tooler wrote:If you asked Paolo to improve over the offseason, you'd say defense, passing, and shooting efficiency. He's done all of that. Maybe you quibble and ask him to grab more rebounds.
I'd love for him to be a 25 PPG scorer right away, but there's plenty of time for him to grow into that.
Right we’d all love for him to have that volume scoring and it’s easy to look at all these other young guys with big numbers, but i think our expectations are just a bit high for him bc we’ve seen what he’s capable of.
Just looking at the list of players under 22 y/o to score 25+ ppg in a season:
oscar, rick barry, jordan, Shaq, Tmac, Carmelo, lebron, Durant, Luka, Trae, zion, KAT
That’s a pretty small list, littered with first ballot HOFers.
The lowest FGA on that list is Zion with 17 FGA/G (insane) and KAT with 18 FGA/G. The rest of the list is ~20+ FGA/G.
Paolo in November is at 15.7 FGA/G and scoring 22.1 PPG.
If you assume he could increase his volume at that pace (not even accounting for extra FTs for the extra usage/FGAs) that would have him needing 17.7 FGA/G to break that 25+ PPG mark.
For comparison, Lamelo/Brunson/BI are all around ~24.5 ppg on ~19.5 FGA/G right now.
Now of course it’s all hypothetical and volume doesn’t always translate like that yada yada, but it’s more of a practice showing that he’s very well capable of those higher numbers if we just feed him more. But that’s not the goal right now as we all know. It’s to play winning ball, and that’s exactly what this young man is doing.
I think a line we can look at and expect from Paolo this year with his usage and play this past month is 22+ PPG, 6+ RPG and 4+ APG.. The only players to hit these marks under 22 years old are:
MJ, Kobe, TMac, Lebron, Luka, Lamelo.
Every name to do that on a playoff team is a Hall of Famer.