Bayside wrote:Forte IV wrote:Can we ban everyone who STILL calls him just a dunker? Seriously. If he's just a dunker to you in the year 2019 you don't belong on realgm. Blake has 100% been a top 10 player in the league before. He's a work horse and has changed his game so much over his career.
I second this ....
Same people come out calling players or teams trash, bums etc. and have outlandish trolling behavior.Thing is they might actually be serious, just a bit of a personality issue. But it takes away from the board in total when about 5 people go on like this. Take the time to make a reasonable statement.
No fan of that team that kept bumping the Warriors out, but they were skilled, and I give respect. Not trash, not bums, not one dimensional dunker.
Forte, you might want to put me in with the rest of the trolls who called Griffin just a dunker. It was the fact that his posters on Mozgov in his rookie year, followed by Perkins in the lockout season, had us expecting some sort of a showstopping number every game, in addition to winning. Keep in mind they were still being run by the evil Donald Sterling, and in his watch he wanted to be loved. How do you get that: by dunking on people,
hard. Embarrass your opponents in such a way that, even if you lose, you'll still feel like a winner for emotionally scarring a defender's manhood. That kind of fame did go to Griffin's head, he sometimes forgot his original mission of proving to the world "the Clippers are not a joke," his words. But then the 3-1 collapse happened, and his buddy DeAndre Jordan joined the Mavericks. He got ejected twice in the 2015-16 season. Then, in a fit of anger, exposing Griffin as an evil person, he punched his ex-friend Matias Testi.
I felt that, as long as he was a Clipper, he would forever be known as a highlight reel machine. Sure, he was working on his mid-range game, 3-point shot, and becoming more of a facilitator, but those dunks and lob-jams were his identity. Take that away, he's just Antawn Jamison 2.0 without the Good Samaritan personality. It was only when Griffin was traded to the Pistons
we finally noticed his evolved all-around game. No more dunks, no more posters, no more lob-jams, none of this Hollywood, Shawn Michaels showstopping number plays. The Pistons were such a horrid playoff team in the tank, the other parts of Griffin's game became more of a Darwinistic necessity. Griffin finally had some kind of responsibility other than catering to the crowd. He had to prove to the world he could help the team win games, and he did so to the risk of his own health.
Griffin was one of those players who you saw only for one thing when he was on the Clippers, but a completely different player when he was somewhere else. That's how I felt about him.
