PrimeShaq wrote:OrlandO wrote:PrimeShaq wrote:I disagree completely with that. He is just not an impact player whatsoever for me. I feel the exact same way about Rudy Gay and he is a career 18ppg guy. I mean just look at Vuc's offensive rating during his time here. The only time he's ever eclipsed a 103 offensive rating is this year and his rookie season. His highest scoring 19ppg season was when his offensive rating was at its lowest (100.6) which is brutally bad. He's had a negative plus minus every season he's played for us as well. He just doesn't impact the game Imo. You can disagree with that but ive made multiple posts on why I feel that is the case.
Because those shots are still considered long twos? No matter how much his efficiency improves its never going to be as efficient as getting in the post and scoring a hook shot or up close will be. Thats why id like to do away woth them. Its a pretty straightforward argument. Not sure where the mis understanding is.
Everybody's been in the negative during this rebuild. That's what happens when you overly rely on youth and declining role player vets, hire bad coaches, and do more to tear down a team than build it up. Most importantly it's what happens when you don't have a star.
Vuc's ORTG this season is the best on the team, his plus/minus is better than the majority of players, and he's at the top of the league in percentage at the rim/midrange and he's now added a serviceable high volume 3pt shot. So he's reinvented his game to a degree and trended in the right direction, but of course you want to brush that off. And are you really going to pretend he didn't have an impact in 2015-16 when he was surrounded by developing players who couldn't shoot a lick and still led the team to our best record during the rebuild? Go look at his gamelog... he left his prints all over wins with his scoring.
Did AG impact games when he had to play top option without Vuc this season? He couldn't score, racked up Ls, and Fournier/EP had to carry him in the few wins we did get. Does that make AG a bad player who can't impact the game? No, he just had to do more than he could handle. The same is true for Vuc... I would say he's handled being a top option pretty well in 3 of the past 4 seasons, but the role was still more than he should have had to take on.
An open midranger that he hits at 50% is easier to set up and more efficient than him going into the post or paint for a contested shot, especially if he has a good defender on him. It's also more efficient than passing it to AG for a drive or pullup three. Again, it's easy to say we can get a more efficient shot, but that's really not the case for a team like ours with no star and bad coach. We should always look for a better shot, but it's hard to find or create one on every possession, especially later in the shot clock. Having a couple players who can make midrangers is not a bad thing.
I'm not brushing anything off? I said excluding this year and his rookie year in my post. We got into the conversation about why I haven't felt he's been the impact player for us that you seem to think he has and his offensive rating shows that. The problem with his offensive rating being higher this year, is now his defensive rating is the worst of his career and just watching the games makes it easy to see why. His effort especially this year has been noticeably bad and his defense has fallen off the cliff because of it. In Vogels first season he really made it a priority to give maximum effort on the defensive end while his offense fell off but this year he has done the opposite. So its hard for me to get really excited about what I've seen.
The problem with singling out Vuc for his defensive rating is his starting teammates are rated worse. And what happened when Vuc was out with injury? Biyombo, a center whose only job his whole career has been to give effort and play defense, came in and put up a much worse defensive rating. Why is it that every time Vuc is out of the starting lineup for an extended time our defense gets worse? It was the same last year with Ibaka/Biz. Same the year before that with Dedmon. If he's so bad our defense would get a lot better without him.
He has his physical limitations and he does take some plays off (like many centers do), but he does often give effort that goes completely unnoticed by his critics. He's 6th among centers in deflections per game and he's one of 14 players in the league averaging at least 1 stl and 1 blk (Isaac is on the list). He's still a solid defensive rebounder as well. The thing that probably really frustrates him is he will often rotate to help stop penetration, but nobody is ever there to back him up and he gets blamed for the breakdown anyway. Vuc is a smart guy and has shown in recent years that he's willing to play team defense... if you put him on a team that actually coaches players to play defense as a unit I bet he'd look a lot better. On our team only the first man up ever attempts to do anything... everyone else just watches or is out of position. Did you know Gordon is dead last in the league in opposing points in the paint per game? He and Fournier are not even attempting to play team defense this season. We could have the best shot blocker in the league... it's not going to matter if his teammates don't know how or aren't willing to play team defense. At least with Skiles we saw the team defend together for a couple months... I really don't know what Vogel is teaching our players.