Why are people singling out Blake? Roy amd LMA are going to play big minutes - that's a given. Because of injuries, the team has little choice except to play Joel and Webster. That leaves PG as the only position where an upgrade is even possible - and the coach refuses to even try. If Blake was playing as well as he did last season, you could make a case for that. He isn't. In a sense, Blake is the victim of circumstances. If he was playing like last year, if the team was playing well, if Nate/Roy weren't so gawdawful stubborn - but this season has turned into a perfect (shit) storm.
I have never said Blake was the only problem. The problem is that 3 of our 5 starters do not score. We all know that is Blake, Webster and Joel. Joel is never going to be a scorer, but that doesn't mean we should be so inflexible as to not make some moves on the other two slots. Part of the reason that players who do not score much are used as backups is because they can provide some solid play for a few minutes while the starters get rest, and because they are used for so few minutes, the fact that they don't score isn't as much of a detriment to your team. I don't know how I can stress this more. When we were in the playoffs last year against Houston, it was easily shown that the superior defensive teams in the league can limit or slow down your first two options on offense. If your other 3 guys out on the floor cannot get some buckets, you are totally fucked. You are in for a rough night where they can double team your main guys and your pressure relief guys aren't getting it done. This leads to your stars trying to do too much while under the duress of double and triple teams. We cannot afford to have the PG and SF in the offense not scoring when Joel is in the game. One player not scoring is bad enough. 3 is fucking insane.
Wow, enjoying the blinders much? The team plays better with Blake on the floor because the team hasn't had the opportunity to play with anyone else (starting). So that's a moot point. The fact remains, Andre Miller is a better player than Blake, always has been, always will be. And Bayless is catching up to Blake quickly. There is no reason why our team shouldn't play the best starting 5 possible and the coaching staff should use their "coaching" ability to maximize the efficiency of the offense, not just rely on what we did last year which is blatantly predictable.
While you're caffeinating, I'm going to ask Jim Mora if he thinks this Blazer team can make the playoffs despite all the injuries. Let's see what he thinks . . . [video=youtube;p3-eavMSBnk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3-eavMSBnk[/video]
I think what PapaG is getting at (and who knows about KingSpeed but probably along the same lines) is the hyperbole in Blake bashing. I'm pretty certain that Miller is a better player than Blake. I reserve judgment on Bayless. But just the constant, narrowly-focused effort by a few posters to just tear Blake to pieces on every possible miscue makes it unbearable at times. It makes it easier to come out and defend Blake as well because you can only take so much of someone stating something so entirely preposterous or exaggerated that you have to speak up. And of course the people who can't say one nice thing about Blake instantly assign those people the "Blake lover" title because they can't fathom that an individual could bring one iota of talent to the team. Is Blake a weak link? Sure. But he's not single-handedly costing us games. The team has done fine screwing up games with or without him. I'm just thinking positively that the adversity the team is facing now will make them stronger in the long run.
Dude. He's TERRIBLE. His PER is 9.3. And he's playing 30 minutes a night... third-most on the team. He gets to the line fewer than one time a game. He has zero blocked shots in 720 minutes. He's been Channing Frye-bad, and yet there are still people defending him on the board. And--more cripplingly, of course--the coaches still keep putting him out there. There's no reason and no excuse for him to play so much when he's playing so poorly. He's not helping the team win now and he's not going to be a part of the future of this team as a starter. He should settle into the backup role that he deserves. Ed O.
But it's not his fault Ed! This team wins more with Blakey as the point guard. He could attempt 20 shots, make none of them, but if we're winning..... Blakey should start! Oh, and he's a lockdown defender
But apparently from what we've seen in the other threads, stats mean absolutely nothing, eh? Read through the game threads. If you can't see the hyperbole that some people have with regard to Blake then I don't know what to tell you. No other player has multiple threads devoted to them discussing how horrible they are. No other player gets called out for every possible mistake they might make on the court, regardless of whether their teammate may have helped or not. No other player gets blamed for losing the game on one single event in a game. Come on, Ed, you're smarter than that. You know that even with one bad player he isn't going to lose the game on one single possession.
I actually don't even have a problem with Blake, my real beef is with the mind numbing usage of him by the coaching staff. Blake with 3 or 4 other offensive threats as an outlet scorer and a low mistake player is probably fine because he can at least play adequate team defense (man to man is another story) and can take advantage of the fact the lesser defensive talents are covering him (usually). I just can't quite figure out how to wrap my brain around the fact that he plays so much more than two other guys who clearly put more pressure on a defense. If the point is to give Roy more room to operate, it seems like a defense having to pay more attention to third and fourth options would ease some of the double and triple teams that get thrown at him, vs. guys whose biggest calling card is "getting out of the way" and merely spacing the floor ... on sub 35% shooting from distance (even worse in the past 5 or so games). Blake isn't the problem and for 20 or so minutes a night I think he's probably fine ... I just want to see a more reasonable use of him and our other two guards.
Blake is clearly not responsible for all of what ails Portland. I think he's simply become the symbol to many of a larger problem: McMillan's lineups and substitutions. Whether it's going with a three guard lineup, having both Oden and Przybilla on the bench at the same time, removing Oden at the 6 minute mark regardless of anything going in the game, people have justifiable questions about what McMillan is doing with the personnel. The overuse of a fairly replaceable role-player like Blake has simply been symptomatic of that bigger problem and many people's upset over that larger problem has centered on Blake as the most visible symptom. When you're sick, the runny nose is never the most damaging part of the sickness, but it's often what people complain about because it's easy to notice and ever-present. I agree that Blake is being targeted to unfair extents, but as the most obvious example of what many consider to be a major problem with the team, it's kindof to be expected.
I don't think that anybody's saying that Blake should be the longterm solution at the starting PG position. He's having a horrible year, but hopefully he can get back to how he's played the past few seasons...which in my mind would translate into a solid backup PG for the Blazers' future. What I don't see is the answer at the starting position right now in either Miller or Bayless. Miller's and Roy's chemistry is far from ideal with them both liking to have the ball in their hands. Miller's D is suspect. Bayless needs more minutes, no doubt, but I think he's a year away from being a starter.
Sometimes throwing a player into the fire works out though. It wasn't that long ago a certain kid named Batum was thrown into the starting lineup. By end of year, he was showing some good progress, even though he was playing on one arm.
Not playing Miller and Roy together due to lack of on-court chemistry is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, isn't it? How are they going to develop that chemistry if they are not played together for a significant amount of time? Theorycrafting based on their respective games is all well and good, but games can change, especially for talented, intelligent players like Roy and Miller. Players have to adapt many times in their careers to account for new personnel around them...it's nothing new.
Yet he has the highest win% on the team this year. He was tied with LMA for 2nd last year. Focus on PER if you must, but I'd rather have a player who helps his team win while on the court. To say a player with a consistently solid win% is TERRIBLE seems more like an emotional decision than it does anything else. Is Blake great? No. Is he the ideal PG? No. Does the team perform well while he's on the floor, for whatever reason? The stats say YES. Thus, using hyperbolic pejoratives like TERRIBLE seems rather counter-productive to actually assessing what BLANKY does for this team.
All of this may true, but if Blake still leads the team in win%, have the "experts" here considered that the coaching staff feels that starting him gives the team the best chance to win at this point? Or is the CW that Nate is literally not caring he loses games so he can start Blake? That's a very serious charge, if so. Also, it seems like more a problem with the coach than anything else. I just don't see how fun it could be to watch one player, on the team a person supposedly love, to see how bad they eff up while on the court. That's basically what the game threads here are now. It's like group therapy for people projecting all of their anger on a player who is a role player. So, if a person bothers to say something positive about Blake, they are accused of defending the "Alamo".
Can we at least agree that win% is not the be all end all stat? It is but one piece of a larger puzzle of quantitative analyses and it's been documented that +/- along with win% is one of those pieces that rely on large sample sizes to be useful and eliminate standard errors.
