Secretly Space Jesus

With the idea that you can make sweeping judgments about someone's ability to draw fouls based on their free throw attempts in the first game of the season? Yes. Sidenote: I'm still confused why people think Hezonja would ever make Oladipo expendable. If anything, I'd say that if Hezonja ends up as good as some people on this board think he will be(and some on this board think he already is, inexplicably), then the person he'll make expendable is Harris, not Oladipo. Plus, I think someone is going to have to start losing minutes to Gordon pretty soon.

You're just precious.

Uh, Cousins shoots substantially worse from that distance than Vooch does. Like, almost 9% worse.

Sharp has it mostly right, and I think he nails Oladipo's performance perfectly: he was between good and spectacular last night at every individual thing except 3pt shooting.

I like the idea that Oladipo is the scapegoat even though he shot better than Payton, Fournier, and Watson, and only slightly worse than Vuc did(and Vuc is a big man). I also really like the idea that if a whopping 2 of Oladipo's missed 3s had not rimmed out(putting his 3pt performance squarely at "league average"), we'd be talking about how spectacular his game was. Also: I know everyone likes his defense, but there's no way you put Dedmon in at the end of the game. Not when they can just foul him immediately if they miss. His defense is above average, but he's just so, so bad on offense. Never seemed to know where to be, and demonstrating all the grace of a flatulent hippo.

The common denominator of players who excelled under Vaughn(at least on offense) was that they were all good ISO scorers.

It's super weird to me that fans will blame Vaughn for some players underachieving last year, but will ignore his effect completely for others.

That's crazy to me.

Wait, are there people who think Beal is better than Oladipo? Besides Wizards homers, I mean. He shoots the 3 better, but that's pretty much it.

Statements like this are where this board loses me completely. Hezonja does a lot of nice things, but he gets lost on defense a lot and his shooting, his calling card going into the draft, had been somewhere between mediocre and bad going into last night's game. I think Hezonja will be a decent role player for us by the All-Star break, and might be even better going forward from there, but the idea that he isn't a raw rookie because he had a nice game last night is silly. Hezonja is going to have some very good games, but he's also going to have games where he shoots 1 for 9 and turns the ball over a bunch. You know: like a rookie.

Yeah, it's worth remembering that he was only recently cleared for full practices, so his feet wouldn't have adjusted to all the jumping and running yet. This isn't that big a deal. If he's still dealing with the same pain on a consistent basis come February, we can talk about it.

The real takeaway on Grantland today is that two different writers described Aaron Gordon as "the NBA's over-excited version of Tigger" and "Training Wheels Shawn Marion" respectively.

Yeah, I'm just not sure who's minutes Hezonja would take at this point. He has been outplayed by Harris, Oladipo and Fournier, and I'm not sure where his minutes are coming from.

I think he's an ok #4 big man.

What's this in reference to?

I had always thought he was a 3.

Well, he was pre-injury. We don't really know how he's going to look healthy again. I suspect he'll be fine, but it's worth keeping in mind.

I don't really see Oladipo and Vucevic as ever being much better than third banana level players on a title team. I think Oladipo can maybe hit 2nd banana level if his FG% improves, which isn't a huge deal if it does or doesn't happen since if Oladipo merely replicates his performance from last year for the next decade, he's a super useful player and a top 7 SG in the league. I'm not nearly as high as Hezonja as some people are, I guess? That's fine, but I've yet to see anything from him that I found super impressive, nor have I seen anything that makes me think he's going to supplant anyone or make anyone expendable at any point in the next few years. And while I was as happy as anyone at Gordon's summer league performance, and I'm interested to see if he can build on it moving forward, I'm not thinking too much of 20 minutes in one preseason game.

Oh, ok. You've been to 2 games. Clearly you know what's best, even when the statistics say the opposite of what you're claiming. Turn Oladipo into a parking lot.

For the record(and in the interest of fair comparisons), Oladipo has put up 17.1pts, 4.1rebs, and 3.5asts per 36 on .512/.429/.833. He's also only averaging 1.48 turnovers per 36 so far in the preseason. So any argument that Oladipo hasn't been ghastly efficient in the preseason this year is an insane one, even with his bad night on Tuesday.

I love posts like this, because they are completely meaningless. "We should trade these players, but maybe not. We should maybe trade these other players instead, but maybe not. These new guys might be great, or maybe they won't be that good. Forget it, Jake; it's Chinatown."

Anytime you can trade your starting shooting guard who put up 17.9/4.2/4.1 last year to make way for a rookie who just put up 16pts, 3.8rebs, and 1.7asts per36 on .414/.316 through 5 preseason games(and plays another position), you basically have to do it.

I can't face palm at this hard enough.

It's also worth remembering that Payton has, like a lot of our starters, been in near constant foul trouble. Also: he's playing against starters while Napier has looked really good against D-league talent.

I just glanced over the replies, I will look into the specifics of what was said tomorrow. I saw something about Rafer, which i for some reason couldn't resist commenting on...no one has been able to successfully contest that Jameer was the better player for us at the time we were speaking of. The common response was to say how well he was doing pre injury which, while encouraging for all at the time, was irrelevant to the original statement that Rafer was the better pg at the time in question. I'm a bit confused by this. What time are you referring to? The time when Jameer was actively injured? Because I don't think anyone is really arguing that Jameer was better than Rafer when Jameer's arm was in a sling. I said plenty of nice things about Jameer and lauded his time with Orlando, it wasn't a witch hunt...he just wasn't the better point guard upon his return-and our team played better without him than with him. To deny that is both lame and blind. Again: what time frame are you talking about? They literally only played on the same team at the same time for one series, and Jameer was playing hurt. Even if you take the prime player, you still would be hard pressed to successfully argue that Jameer was a better point that Rafer. He was a better scorer, sure...better at FT's too, but that's literally it. Don't give me that assist garbage unless you are willing to tell me that John Stockton would still be considered one of the best pg's ever if he had played with Harvey Grant instead of Karl Malone. Jameer's career per36 numbers are better than the per36 numbers of any season of Rafer's career. Rafer didn't spend his prime years in the league either. He entered the league at age 23. Either you don't know what a point guard is supposed to do or you confuse someone who scores 17ppg once in their career with a blip increase in the assist column superior to an all around player who made our team better on the fly. Literally every statistic I can think of disagrees that Alston made the team better than it was with Jameer. Like, literally, I can't think of anything that supports that argument. But I'm happy to see any evidence you have of that. The collective thought on AN has been stewing for probably two full seasons by now-to not recognize the vast number of comments made since then shows that those whom responded either have the memory of a goldfish or they realize that they were the ones throwing around senseless drivel and resort to the tried and true method of parsing words to make an empty point. What does any of that even mean? What point do you think you're making? If only you could apply context evenly it wouldn't make your justifications seem so defensive and shallow. Apply context evenly to what? What are you even talking about, man? Did I say no one had said a single good thing about AN's game? Of course not-then what good does it to mention a time when someone said he had some good post moves? If the general consensus on a player is that he has some positives but more negatives, you're going to see more negatives than positives. That's just how player criticism works. There is so much more weight to the criticisms of AN in this thread and the off season thread alone compared to acknowledgement of his game that if he were a celestial body he would collapse in on himself from the disproportion See above. This hypocrisy is exhausting. That's not hypocrisy. I can say that Andrew Nicholson has a very effective post game while also saying he's probably a fringe rotation player on any team, because he's bad at literally everything else a big man needs to do. I can also say that he has no use on THIS team, because there isn't the roster here to mask the things that he's bad at, which more than overrides any value he has on offense. Those statements aren't contradictory. It's an honest assessment of Andrew Nicholson's value as an NBA player. And to be completely honest that mindset, in addition to the systematic bullying of newer members, are the two biggest factors in what makes this board insufferable at times and a near ghost town. This is ridiculous, and presents a gross lack of understanding of what caused this board's usage to decline. There's a reason this board peaked in popularity the year the team went to the Finals. Not one of you who responded is capable of looking at yourself and seeing your contributions to the problem. I used to be told that I was the problem on a daily basis, and I eventually got annoyed by that enough to stop posting more than a few times a week for the last 2 years. Low and behold, nothing changed. It's almost like blaming every problem this board has, real or imagined, on one person or group of people is completely nonsensical and ignores the complex realities of a given situation. You are in this odd clique that lets you think you are impervious to accountability among other things. I need to step away from this before I have to ban myself. I legitimately want to know who you think is in this clique. Name names. It should be hilarious.