Ced67 wrote: Hype
Sorry guys, he got me. I admit that I would trade Blatche for Dwight Howard, and I'd entertain offers involving Greg Oden. I guess I'll have to argue that he sucks now.
Right off of the bat I'm still baffled by the idea of failing to live up to his hype, or falling short of expectations. If you expected Andray to far surpass his current incarnation when he first came into the league you have quite an eye for talent, because most of us couldn't tell him from Ndudi Ebi. I don't want to sound too contrary here because I'll concede that I am certainly occasionally baffled by Andray and I do think that a complete commitment to his career would benefit both him and the team.
On the other hand to me (and possibly to Nate, his mind is so coldly logical and devoid of human weakness that I cannot dare claim to comprehend it) this is sounding more and more like another round of the Brendan Haywood debate. It was always about how Brendan needed to play bigger, to be more aggressive, to act less like "Brenda" but the bottom line was that he was a talented guy and the team has suffered in his absence. Blatche is a finesse big, no question. He takes a lot of mid range jumpers, he uses a lot of shot fakes and pivots in the post, he doesn't dunk the ball every time he possibly could. He does attack his man off of the dribble more than most forwards, he even does showy guard stuff like dribble behind his back, and if he weighs 250 pounds his butt has to be, like quantum singularity dense.
But he's getting better (I really don't follow your argument that he isn't). He's the team's fourth best per minute scorer and honestly he's a more legitimate scoring threat than Nick Young more often than not. He's a tremendous passer for a big man, and his turnover problems are resolving themselves (he's no more turnover prone at this point than guys like Lamar Odom or Josh Smith, other big men who look to make difficult passes) and he's not any fundamentally worse, in my observation anyway, than Antawn Jamison defensively at this point. I certainly don't see him loose his man on pick and rolls the way Antawn does regularly. The only thing he hasn't done better this year is rebound, a trend I would prefer were reversed, but he's still the team's best healthy rebounder currently.
Blatche isn't talked about because he's a former second round pick on a terrible team playing fewer than twenty five minutes a night, and he once solicited a police officer to boot, so announcers almost aren't allowed to say nice things about him. I'm not sure specifically to whom you're referring when you draw upon the clearly informed views of "NBA experts" but if you mean in game commentators I'd remind you that Milwaukee's broadcast team thinks Luke Ridnour is pretty awesome and the guys in New York have nice things to say about Jared Jeffries.
Anyway, fundamental point here is that we're not assuming Blatche will make anything more than modest improvements to his game from here on out, what we're saying is that he's already a guy who could start for a respectable NBA franchise and the third best player on the Wizards who you'll see in uniform this season.
