Cutter wrote:Kerrsed wrote:Cutter wrote:Melo is a high volume chucker (yes chucker!) who has a career 45.5% shooting efficiency. When you have a player that takes 20 shots per game on such average to below average efficiency that team will not win a championship. Period. Melo makes Kevin Love look shy about hogging the ball. Melo's career averages for 3 point shooting are below average at 34.5%...that's just not very good. His 2 point shooting is nothing to brag about at 47.6% for his career. His eFG% is not good at all. Suns take roughly 95 shots per game, and having a player like Melo take 1 of every 5 shots at such low efficiency isn't a championship formula.
Melo is good at getting fouled and going to the free throw line. But high volume shooters are always getting fouled because they are always handling and shooting the ball. He is a very good free throw shooter rebounder to his credit.
I cannot imaging McD in any way seriously looking at Melo for this team.
Ever think that Melo HAD to take all those shots as his teammate tended to be s**t? I mean in NY, who else was supposed to take them? Broken Stoudemire? Tyson Chandler? Felton? Do you give JR Smith an even greener light? What about in Denver? What real good teammates did he have that could put the ball in the hoop? Billups? Old ass Iverson? Nene (the few games he wasnt injured) ?
He really hasnt had that good of teammates. He HAD to be the man. They all relied on him.
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.co ... blogs&_r=0
Good article Kerrsed. Some good points are made, but overall I don't buy what the author is selling. Ball hogs are born, not made. He did the same thing at Syracuse, Denver and NY. He would do the same thing with the Suns.
Now if we got the ultimate basketball alpha male LeBron on this team with Melo, them possibly Melo might change his stripes. Maybe.
The author of that thesis was very selective in his Nuggets analysis of Melo. Melo apologists love to decry what little support he had from teammates.
Melo played on a team which featured Nene, Kenyon Martin, JR Smith, and Billups. They finished 2nd in the Western Conference regular season standings and made it to the WCF. The problem was that that team ran right into the Lakers who were too beastly with all their length and swarming defense...Pau, Odom, Bynum, Ariza, and Kobe were too much for everyone. And Melo, while still being the primary option on offense, was not the primary leader of that team. That was Billups' team - who set the offense and nailed big time shots. He hit 8 treys in a game. Melo avg'd 18 fgs and had his most winning year. Had that team not ran into the Lakers, Nuggets could have won the championship ring by beating the ridiculously mediocre Magic that year (who had no help outside of Howard and Turk and Rashard Lewis). Melo brings little else to his teams other than scoring and rebounding. He just is unable to raise the intensity and performances of his teammates. IF they won, it would have been because of the rest of the team and Melo's supplemental scoring. He's all filler with some crunch time value. But crunch time for Melo doesn't involve shutting down his opponent or creating crucial opportunities.
The Lakers won because of its entire team and because Kobe doesn't have deficits which the rest of the team has to make up for. He can maintain his intensity across multiple playoff series and help his team maintain their focus.
He's a chucker.
Melo should have played basketball in 1990s; when you could just post up your guy one on one and score on your man every time until they started bringing in the double team -- and then the real punishment begins. He could have faced up and gone one on one and pulled out every trick for 35 minutes per game. He would have averaged over 30 points per game for years on end until the Zone Defense of implemented in the early 2000s. In those sort of offensive sets, he could have carried his team on his back more consistently and been more effective in creating shots for teammates when doubled.
I don't want Melo as a Sun because he'll command at least 18 shots a game and slow the pace way down. He won't close out on any shots on the perimeter and someone will always have to recover for his opponent being able to get into the lane.
It's hard to imagine a team with Melo and enough of a talent on its roster to make it through the Finals to win a ring. Perhaps there is such a team in a different universe wherein Melo played alongside Chauncey Billups at his best, a healthy Amare Stoudemire, a young Tyson Chandler, and a Bruce Bowen in his prime. I think that would work. I wouldn't think he'd hack it on a team like the Spurs with Pop running the show...he'd be dumped just like Stephen Jackson was.
