montestewart wrote:JonathanJoseph wrote:There is NO WAY Arenas will play this poorly through the life of his contract.
JonathanJoseph wrote:Facts and historical precedent suggest it's highly likely Arenas will improve significantly above his currnt level of play.
Do you see the difference between these two statements? It's not a subtle one. Even nate33, Nivek, etc., pinning down probabilities, usually call them strong likelihoods rather than certainties, and post their numbers to back up the arguments. Show a clear, logical argument, and support it with statistical analysis. I doubt you'd sway me, but I've been wrong enough in the past to be open to a good argument.
This is fun, and I admire your passion.
You are absolutely right. I've mixed metaphors, so to speak, here.
In one instance I used "highly unlikely" and the other time used "NO WAY". It's tough to assign a literal number to it because it's very subjective. But when I say "no way", I'm referring to what I'd consider to be a 95% likelihood, based on historical precedent. When you look at the other players who have been perennial all-stars (or high quality NBA players) who have had their careers derailed by injury and the respective drops in PER there is simply no precedent for how bad Arenas is playing right now.
Arenas is a career ~20 PER player. Arenas' post knee injuries PER is about 18. Arenas play with Orlando is 10 PER, so his PER has declined by about 50% in 1 season. There is simply no precedent for this.
Bill Walton's career high PER was 24 and it never got below 17 in his worst year.
Tracy McGrady had one ridiculous year (30 PER), but otherwise hovered around 20-25 PER during his peak and then he had a steady drop to 18.4 ('07), 16.3 ('08), 16.3 ('09), and 12.2 ('10) (and it's gone up to 14 since).
Grant Hill was a 24-25 PER player before he got hurt, but he was still a 19-20 PER player when he finally got back to playing and had his worst season last year at 14 PER. His single biggest drop in any year was from 24 to 18.
Allen Iverson's last 4 years in the NBA included a decline of 19.6, 20.9, 15.8, to 13.4.
Ironically (and more to the point about the existence of the curse of Lez Boulez), Caron Butler has had one of this biggest PER declines going from 20.7 ('07), 18.7 ('08), 13.3 ('09).
The most injury prone players in the NBA today are Michael Redd (PER declines of 22.3 in '07, 18.8 in '08, 17.9 in '09, 12.1 in '10) and Yao Ming (his career PER peaked at 25 and still has never dropped below 20).
There just isn't a rational precedent for a 3-time all-star to go from a steady 18-19 PER to the 10 PER he's been with Orlando over the span of <12 months without injury. Arenas is years removed from his last knee surgery and he's missed about 3 games due to injury over the past 70-80 games so health wouldn't be a valid reason.
I don't have a concrete answer as to why Arenas is playing like a mediocre NBA player but I know that based on history I wouldn't bet Rashard Lewis' contract on Arenas being the worst decline of any player in NBA history. And if it is, then the Wizards were screwed (and cursed) either way.
