DreamTeam09 wrote:Again the context was that last yr was a developmental year, where multiple players were put in positions of varying developmental degrees. The first year he came, like you said you saw the uptick in efficiency. I suspect an uptick in everyone's efficiency when we aren't playing 2ways & 10days for the majority of the season
Okay, but let's look at that.
First of all, if you're that bad relative to league average in a non-ideal scenario, you're a very limited player who shouldn't really be a feature guy because adversity is going to tear you apart... and lo, right? He can't shoot for beans except from the right corner and has always been a weak FT shooter.
We love that he creates opportunities at the rim, even if he's a considerably below-average finisher there. We've had the discussion that he's generally been on some pretty poorly-spaced teams in his career, so there's any hope that he can do SOMETHING with that, but we do need to acknowledge that he's like discount Russell Westbrook as a scorer, lacking any kind of counter besides "HURRR RIM" at the moment, and lacking Westbrook's insane athleticism.
-3% rTS was a specific value, but.... he's been at -8.6, -3.7, -5.5, -5.0, +0.0, and -2.9.
So the odds are, he's going to be an inefficient player again this year, without some major changes, and he has a LARGE improvement to make to become worthwhile as a feature component of our offense, right?
Okay, so let's look again at some of what went into how things happened last year, yes?
He was a 53.6% TS player for the Knicks prior to the trade, looking essentially the same as he has his whole career.
Then he comes to our team and goes bonkers at 61.5% TS, which is a MASSIVE deviation from his usual play.
How?
Well, for starters, he jumped from 33.2 to 39.2% from 3, in the main because he was shooting much better from the corner: 43.6% vs. 38.8%. He's a career 37% shooter from there, though he's posted 40%+ in two other seasons (including this year).
The other big difference was that he set a career-high in FG% from 0-3 and 3-10 feet, and a meaningless career-high from 16-23 (he took too few for it to matter). But, as a career 35.8% shooter from 3-10, he shot 45.1% there for us (39.2% this year). It's 3.1% better than his previous career-high which, of course, is concerning due to sample and deviation from his normal performance.
But the big ticket was that he took 43.1% (!!) of his shots from 0-3 feet. He hasn't been above 36.4% in any other season. And he shot a career-high of 73.1% there, outpacing his previous high of 69.4% (and his career average of 62.2%). This year, he shot 62.4%, which is very much more RJ-ish.
So the first step is to look at how many times I had to say "career-high" while discussing this short sample. For a team which was 24th in the league on O, and specifically 27th in 3P%.
OG went away in the trade which brought us RJ, and he had Siakam for like 12 games, which didn't really affect his averages. He played his first game for us on January 1st.
So he crazily outperformed his normal self in an environment which wasn't really significantly better than what we saw this season.
You know I'm interested in seeing what he does with Quick healthy and BI on the floor helping to open things up, but there does have to be acknowledgement of exactly what was happening after the trade. That proportion of shots at the rim, shooting 3.2% of his shots from 10-23 feet, setting career-highs from the corner 3 and from both 0-3 and 3-10 feet... all to get himself to +2% rTS for less than half a season.
We need to temper our expectations a little bit. It would be a nice story if he could come through for us and justify his contract, but we're gonna need scoring next year, and quality scoring... and he doesn't have an awesome history of that, and he has not been particularly good in either of his postseason appearances, either. Which, given his particular skill profile, about tracks.
So when you're looking at stuff like "developmental seasons" and what-not, it's worth realizing that he's proving that he can only really score well under ideal circumstances, which has to be fairly concerning for his utility as a volume option and postseason play. And while I hope he can get beyond that, and am open to seeing what he looks like to start the season, there has to be preparation for the idea that we're not going to see anything like what we saw after the trade from him ever again. Kind of like when Mike James shot like 44% on 5 3PA/g for us that one year.
