garrick wrote:Ghost of Kleine wrote:garrick wrote:Jumpers in a gym is meaningless.
Ben Simmons always puts out workout vids of him nailing 3's in practice but this never translates to better shooting during games.
In these videos man, what you're looking for as indicators towards improvement is form, mechanics, fluidity etc. When you watch his shooting, it's not like he's clanking shots or even banking it off the backboard either. The arch is great, the form is solid, heck, his shots are so clean that he's not even hitting the rim. They're all net.
Also it's not like he's just standing there in an empty gym and hoisting up shots. He's being guarded and shooting I'm the flow of the game. Whether in an nba game context or in a practice gym, getting good shots in motion or on the move or off picks, etc are important for muscle memory development and repetition based improvements..
I mean heck man. This is how the nba players work on there games after all. Even Booker, Beal and Durant themselves get runs in for game development. Are those contextually meaningless too? Pattern recognition here my friend.
I would just temper your excitement just because he can make 3's during scrimmages.
My point is even the worst NBA player can hit 3's in non game situations so I won't have much expectation from Dunn until we see it happen during games.
If he can hit a decent clip in G league games I would take that as a metric that he has hope as a shooter, until then I am not expecting much.
I get and respect what you're saying man! And large scale history samples would of course legitimatize yours and Fishis' and others clear skepticism around any potential offensive improvement from Dunn so quickly. But again, for my part, and acknowledging each individuals own lens of seeing things regarding Dunn, for my part I'm specifically looking for two distinct contributory factors to potential improvements here:
1- The player's mechanics, form, and overall motion ( whether during movement or standing still).
2- The player in questions awareness and acceptance of their core issues first and then the actual willingness/ overall level of determination they show to put in significant time to correct those specific issues that my be core contributory inhibitors to their shooting improvements.
For my part, and not downplaying anyone's skepticism here, I see both of those two conditions being met reasonably so far. Now any potential excitement exhibited on my part is honestly based predominantly upon my interests in Dunns' elite defensive abilities he'll being to our team. And also more importantly, the overall defensive pressures he'll absorb and take off the shoulders of Durant and our other key offensive players.
In this context, he'll spare them the unnecessary exhaustion of trying to excel (through intense efforts) on both ends of the floor and allow them to focus their efforts more purposefully on the offensive end, strengthening their dominance on that side as they'll be able to now play to their strengths more often. The offensive flashes have been/ will always be supplementally encouraging aspects for me. But any excitement will be rooted in his defensive contributions man.
