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You also have to admit that Shawn doesn't have the size to hold his own against more physical bigs.
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Neither of those two can give us anywhere near the contribution that Shawn can. Is Shawn going to out muscle Shaq and Yao? Of course not, but neither is Pavel and Benga. But Shawn can give us some quality minutes on both ends of the floor. He's still an excellent shot blocker and can affect the game defensively more than most players in the NBA. If Pavel and Benga were college juniors coming out, maybe I could have seen them playing a little during the regular season if they were on the level I would expect a college junior to be at to elect to leave early for the draft. However, Benga and Pavel probably wouldn't be ready to start at center for any team that made the NCAA tournament. And this the NBA is a lot tougher than that.
What you're probably looking at is Benga's raw athletism,which I admit is impressive. However there are tons of super athletic players who couldn't hack it in the NBA. Athletism is great, but you at least have to have a bare bones foundation of NBA level basket ball skills to justify PT on a playoff team. Both Benga and Pavel are light years away from having that level of skill. To top it off, both are having to learn a from a staff which doesn't speak their native languages. That is not just a trivial point. Good teams communicate on the floor. That's hard to learn for anyone, but a non-American (yes, American, not English) speaker has a exponentially harder time with it. Heck Dirk still struggles at times finding the right words.
Lastly, we had 9 new 7 new players as it is and got 2 in mid season via trades. They needed to learn to work together as a team and they needed all the PT to do it. Sorry, IMO, if we had put someone else on the IR and given Pavel and Benga minutes all year that would have been a colossal mistake.