mojo13 wrote:I'm not sure these are great examples.
Steph - Irving, Harden, Thomspon, D-Rose were all there eating up minutes. Steph didnt even start did he?
Giannis - 20 years old (2nd season, 12ppg in the NBA), no where near the player we know him as today as Giannis changed drastically. Comp would be Shai at 20 (10ppg NBA rookie season) . Also the worst NT imaginable for him to play on (zero shooting).
Tatum - injured, was clearly suffering from it and then finally held out all together.
Jokic - System, coaching, might have been injured or fatigued. He came off the bench in a number of games (Spain he didnt play much), and only averaged 22 mins for the tournement. They had no idea how to use him properly. I'm still not sure they do now.
Booker - averaged 20 mins a game. With all the mouths to feed on the USA, I don't think USA players are ever good examples. SGA should be the man for Canada.
After seeing SGA versus Aregentina last year, I need more than one exhibition game, where the coach barely played the starters, to lose any sleep.
Giannis wasn't a positive for Greece until the 2022 EuroBasket. Until then, he was actually the main reason they lost every elimination game, along with Calathes, and in some of them, he was the main culprit himself. And even at EuroBasket 22, he played zero defense in the loss to Germany.
If you look at how Giannis played in elimination games in the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics qualifiers, it was shocking. I mean, like the two worst games that any player has ever played for Greece, by far. The actual seriously two worst games of anyone ever in the national team.
And then that game against Brazil in the 2019 World Cup, that eliminated Greece on points......yeah, that is top 10 worst games any player ever had for Greece's NT.
So Giannis finally started playing normally for Greece only last summer, after he had played in like 6 or 7 FIBA tournaments.
As for Jokic, as he has said himself, because of FIBA's rules, he can't really be used the same way he is in the NBA. It's just like with Giannis, the FIBA rules are much stricter and can greatly affect the stats and performance. You can't just put big guys on Jokic in the paint and leave them there in the NBA. You can in FIBA. You can't rough Jokic up hardly at all in the NBA, and you can in FIBA.
Jokic is very big, but he's also a finesse player, and he's more a skill player than a physical player. It's way harder to be dribbling the ball and shooting 3s and fadeaways under FIBA's rules than it is in the NBA. It's the same exact issue with Giannis, although his is the other way around, because he doesn't have good ball handling and shooting skills, which are much more emphasized under FIBA's rules, than the NBA's rules. Giannis is very physical, but in FIBA everyone is allowed to be more physical, so that doesn't have the same advantage for him as it does in the NBA.
