tsherkin wrote:13th Man wrote:The way that both Lin and PB have progressed I'd be inclined to simply throw away all the numbers from last year and start with a clean slate this year. They seem to be totally different players this year, both more physically and mentally ready.
Since there've only been 4 games with some key missing players, I think it's too early to make a definitive judgment on who's the better player or even the better fit for the team. Nothing wrong with stating our opinions through number-crunching but personally I wouldn't put too much weight on them especially off of last year's numbers, it's more of a time will tell thing imo.
There's no mentionable or worthy sample at all for this season: preseason games are entirely irrelevant.
It isn't entirely unjust to say "see what happens over the first 10 or 15 games" though, and make a decision from there. As I said before, I don't think the issue with Lin is necessarily whether or not he's on the floor when they jump the ball so much as tightly controlling how many minutes he plays. At 30ish mpg, he's hovering right around the efficacy line for a guy like Jose Calderon, who starts to really see diminishing returns when he plays more minutes than that, and Lin is a less effective offensive player than Jose much of the time because he doesn't have anything in his arsenal to fall back on and say "this is elite." Calderon's at least really efficient and a nasty, turnover-stingy PnR guard who feeds his bigs well (although way, WAY worse on D).
The big problem with Lin is essentially that he's a ball-dominant guard who is too sloppy to be ball-dominant over large minutes and who plays next to a ball-dominant guard, which isn't really an awesome situation for him personally. I think it's probably fortunate for Houston that they have another on-ball guy in the backcourt so they don't have to throw Lin to the wolves in a role in which he doesn't belong, though. Toronto's been doing that for three years with DeRozan and it hasn't brought them positive returns, a few preseason games this year notwithstanding.
I have to agree with HotRocks that preseason action can and does say a lot. I am sure you've watched a lot more basketball overall than I have but I've watched every Lin game since his Knicks days plus a lot of footage prior to that. From what I can tell so far this preseason is that Lin is much healthier and stronger than he was at the same time last year, this makes a huge difference. His shot is also tighter as well, which is why I'm inclined not to rely on his last year stats so much and this year there hasn't been all that much to go by. Surely, you can can base your opinion of him on his general play last year (which wasn't all that bad either) but imo he is one of the few guys that have shown tremendous overall improvement so far, both Kevin McHale and Darly Morey have attested to that.
As for Lin's diminishing return the more minutes he plays, didn't he have a couple of monster games last year when given ample minutes? This year he seems to be even healthier so I would suspect that it would only improve his concentration levels on the court.
In this case, I do believe that it's a time will tell scenario, especially since Dwight isn't comfortable yet and Asik hasn't even seen the court. Until you have the real team in there, how can you fully develop that team dynamic?
I respectfully disagree with your assessment, mine is that it will take awhile longer until we'll truly find out who's the best fit when and where.
