Hmm. I thought it was just me. I'm not seeing a guy who has the speed to play SF in the NBA, or the muscle to play PF.
Ah, you mean this pick might have been better used if packaged with something else to move up a few spots to get Ty Lawson or Brandon Jennings?
I drool over Jennings... on... this... team... But I need to not think about it. We should just listen to STOMP from now on during the draft.
Agreed on Batum, but in fairness to Claver, they're in the same Euro-cohort and Claver was usually ranked ahead of Batum. But Claver had a serious injury from which he is still recovering. He's the captain of Valencia (pretty good considering his age - and they're one of the second-tier [behind Madrid and Barca] Spanish teams) and in no hurry to get over here. I have my doubts that his game will translate. He's a bit of a tweener: seems to lack the ballhandling skills and speed for SF, but too skinny for PF. He (like Rudy) seems to lack a middle game: it's threes or dunks.
I've heard this before, and I don't get it. How many dunks has Rudy had this year? One? Maybe two? He is incapable of getting to the basket when it's not a wide open fast break. Rudy is exclusively a three point shooter.
That's because of McMillan and Roy. Rudy plays the Brandon Roy role with Spain and does it very well. He can create for himself and others. He's not just a three point shooter. Nate is trying to mold him into James Jones.
He had at least one play last night when he drove to the hoop. Didn't dunk it cause he got hammered down, but he did get free throws. barfo
What don't you get? It's a disjunction, not a conjunction. But besides that: the reason he has had no dunks is not because he CAN'T dunk, but because he's not being put in that position. He hasn't lost jumping ability since last year, he's just lost a PG who knows how to alley to his oop.
Rudy isn't even a starter for his National team. and he almost exclusively gets his shots off of the point guard delivering the ball or getting a steal and dunking on the break. His handles have never been all that great (watch him some time, he can ONLY go right) which makes him a liability as a player creating off the dribble, especially against NBA athletes which seem to both him quite a bit.
That made me wonder where the phrase alley-oop came from. It seems it comes from "allez, hop!", which is supposedly what French acrobats say before they leap. The caveman comic Alley Oop also draws it's name from the same source, although I don't quite see the connection between a caveman and a French acrobat? barfo
He can create by passing. Every scouting report on his European performance said that his ball-handling skills were his main offensive weakness, and nothing in his NBA performance has really contradicted that. If he had good ball-handling skills to go with his shooting and passing, he'd be an NBA star. Shooting and passing have a limited upside when you can't do either off the dribble. He's a great finisher/shooter when someone else creates for him.
2 weeks ago, someone calculated player consistency = standard deviation of the player's efficiency (ESPN formula, not NBA.com formula) divided by the mean. For Portland, they only reported that the most consistent to date was Oden and the least, Fernandez. I guess my point is that it's possible to measure consistency objectively, and not argue about it subjectively. http://courtvisionaries.blogspot.com/2009/11/nba-analytics-november-13th.html
I say this about a lot of post-Whitsitt Blazers: He's too skinny to drive through traffic. That's why he's just an outside shooter. 6-5 and weighs 185. A shadow of a human being. Alley-oop used to mean swinging on a vine like Tarzan. It transferred into flying through the air, swooping toward the hoop.
Ah. Well, that makes perfect sense, thanks. The vine metaphor didn't occur to me. Of course, that means the comic has a certain confusion between Tarzan and caveman, but I guess that's ok. barfo
I'm only here to help you, Barfo. We may have our tiffs, but it's all part of my facilitation of your maturation into becoming a man.
