Doctor MJ wrote:therealbig3 wrote:And something that's interesting to me, and everyone can take this as they will, is that in the 12 games that Williams played for the Nets this past year, they had a 107.9 ORating. For the season overall, the Nets had a 103.1 ORating, which was 27th in the league. With Williams, they would have been 14th in the league offensively.
That's just very impressive to me, that he can take a horrible offensive team and turn them into an average offensive team...and it's not like he just showed up, he replaced Devin Harris, who was pretty important to the Nets offense. And obviously, this was Deron Williams seriously affected by a wrist injury that he never had the time to heal from, and you can see that in his poor shooting numbers. It makes you wonder what a fully healthy Deron Williams would/will be able to do with the Nets offense.
It's nice, no doubt. Look, I'm a little bit weirded out being in the anti-Deron camp here. I was under the impression I was among the minority who thinks he's clearly stronger at his peak impact than his high school mates Amare & Melo.
As far as the details of the example you give, just a few notes:
-While I'll admit I once thought pretty highly of Devin Harris, after '09-10 it's pretty clear we can look at him as anything like a real point guard, so we shouldn't say "Deron's THAT much better than an all-star level point guard".
-So what you're talking about is a guy who in a short sample size who can take a broken offense and improve it 4 to 5 points. Assuming that's accurate, we should remember that the scale of star offensive players by APM metrics typically moves up to the 7-8 point range.
Obviously I wouldn't hold this against him, but by no means does this make me think "OMG Deron's actually having MVP level impact".
Fair enough, I did say as of now, because I could be convinced to put Price back ahead of Deron...but I'm not really seeing Parker over Deron.
If Deron's not having superstar impact, then clearly neither is Parker. The only real edge he has on Deron is longevity. Parker doesn't really hit his prime until 05, so we have 7 prime seasons from him, compared to 4 for Deron. Are three extra seasons for Parker enough to compensate for the fact that he's clearly not as good as Deron, and clearly had an inferior peak? And I understand that APM is big for you, and I know that Deron isn't all that impressive in those terms...but he's still better than Parker, from what I've seen. Ilardi's study ranks Parker ahead of Williams, but all of the RAPM studies rank Williams ahead of Parker.
And btw, I don't think Utah gave up on Deron. Well I mean they did, but I don't think it's because they lost confidence in him as a franchise player. A few reasons for my thinking:
-Everyone, including the fan base, the media, teammates, coaches, and Williams himself, was shocked that he was traded
-Williams led them to a bunch of very successful seasons, they just couldn't get past the Lakers or Spurs
-He did fight with Sloan...but what superstar hasn't had a problem with their head coach at some point?
-I think the whole situation with Melo scared Utah into thinking they could potentially lose their superstar for nothing, so they decided to trade him for what they could get
I don't really see what Williams could have done to have them give up on him as their franchise player...they were a perennial playoff team with him (always a middle seed it seemed), and he always played well in the playoffs for them. They still could have made the playoffs if they kept him in 2011...after he was traded, their playoff hopes went out the window.
