Rookie of the Year: The Marco Belinelli Thread

[LamarMatic7]

Ten (12) things I like and don't like, including the streaking Miami Heat by Zach Lowe.
http://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/18655198/zach-lowe-10-things-like-featuring-miami-heat-nba

9. The flailing of Marco Belinelli

Belinelli is threatening to surpass Russell Westbrook as the league's most notorious arm- and leg-splayer on 3-point attempts. Belinelli isn't the speediest guy, so his defender is often right on his tail when Belinelli curls around a pick, catches the ball, and rises to fire. His answer to tight coverage: Flail all four limbs like a spastic, bearded starfish in hopes of hitting someone and tricking the refs into thinking the victim fouled him.

He's been getting away with it too often lately. It's hard for referees to watch everything in real time. There is real danger in defenders running underneath shooters, and stealing their landing spot; the NBA has to police that. But the benefit of the doubt when there is contact on a jumper has tilted too far toward shooters this season.

can't argue with that.

[316Hornets]

Compared to who we would have had at #22, Malachi Richardson, the Marco trade doesn't look bad. He's a liability on defense at times, but he's also a contributing factor to keeping the Hornets in games. He's also the only player on the team with a positive net rating in overtime games this year. With another year at only 6 mil, I'd say he was worth the trade.

[fatlever]

That's only if we're assuming Richardson is who we would have picked at 22.

[yosemiteben]

Brogdon has played well, but he had medical red flags and if those were real I get not rolling the dice on them.

He is pretty much the only guy drafted outside the lottery that is making an impact this season, so I don't think Cliff was that far off when he said we weren't going to get someone at 22 that could help us.

[fatlever]

The focus of that pick should have never been what can it do for us this year, but what can it do for us on a super cheap deal over the next 4 years (with the small chance of finding a real difference maker). While Marco has been worth his contract and a decent 6th man for us, nothing he's done has moved the needle in terms of wins. We could have kept Troy Daniels at half the salary and gotten a similar return.

Meanwhile there are a handful of guys drafted 22 or later that are starting to get rotation minutes, post All-Star break
- Brogdon
- Ulis
- Skal
- Zipser
- Luwawu
- Whitehead
- Dejounte
- Zubac

Who knows what this group will look like this time next year, a few probably wash out, a few probably look like steals. Then you might also have a few more guys who aren't getting minutes now start to show some promise.

At the end of the day, I'm not too broken up over the Marco trade because I like Marco and there was a good chance we'd have blown the pick or not done enough to develop the pick. I'm more annoyed by the history of us ignoring the draft as a way to find cheap rotation players so that we don't have to chew up our cap space on mid-level bench guys - Marco, Lamb, Sessions, Hawes, Hibbert, Plumlee etc... Ideally our bench would include two or three guys on cheap deals that prove they can have similar impact.

Also, I'm still annoyed that we didn't find a way to trade back into the early 2nd round to grab Brogdon, a guy that we apparently liked, wanted to be here and almost all of the board wanted us to draft when he was still on the board in the 2nd. Instead, Cho was giving press conferences at the start of the 2nd round talking about how it was too expensive to trade back in.

[yosemiteben]

I don't disagree generally about wishing we'd been more active in the draft, though kudos to Cho for his UDFA and D league work this season.

I do however think it was obvious that we desperately needed a rotation ready wing with CLee and JLin out, so like you pointed out I think Marco was a good option. We weren't really in a position to think long term in the draft given the immediate need we had in our rotation. By contrast I think we have the opposite situation in this draft, we don't have an obvious gaping hole in our rotation and we can really go BPA.

[fatlever]

Except we had a rotation ready wing in Daniels, who we let go to Memphis for 3mil because his role had been filled by Marco for 6 mil. Daniels has played 57 games, 17 minutes per game, with a +2.7 net rating, shooting 38% from 3 for a solid playoff team.

We could have survived without Marco. We could have used that extra few mil + 6 mil for Sessions + 5 mil for Hibbert + 1 mil for Roberts to find a real difference maker and filled out the roster with guys like Weber, JOB, Wood... and still had a 1st round pick to keep around on a cheap deal for 4 years and potentially develop into a solid rotation player.

The front made too many small mistakes this summer that added up to a disappointing, yet overpaid bench full of aging vets, who failed to produce. Its not secret our bench and lack of depth killed us this year.

Somebody has to have some fingers pointed in their direction for the failure of this season. We can't give everyone a pass. None of it worked as planned. Thankfully, its not the end of the world as some would have us believe. Our core has proven to be good when healthy and they are all signed to solid deals (minus Plumlee) for a few years.

I get the logic the front office had at the time of trading for Marco. Like I said earlier, I like Marco. He's OK. The trade for Marco alone didn't really have much impact, either direction. But it's also OK to admit that it didn't really work out as well as planned and that move along with the others mentioned could have probably been done differently to better success.

[BatumtheGlue]

Marco is ok, but I really want to see a young player with potential to rooting for, beside of Frank. I still don't like the trade.

[yosemiteben]

We clearly had a specific role in mind, as evinced by how we used JLin and CLee, which required some ball handling and passing ability that Daniels didn't have. Neither Lamb nor Daniels were in the rotation down the stretch last season. We can debate whether there is a real need for a wing that can be a secondary ball handler and perimeter threat in our rotation, but if you make the assumption that that was a need then I think Marco is a significant upgrade over Daniels.

I agree that our signings didn't work out and that that is a major reason for our disappointing season and have said so. The Hibbert signing didn't work, though I think injury played into that. Hawes as a second backup option didn't work. Sessions posting off the chart career lows was not really predictable, especially given his relative success the year before in WAS. Roberts as an emergency valve PG3 on a one year, $1M deal was fine. It is really unfortunate that things turned out the way they did, but I don't think our approach last offseason was unreasonable. I'm positive that Hibbert wasn't our primary C target in FA and doubt Sessions was either, so I have a tough time arguing that we weren't willing to pursue a more significant FA or faulting Cho for not landing one.

You probably remember us trying to trade Lamb and Hawes and our pick at the draft to get cap space, that's not the sign of a team looking to sign a bunch of small $ one year deals.

[MugzZo]

Hated the trade. There is absolutely no upside to last years draft trade. All i can think of is missing out on Brogdon. They brought in belli to make batum happy so he would resign and have a buddy on the team.