The guy is an upgrade over Bogans, no doubt. The problem is he's not enough to put us over the top. He has a career PER of 12. He's been on three teams in three years. That has to tell you something.
I think the people who favor Lee acknowledge he's not a special player. But rather, he makes sense because he's just the right type of player, and so his effect would be much greater than the sum of his individual abilities. Sort of like Bruce Bowen on the Spurs.
Bowen was a 30+ MPG player, and 1st or 2nd team all nba defense 8 times. He also shot .393 from 3pt for his career and averaged 8 PPG.
I hear this "over the top" line a lot. Of course, it's subjective and getting over the top gets harder to judge when you start trading players who helped you get just below the top. PER doesn't really help with defense which is one of Lee's strong suits. He's a better defender than Morrow (12.1PER last season...same as Lee) or Mayo (12.6PER last season). I'm sure that Lee being traded each season tells us something...or several things. One is that he's not a stud...you seldom trade young studs. However, he hasn't been traded for non-starters and he wasn't filler. He's a good player on a value contract. Let's face it, there's a problem with every SG in the discussion...weak defense, low efficiency, uncoachable, would cost us key players, etc.
I know Bowen was a very good defender. I wasn't trying to argue that he wasn't. My point was that he was a role-player who found himself in the right spot on the Spurs, who were well suited to benefit from his strengths and could hide his weaknesses. Obviously Courtney Lee is a little different, but I think the same point applies. His game isn't as two sided as Bowen, but we don't need that from our SG. We need a guy who's just good enough at most things to take the load off our better players, and he fits the bill. Maybe a better comparison would've been Derek Fisher. When he was playing for the Kobe-Shaq Lakers he had a PER in the 12ish range, played 20-something minutes a game, but everyone seemed to agree he was an important player for them, even though he didn't excel at anything. I'm also not sure what to make of the offensive statistics you cited. A .393% form 3-pt land is pretty good. But it's also the only thing he had to do on offense. And most of them were wide open, courtesy of Tim Duncan and Tony Parker. The only thing I can gather from someone with a career average of 8 ppg is that that someone must not be very good at offense, but I don't think that's the point you were trying to make. And as a side note, after taking a closer look at Bowen's career.....I'm not sure there's ever been a worse offensive wing player who had as much longevity as him. His career PER was 8.1 (Bogans' is 9.9, in case you were wondering), and his career FT% is .575. Both remarkably terrible. It's a testament to how good his defense was. He also didn't make it in the league until he was 25, and didn't really get any traction with a team until he was 30. And then he blossomed into an All-NBA defender. Remarkable career. I wonder what his story is.
"Over the top" is comparing the Bulls last season and organization to a deadly sea accident that killed more than a thousand people.
Nice post, Rosenthall. The question is can we even get someone as good as Lee without losing too much of our front court strength?
Ben Wallace had the same quality as Bowen. Rare and superior defense, and enough offense or rebounds, etc. to warrant staying on the floor. As for Lee, I really don't expect more from him than we got from Brewer in the ECF, including the 3pt shots. It wasn't enough, hence not over the top.
Over the top is beating the Heat, and ultimately the Mavs. Rearranging the deck chairs means running into the iceberg known as the Heat, and losing again.
