sacking101 wrote:Since our unfortunate decline nothing has upset me more then not being able to finish close games. Even this season we struggle winning close games. We have needed a guy that has a jordan/kobe mentality of "give me the ball i'm gonna go win the game." Tyreke has showed that he has that attitude that nobody else on the kings has especially kmart who is our leading scorer and suppose to be leader. I love it and he is exactly what we have desperately needed.
That appears to be what a LOT of people seem to have gotten confused. Kmart is a scorer. Plain and simple. Everybody tried to
make him the leader because he just so happened to be the leading scorer on the team. IF memory serves me correctly, the SAME EXACT thing happened with Peja when Webber was traded, and with Bibby when Peja was traded. Since the "leader" experiment failed each time, the only sollution people could seem to come up with was to trade them, because since they weren't LEADING, that meant that they were apparently worthless. The same treatment is being bestowed upon Martin today. Neither of these players are "leaders of men", they are simply great scorers. They are what they are. You don't see defensive stoppers or rebounding machines criticized for not leading their teams, but it's always the scoring machines who "inherit" the title of team leader, whether they actually are or not.
Evans is clearly the type of player who CAN lead, not just because he scores, but because he does everything on the court, similar to lebron. He scores points, he grabs rebounds, he gets makes his teammates better, and he does it all with relative ease. Oh yeah, and he hit a couple clutch shots as well. He's just "that kind of player". Some people are and some people aren't. Kmart isn't, though that doesn't mean he's garbage. He's just a very solid scorer. Though for what it's worth, Kmart DID hit a game winning shot in a MEANINGFUL playoff game against the spurs a couple years ago, but I guess nobody remembers that now...
Like I said earlier, not being the "leader" of your team does not automatically mean that you are garbage. It just means that you are looking for guidance in the wrong place, and perhaps responsibility should be placed upon the entire TEAM for not competing on a nightly basis until just this year. How many players BESIDES Martin were doing much of ANYTHING on a consistant basis prior to this year? You can't put it all on Martin. Houston is leaderless right now, but they play hard and compete every night. The result is a winning record.
I think if we had him right now, a lot of these close games might not necesarily be quite as close as they have been, meaning that we might start pulling away from some teams with a one-two punch of Martin & Evans.
But one thing's for sure, I'd hate to see Martin go somewhere else, become and all star and light us up every time he plays against us. (Gerald Wallace, anyone???)
