Post#610 » by Sugarless » Sat Apr 15, 2017 10:12 am
I've seen an older Ricky, still enthusiastic when there was a good reason to be excited, but overall much more solemn, which is pretty understandable with his mother and grandmother passing away, and even more when you consider his situation in the team plus the fact that they have had yet another losing season.
When it comes to his game, I've seen the same old Ricky for the most part, with the same improvements we saw last season and that by last June were already forgotten. When he's had the ball, he's been great as always running the team and delivering it to teammates for easy buckets, and without it he's given his all defensively, fought for loose balls and crashed the boards nicely, as usual. Some people will tell you there's been a definite change in his mentality when it comes to shooting the ball, and that has been true to some extent (probably due to the circumstances stated before). But I think his aggressiveness the last couple of months is more a product of losing Zach LaVine and helping replace that in the starting lineup (neither Gorgui nor Rush were going to do it), and I wouldn't be surprised if he went back to his usual number of attempts when (if) we see them all on the floor again.
Other than that, you look at his shot distribution and it's basically an exact copy of last year's. You also look at how he started to be a bit more efficient scoring towards January, then got much better in February and March, then finished April on a low note, and once again it's exactly the same we saw last season. The key is not whether he shoots 9 or 12 times per game, forget about that. The key is that he's as effective as possible when looking to score, and he's just built on what we saw last year, when he had a career high in scoring efficiency and his first close to average season ever in that aspect. Hopefully next season he'll continue to improve in that aspect and find ways to be a more efficient scorer every year.
So, a different attitude, more serious, more somber even, and continued improvement in his efficiency, but all in all not so many changes in his game, and certainly not the impact in wins that some have been expecting and predicating over the years when he's shot more (always overrating scoring volume from the PG position, always forgetting about defense and the nature of the playmaking role). And that's perfectly fine for me.
As for his situation going into the future, I don't think he's here for the long term. Whether Thibs likes him more than last year or not, he still doesn't seem to be his PG of the future, so I think there's a good chance that he gets moved between this and next summer. You can't say it's going to happen for sure, because you don't know what kind of offers he's going to receive, and at the very least Thibs now knows Dunn is not ready to run a team, but if he gets a decent offer for another veteran and a different type of PG (not necessarily better than Ricky, just someone who can split minutes with Dunn), I'd expect Ricky to be traded.
