiple games just makes no sense to me.
An alternative would be to move Gelo to SF in place of Singleton, then having KJ and Mullins split time at SG. Third alternative is to go small ball:
Martinelli along with Gelo, Green, KJ/Mullins, Reid/West.
On the one hand, I still think this is one of the more talented rosters we've had - Collins has the option to go pretty deep into his bench rotation compared to most years. On the other hand, it makes giving our mostly young roster the time they need to gel together and grow really hard when there is no consistency in the rotation. And the depth we have is overly concentrated at the guard position, which puts a lot of pressure on our front court players.
