Why did the Blazers kill Rudy Fernandez?

When he came in, I thought he was going to be electric, he could shoot from way out and throw down with anyone. I thought they'd make him a real scorer, cutting off the ball. Instead, they made him Quentin Richardson/Jason Kapono, just stand there and shoot 3s. Terrible. Why???

 

Trevor Ariza killed his back.

 

To be a "real scorer" you need to have elite ball-handling skill, or at least above average for the NBA. Fernandez doesn't have that. Without that, there's a limit to what he can do. He can be set up for spot-up shots or he can be fed passes going to the hoop. The Blazers did plenty of the second in his rookie season but, as andalusian notes, the back injury he suffered seems to have affected his ability to finish at the hoop. So he mostly contributes in the first way.

 

Yep. An NBA cheap shot did him in.

 

Teams scouted him...

 

Thanks. Just wondering. I hated to see him become a standstill shooter.

 

Nonsense.

 

Care to back that up with some evidence to the contrary?

 

Rudy is certainly an above-average dribbler for a SG, much better than Matthews.

At PG he's as good as Brent Barry, the 6-5 Rudy lookalike who moved from a hot-shooting starting SG to starting PG after the Sonics traded Payton for Ray Allen. Barry surprised everyone and was really, really good at PG. He dribbled carefully, hunched over, and was just as effective as Payton, which is one reason they dumped Payton. After 1 1/2 years of starting at PG, Barry became so overvalued (he was already a Rudy-like SG) that the Spurs drooled and stole him. Here is Rudy's future:

http://www.basketball-reference.com/players/b/barrybr01.html

By the way, all that happened under Coach Nate McMillan. If Nate has to start Rudy at PG, we'll do just fine.

 

I hope you're talking about old, over the hill, almost retired Payton and not the young, dominant, couldn't be stopped Payton.

 

I was, although Payton was overrated at all ages. The only reason they drafted him was because starter McMillan played like he now coaches, and Coach K.C. Jones thought he played cowardly. Then, Payton sucked his first 2 years, playing just like McMillan, possibly because of McMillan's dominating personality. The Sonics tried to dump Payton the summer after his 2nd year for Derek Harper, but the Mavericks wanted too much and wouldn't budge, for the crumby Payton.

They had to trade starter SG Ricky Pierce because Payton fought him in the locker room. Payton used to jump up at players and challenge them to fights.

Then he started to get his mind together. He became the equal of Detlef Schremph and Michael Cage and Sam Perkins, though nowhere near Shawn Kemp. Nowadays people look at stats and say he was more important than he was. Wrong, he was just one of several equals, led by Kemp. Kemp's stats were held down by foul trouble.

After Kemp left, the team got worse, and Payton had his peak. For 2 years, he could drape over the dribbler like a spider, while running alongside. As age made him lose that, his ego trips made his negatives exceed his positives. He didn't like this and he didnt like that. He exploded at teammates until management dumped him back to George Karl, who couldn't get anything out of him in Milwaukee because he sucked.

Gary Payton. Most overrated Sonic of all time. Mediocre passer and bad shooter. Ricky Pierce. Most underrated. I laugh when someone suggests Payton go into the media. He can't talk, fool! He is an unvarnished idiot! You think Outlaw talked funny? Add a personality that wants to fistfight everyone and runs away from people. To be in the media, you have to speak, and have some charm!

 

Payton is a good example of my oft-repeated theme that past Blazers seemed terrible because the Oregonian publicized their squabbles and ghetto personalities so much...while papers in most NBA cities cover up such incidents as trivial. I remember the reason Ricky Pierce was traded only because years ago I was reading the Seattle NBA media closely, and chanced upon something barely mentioned in the local Seattle media only once even then, and never since. His snits against teammates were reported only temporarily, too.

If a Blazer had done the same thing, we'd still be talking about it, rekindled constantly by the local media whenever our memory for gossip begins to flag. This would transfer into frequent mentions in the national media.

 

It was the players around that got him those stats.

 

Selfish ballhog. The Oregonian would have driven him out of here, had he been a Blazer for one year. Talk about unlikeable.

 

Except that since he would have been the first JailBlazer, locals wouldn't have put up with him for 350 games. He'd have been gone. In the power vacuum of post-Kemp, post-Whitsitt Seattle, he was King of the Roost and lorded over his teammates. But in Portland, a more talented team, players wouldn't have tolerated him when he snitted at them like a witch.

 

What was different? The Blazers were a title contender without Payton and with rule the roost Sheed, and the paper still got the city to blow up the team. The paper couldn't care less whether we had a winner or a loser, only their farmer boy moralisms count.

But at least those players liked each other, even if the paper didn't. With Payton's persona replacing Sheed's as the team's dominant paradigm, it would have been a lot worse, giving the paper even more incendiary ammo to divide and conquer the town.