MrMiyagi wrote:SF88 wrote:He's in the same category as Gallo maybe even higher than Gallo, I think he's in the same category as Hayward even though Hayward is somewhat better than him overall imo. Wiggins I respectfully disagree. I don't like the Knight is young argument because that only works IMO when a player is 2 or 3 years in the league. If you told me that about Goodwin or Warren, I'm open ears. Knight may only be 23 but he's been in the NBA for a while now. He has the same looking down while dribbling and bad shot selection issues that plagued him in Detroit and Milwaukke. He's a really nice kid and a really coachable kid based on what I've seen but for what ever reason, the coaches haven't been able to get through to him.
He has one really good game then like 2-3 bad ones. He's due for a good game tonight and I think he'll hopefully go off especially with Redick out.
I agree with you about Kieff being a bench big. I said it all last season that Kieff should play the Lakers Lamar Odom role for us, nothing more. At his best he may be an average rebounder and defender but at his usual self, he's terrible in both categories imo. Wall and Beal showed signs of promise and Wall is a really good distributor and makes teammates better, same with Steph. We can't quite say that about Knight/Bledsoe even though I'm liking Bledsoe's game from an overall standpoint this season.
Here's what I see with Knight, he's got good skills, but he has a lot of bad habits. He's never really had a good coach (Lawrence Frank and Larry Drew? Kidd's been okay so far, but jury's still out), and the longest he's been with a team for 2 years. All the players we're talking about have had consistency for multiple years in a row. I hope we keep Knight for the length of his contract (insert joke about "we'll have to, no one will want it!").
Let me just ask, how many guys averaging around 18/4/4 this season would you consider to be "bad players?" Let me throw out some names: Kyle Lowry, Jeff Teague, Reggie Jackson, CJ McCollum, Evan Fournier, Jimmy Butler, Rudy Gay, Dwyane Wade, Marcus Thornton, Eric Gordon. Marcus Thornton is probably the one that sticks out, and he's never averaged more than 4 rebounds, 3 assists per game for an entire season season and only had 1 year averaging more than 14 PPG. Bad players don't average 17/4/4 for 3 seasons in a row. They just don't. And maybe he's not a lead guard, like he's been forced to be his whole career until now. I think he has the skills to be a really good off-ball player, but he needs time to learn how to move without the ball and not dribble when he has an open look.
It's still early in the season, he's shown flashes of how good he can be, let's see if he can consistently be that good. That being said, it's on Hornacek to start breaking his bad habits, and if they persist, I suggest we look for a new coach. This is year 3 for Horny, time for him to prove how good a coach he is or isn't. Luke Walton may be getting the benefit of subbing in for the champs, but he's been doing a pretty good job with the Warriors, I think we'll give him a good hard look next offseason if Horny is disappointing this year. Don't want to be overly homer, but I could see us being Golden State-lite with the core guys we have. No Bled and Knight aren't the shooters Klay and Steph are, but I think if they get a system with sets to get open looks instead of fighting for their own shot in isos would do them good.