Ericb5 wrote:Do you ever read people decrying the horrible defense of KP and Towns? Me either.
The Okafor stuff has crossed the hater threshold. I think that I lot of the people who don't like him on this board are offended that there are a lot of people that do, so childishly they need to hammer every negative thing like a woman trying to win an argument.
He has a good game and nobody says anything. He shows improvements in certain areas and they are ignored. Meanwhile the golden children like KP and Towns, who are admittedly better players, have their weaknesses totally ignored.
At the same time, all three of them are 21 or 20 years old, and are wet cement in terms of the players that they will be at 25. They are still developing their skills.
I doubt that their are vocal contingents on the Knicks and Twolves boards that lament every game how bad defensively KP and Towns are.
That's the point. They're admittedly much better players.
Do you see Rockets fans complaining about Harden's defense? Do you see Warriors fans complaining about how they need to hide Curry on defense? No, because they're much better players that can carry an entire offense.
If Jahlil was that kind of offensive player, no one would complain about his defense either. But an 92 ORtg shows that he's a very below average 5 on 5 player right now.
Your mistake right now is simply assuming that people are just "hating" for the sake of hating. No, they're hating because they want to root for promising players and Okafor is running out of time to show that he can become a promising above-average player in the NBA. Look how quickly everyone was willing to fall in love with Embiid. They're not 'haters', they're just desperate to find people to root for after four seasons of being awful.
Saying "he's only 20 years old" ultimately is meaningless because every bad player was also 20 years old at some point.
