dantian wrote:Amare used to be a horrible defender in every facet of the game. But he is an above-average post defender now.
He most certainly is not. He routinely plays with his hands down and doesn't do anything with his feet to deny or pressure the defender. He doesn't switch his defensive looks, he doesn't keep the ball below the scorer's waist (or even try to), he does a REALLY bad job of denying post-entry passes...
I could go on but you're flat-out wrong. Occasionally, when he gets it in his head to not be a douche, then yes, he has the capacity to play good defense but he is (on balance) a godawful waste of my air as a post defender.
With the exception of Rasheed, he always punished people trying to post him up, including Gasol, Odom, Boozer, Aldridge. He no longer bites on every head fake or leaning his upperbody towards the attacker that got him called.
Ah, Gasol's a pinch-post player and he murdered Amare the last they played, scoring 29 on almost 69% FG.
Last year, his lines against Phoenix were:
23, 9 and 7 (10/11 FG)
21, 10, 4 (10/19 FG)
23, 11, 4 (8/20 FG)
So with the exception of one bad game in which he rebounded and passed well, Pau continued his trend of eating Amare's face. He's never been a volume scorer but he is efficient and Amare doesn't do crap to stop him because he's absolutely awful at trying to deal with guys who can score outside.
Amare's idea of post D is to cross his arms and bar the scorer's back, leaning into him to gain leverage for his legs and then let himself get backed down and shot over because he can't recover to contest the jumper quickly enough.
Odom isn't a guy who regularly makes use of the post because he likes to play on the perimeter, Aldridge likes to shoot mid-range jumpers more than he likes to post and Boozer is primarily a pick-and-roll player who can and does also score down low, very much like Karl Malone.
You understand that Boozer is throwing 21.7 ppg on 53.2% FG and he's averaging 5/6 from the line against the Suns over 3 games this year? Amare hasn't done ANYTHING to slow Boozer (FWIW, that's a hair OVER Boozer's season average of 21.5 ppg and Booze is shooting 54.4% on the season, so it's not like he's being inefficient).
but in general effort is not the problem for Amare's defense as it was at the beginning of the season.
I vehemently disagree here; every time I watch a Suns game, I want to crack his skull open and light his brain on fire because he's so bad on D. He's a breath-taking scorer and his help D (at least ITO contesting and blocking shots) has dramatically improved but his man D is very much the worst part of his game.
