dantian wrote:1. Pull out your tapes to witness that Nash has rarely been good at catch-n-shoot this whole year. Maybe he intentionally did so to sabotage Porter who wanted him off the ball more with his original plan.
In any case, Nash mostly scores with stop-n-shoot.
I haven't seen Nash being put in position to get a good catch-and-shoot opportunity most of the year, I see him getting a lot of bail-out Js and stuff, but I've never really seen him being moved around pin-down action or cutting across a midscreen for quick Js, etc. He's never been used like Steve Kerr, it's usually "bail-out 3 with a defender on him 3 feet behind the line." That's not a good estimation of a player's worth in that role.
2. Whether he is bad at it or just doesn't want to do it, the result is Nash dominates the ball too much that cause two problems. For one, and most importantly, he spends way too much energy on offense so that he has to save himself a lot on defense. Secondly, it makes our offense way too monotone so that good teams like Spurs and NO easily kill us by neutralizing Nash.
Eh, the Suns are fine with their offense, the problem is that they have a couple of gaping defensive holes that can be exploited and, in tandem, they are troublesome to overcome. The Suns aren't really in trouble offensively, certainly not with J-Rich and Shaq on the team. The problems against SAS last year were that Shaq, Barbosa and Giricek played like crap. Nash not hitting 3s well and Amare shooting a relatively pedestrian 48.5% FG were also problems. The Suns were "stopped," but it wasn't the result of the way San Antonio handled Nash, it was a confluence of factors that affected the team. That probably wouldn't happen this year given Shaq's much improved mobility and the improved shooting on the team. Now, could they stop San Antonio, well, that's something else. But if the team was running a stead diet of SSOS at the Spurs, I think they'd be generally a lot better off than they were last season.
In summary, it's fact that Stockton was used a lot off-the-ball with great results for Sloan's Jazzs. Nash doesn't have or display this quality, making the team he is dominating on easier to beat for the opponents.
Stockton hit set Js, but not much different than the ones Nash hits off of the pick-and-roll. His major contributions off-ball were screens, but that was the design of the offense. Remember too, Stockton wasn't a terribly significant scorer and he actually choked it up pretty badly in the Finals both years, so I hardly think he counts as a useful example here.
