Dark Faze wrote:I think guys who seem overzealous in their arguments against Bennett do so because his supporters simply dismiss the numerous issues that are waged against him instead of actually addressing it.
Injury prone? " No comment "
Lack of defensive effort? " But did the coach even ask him to play D? "
Gained twenty pounds despite having two fully functional legs? " He doesn't have time to stay in shape due to flying around for interviews"
With Porter, guys tell me he's unathletic compared to Kawhi and we post the numbers saying differently. People say he has limited upside offensively, we point to player similarities in Kawhi and Tayshaun that were huge parts of NBA finals or playoff teams.
There's a lot of dismissive, I hope type defensive argument in support of Bennett.
Again, not at all.
Injury prone? I've already commented on the fact that both Bennett and Noel have injury track records going back to high school and not just '12-'13. That is horrifying, and far more concerning to me than the weight gain, or the D issue. Players that get injured more than once in a blue moon, tend to be injured repeatedly, the two most consistent traits with regards to injury is that it is more frequent in your 30's than in your 20's, and it is more frequent w/players with a preexisting track record, than it is with players who have no track record. That both Noel and Bennett already have had multiple injuries in just the past three years that were serious is HIGHLY alarming to me, and the biggest knock on him, for me, as a prospect. You can address or fix nearly everything else except perhaps length, but a player chronically injured is far more likely to be injured again, and often, rather than one w/o the track record (like a Porter, or Oladipo, if memory serves).
Weight Gain:
Its bothersome, but not a huge issue for me, because as I've seen with the Heismann circuit, and the blue chip circuit, many, many players gain weight unless they have a trainer working them for the combine (supposedly Zeller's combine #'s were in part, due to him hiring a lights out trainer that specialized in producing elite combine numbers). If he had the weight gain w/o the injury, then I'd be a lot more concerned. As such, I am not, though I do have some measure of concern about it (you can't have none about that, but you can elevate it beyond all reason (a la, "He's off my board" talk).
Defense:
Already addressed, nobody likes that his defensive effort looks like crap on the tape. The only explanations offered by Bennett boosters are the reasonable explanations that #1 well in terms of metrics it aint that bad, which is true, it measured adequately, and #2 we don't know why which is also true. But it can't be a net positive by any stretch of the imagination, it is at best a net neutral, and I don't buy that either, especially in comparison to Porter's vastly superior D (in admittedly a system that preaches D, unlike UNLV).
Leonard played much more athletically on the floor at SDSU and with the Spurs. So far, Porter hasn't shown the #'s on the court. Like with Barnes last year, it may just be a case of ability being masked somewhat by the system he played in, and due to coaching not drawing it out, or it may just be like with Zeller this year, it actually isn't there or translatable in many ways (Zeller's ups may be nice, but they're actually too slow to matter inside in the NBA, he takes too long taking advantage of his vert). We'll see. For now, Leonard may not have measured so great, but he sure showed it playing.
I don't care about players doing something with "championship teams", once you start doing "team" related rating like that, you start evaluating like they did in baseball before all the pioneers of moneyball ideas (going back to the late seventies but rarely applied until the late nineties), attributing to players characteristics that can't be separated from the team itself. I want to know about the player, and the player alone. We can't ship over Detroits D from a decade ago. We aren't that team, though we did play some nice D this past year.
