KingTdot wrote:You are probably one of the few raptors fans that actually know what they're talking about and don't just hate Demar for being our number 1 scorer.
Most of the comments on this post is just from pure hate.
Im sure a lot of these posters would put JV ahead of Demar if they could; heck they would all probably take him off the top 50
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But sadly demar haters outnumber the demar fans and neutral fans by 9:1, so there really is no point into posting and debating with them anymore, at least for me.
This is a lot of hyperbole. Most of the people who aren't overly thrilled with Demar at least have the sense to compliment what he does bring to us while pointing out what his failings are, and have legitimate examples of other players who could replicate the offensive value Demar brings. It takes about 3 minutes on b-ref to find a massive slew of similar players over the preceding decades to examine how easy or difficult it would be to replace a player like him.
It is ALSO important to look at the difference between Demar in the 2014 and 2016 regular seasons compared to his playoff performances. In both of those years, he was actually a pretty good offensive player. A little stupid and slow to learn, but generally show us the things we wanted: more passing, a little bit of improvement in scoring efficiency, a little reduction in dumb-ass perimeter shots in exchange for drives and looks in and around the paint for improved consistency, etc.
Apart from not being a really efficient scorer at any time, the big issue is that he's a dumpster-fire in the playoffs who changes how he plays in the second halves of games to be a much less intelligent player who makes life harder for us as we try to win. In other words, he's a slower learner who doesn't adapt well on the fly, has bad second-half habits and performs poorly in the postseason. One might also say "he's not the second star we need to win a title, just a sometime-All-Star who's pretty good most of the time."
That's about as fair and accurate assessment of Demar as you're going to find. He helps us get to where we go, and he holds us back from going any further. We wouldn't be a 50-something win team without him if you just yanked him out of the roster, but it wouldn't be as hard as some thing to replace average efficiency on scoring at that volume from a backcourt player.
Bringing things back on point, we're talking about an article that's calling Demar a top 25 player in the league. Setting aside how crappy he's been in the playoffs, that's not an AWFUL ranking by any estimation. Look at the top 2 players on each team. Many of them will be quite a bit better than Demar. Several will be as good or worse. In the end, you're looking at 5 dozen players and basically saying, "does Demar deserve to be around or slightly above the mid-way mark of that group?"
That's not really an awful examination. Obviously, talent isn't evenly distributed around the league, so you could look at that a couple of different ways, but honestly, we use him as the #2 player on our team. If you look about at the real focal talent, and then the quality second options, he's not going to be so far down. He does have some skills. Yeah, he has flaws, but he's got value he adds to our team. I'd say 30 would be slightly more accurate, but in the neighborhood makes some sense.
