Zeitgeister wrote:Neeva wrote:theGreatRC wrote:Rooting for Wiggs even more now. Holy **** he gets so much **** on the general board, it's like he piped all their moms or something
Usually happens when someone gets a ton of hype and doesn't live up to it, plus not like he has a likeable personality, does he even have one? It probably doesn't help that some Wolves fans over-rate him either.
People continue to hype him up too, part of the problem. I just don't think a lot of Minnesota fans are realistic about their expectations with him.
Players have inflated raw stats on bad teams and it can be misleading. Look at Tyreke Evans in his rookie season. Look at Michael-Carter Williams in his rookie season. It's not that difficult to have inflated raw stats on a bad team where you're given a green light to do what you want. Jahlil Okafor may fall into that boat in his rookie season as well.
Basically multiple guys who's skills are not translatable to winning basketball. I'm not saying that Wiggins is necessarily 100% analogous as those guys (though maybe more in line with Tyreke Evans impact) but the bottom line is if you are going to have the ball in your hands a lot on a winning team you have to be some combination of a high level passer or scorer. Michael-Carter Williams, not high level. Jahlil Okafor, grind it out post up basketball not very conducive to winning basketball. Tyreke Evans, can still run some point but his scoring volume had to be reduced because he's not a skilled enough scorer. Wiggins is showing more propensity to at least do a high volume role BUT he's a very poor passer and his scoring efficiency is below league average. Those things are not conducive to winning basketball. No, that does not mean he will never improve but given he's maintained mostly the same rates through three seasons I think expecting those skills to go supernova or to substantially improve in the next few years might be giving into false hope a bit.
So if you're not going to have the ball in your hands a lot on a winning team, you need to find other ways to be valuable. Well, Wiggins is a very bad defender (this is the truth, not overstating) and I still think his three point shot is a bit of a question mark, even if for him it was a big improvement last year. He was at league average from 3 last year but with a low volume of 3s taken.
So if it seems people are being negative about Wiggins it's because the reality is there's a lot of reasons to be. I want him to prove me wrong, I want him to go supernova but he's really going to have to prove it.
His efficiency was OK not good not bad. He was needed to carry a large scoring load last year as a 21 year old because we had nobody else capable of doing it besides Towns after LaVine went down. Now we have Butler to take some scoring burden off Wiggins and to take the burden of guarding the other teams top scorer. Also at 22 players tend to be better than at 21. I'm confident his efficiency is going to go up nicely this season as well as his defense.
