nate33 wrote:payitforward wrote:Rui just came off his rookie season, ... It's unfair to him to use Kawhi as a point of comparison. It's also offensive to Kawhi.pcbothwel wrote:Again, this is not to compare the two as complete players, but simply their offensive style and output.
Well, obviously, no one would compare them as complete players!
It's precisely the comparison of "offensive style and output" that seems so way off. Maybe I'm wrong? But, I can't see the similarity.
Certainly, rookie Rui was in no way similar to rookie Leonard. E.g.:
As a rookie, 27% of Kawhi Leonard's shot attempts were 3s.
As a rookie, 16% of Rui Hachimura's shot attempts were 3s.
Let alone the results -- 37.6% for Leonard vs. 28.7% for Rui. More importantly, Kawhi took only 7.67 2-point attempts per 40 minutes as a rookie. Basically, he only scored on opportunities. He was never featured. OTOH, when Rui was on the floor, he was definitely featured: he took 12.67 2-pointers per 40 minutes, most of them in situations utterly unlike any of Kawhi's play early in his career.
It's no different, really, when I look at Leonard's activity on the court in his prime years vs Rui's activity on court in the limited time we have had him. They just don't look similar at all.
We'll find out in time how good a player Rui Hachimura is. We won't find that out by looking at his play as a rookie. Now, fans don't like that kind of uncertainty, so I suppose it's normal to try to leapfrog it by finding some model for the player. In this case, to me it seems to amount to trying make Rui's light brighter by adding reflections from Kawhi Leonard. Natural enough, I guess; no one would think of comparing his play to Thaddeus Young or Dario Saric or Jerami Grant or... Nicolo Melli.