Grew wrote:Team is broken from management to coaching to relationships between our best players. Starters have no chemistry, our top 3 most experienced bench players have the basketball IQ of a walnut. We have zero spacing and our best most versatile 3pt shooter is a 3rd year player who couldn't shoot over 30 percent from deep when he came into the league.
Gradey has been bad. People on here need to chill out on the scathing remarks though. Hard to ask a 19 year old system player to come in to a broken system and provide the only spacing on the team while playing with a team full of guys who want to get there own and Scottie Barnes, who for some reason Darko loved to sit on the bench for almost all of Gradey's shifts. Darko then proceeds to run nothing for him and tells him to go stand in the corner and get a rhythm whenever Dennis and Pascal decide there's no other choice but to throw it there.
It's easy to forget that most people on this board like watching box scores more than games and have never played competitive basketball in their lives, but threads like these bring it back to light. Reminiscent of the 50+ pages of Pat Mccaw hate when all he was there to do was not take shots away from the 7 guys on the team who had put up 15-20+ points seasons in there careers and just be a half-ass connector on one of the better teams ever in raptors history.
The "guys we missed out on are either more experienced college players placed on proven rosters or young guys shooting garbage percentages but have green lights. None of which are Kobe Bufkin who this board would have drafted if the pre draft pole was doing our drafting.
Hard to believe people gave up on a 19 year old 5-10 games in. Harder to believe it's the same people that hate the direction of the team and know how broken we are from top to bottom. Once this is Scottie Barnes team, we have turned a corner and we are giving Gradey at least the 25 minutes a night we are letting Gary flush down the toilet right now, we can watch for a season and a half and actually see what we have. Until then calling him a bust is asinine. If he can't produce under those circumstances, we botched a promising players development by placing him in a terrible environment and then tanking his belief in himself. Gradey has alot of work to do physically and mentally, but he definitely has the talent to not be a bust in the NBA, if you can't see that, it's time to go back to watching the leafs and jays.
While you're right about the team being in a bad state, but a good prospect should still be able to not be complete ass, especially in the G League . Gradey has been horrific. He has been getting completely open shots and he can't make them, which was his calling card. But even so, shooters sometimes need adjustment, but he can't do anything else. You can blame the team (Both Raptors and G league) all you want but we're not asking much of him. He's making his G League team worse when he's on the floor which is unreal. This post seems similar to the apologetic Bargnani posts back in the day where Bargnani was never to blame, but Mitchell, Bosh, Ford, the front office asking him to gain weight was the reason he sucked. (Maybe he just didn't want to get in shape). Not the fact that he had the worst defensive awareness in the league, had low BBIQ, and didn't give a sht.
Its too early to for sure call Gradey a bust. He can turn it around. But it really doesn't look like he has a high ceiling. I don't know if there's anyone that looked this bad in the G league that became an good NBA player. I hope he does become one, but I think the odds are against it. And Darko has been bad, but I don't think you can blame Gradey's play on him. He's probably been given more opportunity than most coaches would. And If he can't play with inferior players in the G league, why would be get plays run for him with the big club?
