Should the OKC Thunder risk signing Ryan Anderson to add depth upfront?

Ryan Anderson was recently waived by the Houston Rockets. Should the OKC Thunder sign him?

When Ryan Anderson was waived by the Houston Rockets, my immediate thought went to the fact that the OKC Thunder a reasonably thin at power forward. They have Danilo Gallinari and Mike Muscala as the mainstays of that position.

Rookie Darius Bazley has been amazing but the Thunder is one injury from exposing a big weakness in their rotation. Anderson is a 6’10” power forward who has the ability to step out and hit the 3-ball at an impressive 38.0 percent clip over his 649 game career.

In his 11 seasons in the NBA Anderson has averaged 12.3 points and 5.3 rebounds per game. He has done this in numerous types of offenses playing for six different teams in that time. He has a career slash line of 42.2/38.0/85.4 showing that he has been effective offensively.

However, there are some major downsides to playing Ryan Anderson now. Since he was traded to the Phoenix Suns back in August of 2018, his shooting has simply slumped. He played 15 games for the Suns and shot the 3-ball at 20.6 percent from the floor.

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Anderson would again be traded, this time the Suns moved him to the Miami Heat where Anderson would play only ten games. His shooting improved to 33.3 percent from deep but that was only from 0.6 attempts per game. He also only received junk time minutes, averaging 4.4 per game.

This resulted in Anderson being waived by the Heat and him re-signing with the Rockets for this season. Perhaps he was hoping for a rejuvenation in the old offensive setup. Alas for Anderson he played a total of two games before being waived. He shot the ball from deep five times, only hitting once.

There is another drawback to the Anderson game. He has never been strong defensively, even early on in his NBA career. Now that he has passed 30, his defensive rating has soared to the worst of his career. Not counting Houston because he played for 14 minutes, his defensive rating last year was 118 points per 100 possessions.

Considering the OKC Thunder have a team ethos on defense, this is simply not good enough. Combine that with his decline in shooting and the answer is obvious. The OKC Thunder should have nothing to do with Ryan Anderson.

Let the New York Knicks sign him, there is reportedly a flicker of interest there