Yeah, I remember last year when Roy started off, looking a step slow and his game was off a bit. But he got much better as the season wore on. I'm hoping that Roy can do it again this year. Hopefully his knees will be okay enough for him to raise his level of play.
That was before he had surgery to remove the rest of his meniscus. This isn't the same as last year because Roy is fresh off another knee surgery.
Good point. Last year, he had one healthy knee during that time. Now he has none. Aye! So depressing.
I hate to say it but I believe Roy is done, I think he will keep trying to come back and modify his game, but I don't think it will matter. Folks he wasn't doing much when he had to leave the game last night. If he can't do that he can't even really play basketball. All he did was dribble through the middle, and didn't even jump. That is game over. So unless Paul Allen has him shipped to China for stem cell therapy to rebuild his knee's, we are going to be a team with a high salary and lacking talent for the next several years unless we are fortunate enough he takes a medical retirement and we can get him off the books.
This is a brilliant example of why the "naked eye" test is invariable better than statistics. Everyone can see that Roy is struggling to beat defenders off the dribble and can't finish at the rim like he used to. Basically, he's been relegated to a jump shooter. (Fortunately, he's been knocking them down at a good clip.) If the stats don't line up cleanly with that plain-as-day observation, then they're misleading at best.
The TV crew never caught it, but I saw Roy come up gimpy a few plays earlier at the other end of the court. I'm pretty sure the nothingness that led to him leaving the game didn't fully capture whatever happened.
I'll just leave this here... ;-) [video=youtube;etSJam5VgH8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etSJam5VgH8&feature=related[/video]
The best part of that video is Jerryd's face. Everyone else is happy or excited and he just looks so confused.
Oh my god, I didn't even notice that! ANd then he's looking up at the monitor as though it couldn't possibly have happened! lol...!
Possibly. It's just another view (since the "he looks terrible" view is already out there and well-discussed)...not necessarily the right one. Human observation has its own flaws, especially among those with an emotional investment (like those of us). Humans don't tend to be good at recording in their mind every instance of something (like every Roy possession) and putting them together in an objective view...there's a tendency to call to mind mostly the instances that confirm the narrative they already believe. Fans who view a baseball hitter as clutch tend to better remember his successes in key moments and not so much his failures, for example. I'm not necessarily saying that the observational viewpoint is wrong, but his production suggests that he's still finding ways to score as much and at similar efficiency. He's rebounding pretty well still. These are statistical facts. What isn't a fact and may not even be true at all is that it means he's still quite athletic. He may not be...but he's still finding ways to approximate his old production--except in one way: assists. Considering that he has admitted trying to play off the ball more, that may explain some of the drop in assists. As I said in my original post, it may also be an inability to collapse defenses with slashing. Even if his elite athleticism is gone, though, that comforts me that he's finding new ways to be effective. And this is when the situation is "new" for him. As he gets used to his changed athleticism, he may become even more effective in adapting his game.
There's just no way he retires. It's his first major contract, and he's going to want to secure his future.
