Well, that's an opinion. The statistics say that Matthews is the worst in Drtg of the starters (w/Camby), tied with Batum. Yet, Batum brings an Ortg of 115. Anyhow, I don't want to debate Matthews' impact, other than to say statistically, it seems inflated.
I don't know about a "gotcha." A young, average starter is a good return on the MLE. Not particularly relevant. He wasn't signed with a stated intent of being a player as good as Roy.
batum will need new excuses on why he sucks. although his wifes new pic on twitter may be distracting him. what an ass!
If you recall, he said he'd have the opportunity to start when he signed the offer sheet. He stunk off of the bench; now that he is starting, he is an average SG who has his moments. Not a bad player at all, just not a very good player, either.
Matthews is what he is: an upgrade over Martell Webster. http://bkref.com/tiny/UYR9d He's a better shooter, and more efficient offensively. I think the focus on offense has made him work less on defense; I'm a little underwhelmed by his ability to stop his man. Maybe he was overrated, or maybe Utah was better defensively than the Blazers. And maybe Martell was underrated defensively. Regardless, given his FG%, 3P%, and FT% (as well as his ability to get to the line more), I'm glad to have him filling Roy's shoes instead of Martell.
if we didnt have matthews.... lets just say that we would be more interested in college basketball in march then the blazers.
That's definitely true. While he's streaky, he's a good player and a solid starter. I'm glad to have him around.
This is laughable. You're basically saying, "I don't want to discuss what the statistics mean, once I find a statistic that agrees with my bias". LOL.
I really like Matthews, don't get me wrong, but sometimes he does try to do too much, and it shows. http://www.basketball-reference.com/blog/?p=8827 According to that, Matthews is the 6th biggest "Black hole" SG in the league. Take from it what you will.
Yeah, I just saw that on Blazersedge. Brandon is #9, which I don't think surprises anyone. Matthews definitely needs to learn to look around a bit when he starts making a move to the hole. Once he's heading that direction, even if there are 3 shot blockers in front of him, the thought of passing to somebody else doesn't seem to even enter his mind.
I'm fine with Matthews being a "black hole". Overstatement aside this team has too many players on this roster that aren't aggressive enough on offense and pass up wide open shots for more difficult ones. Matthews otoh isn't afraid to make things happen and the result has been a good season from him.
I agree with that, but he also gets stuffed at the rim a lot. He's doing fine for a 2nd year player, but he'll be even better when he learns not to over-commit and to dish the ball off to avoid getting blocked.
I think the way Mathews is used - him shooting a lot is just fine - he is just not used as a play-maker for others a lot - he sure has some games where you wonder why he shoots as much as he does - but it never seems to be glaringly out of the offense.
I meant that the opinion of Matthews seems inflated when you look at the actual stats. He's been average as an aggregate according to PER, and below average compared in terms of Drtg. Yet, I've seen him called the second best player on the team by at least one poster. Congrats on getting my post completely wrong.
These are not proper individual statistics. If they were, the great Bruce Bowen, during SAS's last championship run (2006-2007) would not have had a DRTG 5 points worse (103 vs. 98) than Manu Ginobili. Manu was not 5 points/100 possessions better than Bowen. The statistics do not matter if they are not properly attributed to an individual. Just for fun I looked at the DRTG on SAS in 2004-5 (another championship year) - and again, Manu's DRTG of 98 was better than Bowen's 102. Went back to 2002-2003 (another championship year) - and again Manu at 98 is significantly better than Bowen (103). If anyone looks at these statistics and claims that Manu was a better defender than Bowen - he is out of his mind. These statistics are not relevant to the discussion - as they are an observation not a root cause. The place where DRTG really makes sense is in comparison to other team-mates to look for outliers. If you see these - you can carefully look at game tape to see if this individual is really tons better or tons worse than his teammates - something that was rather obvious on last year's team where Greg Oden's and Camby's DRTG is significantly lower than the people they play next to - not a real surprise as they were the defensive anchor of the team last year.
