bqjbxuud…

czlsqgwm…

How one can comment and also justify such an article at the time is very ONE-SIDED.

I’m glad I new nothing of this website during the time this article was put foward in March 2006.

I could imagine how players like Billups and Ben Wallace would’ve been pictured in an article when they were 24 years old in the league.
Or is it the jealousy of $60 million for 6 years that made this article manufactured. Or is Curry just a block in the Hatred of Isiah Thomas making people gather block after block after block to build a Hate PyriMAD…

First I want to state up front that my view here is elastic and evolving. I’m going to get into some ideas that I haven’t fully wrapped my head around and so this is more of a stream of ideas than a formal post.

I started thinking about this awhile ago, but why is it that a player expect to be great get’s more grief than a player expected to suck…that actually does suck.

If we rated all players on a scale of 1-10. It seems to me that if a player is scouted as a 10 and turns out to be a 6 we all call him a bum and talk about why his results aren’t helping the team. But we never knock the guy who was scouted as a 2, becomes a 2, and does almost nothing to positively impact us.

In other words, we don’t blame Rick Brunson for “just being” Rick Brunson, but we destroy Curry for being Curry. What if the problem isn’t with Curry, but with the scouting and projection process that built him up to something he isn’t and will never be? Who’s fault is that?

I guess the counter to that thinking is that if we carried my logic through we would never knock any player because whatever a player is is what he should be. Under that idea no player would ever have incentive to get better and so on. It would also make projecting either impossible or irrelevant.

But I think that what it would do would be to build a proper amount of risk into future investments. It would make a team less likely to overspend on what amounts to a throw of the dice. The team might miss out on Gerald Wallaces’ but it prevent the team from spending 10 mil on Eddy Curry.

My view is that our frustration toward X player should only be as much as we see a regression not a FAILURE to progress to where we think he should. Now maybe that lets players off the hook for coasting and maybe it doesn’t, but it seems to be a less frustrating and more fair way to evaluate these matters.

Why be mad at Eddy Curry. Nobody puts a gun to his head to get better. He didn’t force the knicks to give him a stupid contract. If anything Curry has been “himself” every since his rookie year. His contract was based on OUR belief that he would STOP being himself and become another player during the life of the contract. So let’s look at what he actually is.

The guy can score. Contrary to popular belief it is really tough to find a center in this league with that skill. Since you don’t win games 1-0 SCORING is the primary ability in basketball. In fact the only reason to not fill your team with scorers is because you can’t keep them all happy and it costs too much. So in my view his best asset is the most important in basketball.

Next, he sucks at rebounding. This is a huge problem. How much worse is he than the average rebounder? I don’t know but I’ll let Knickerblogger delve into that one. My HUNCH is that he isn’t much worse than your average starting center. He’s much worse than Shaq, but probably better than Jaron Collins….although who knows if even that’s accurate.

Defense? Tough to evaluate. However based on 100 opposition possessions the team gives up 114 points when hes in and 110 when he isn’t. So lets call him mediocre to bad.

My point here is that he’s an imperfect player who shouldn’t have gotten the money he did. But he isn’t Rick Brunson either and Id rather spend my time talking about Curry vs the average center than Curry vs Shaq. Because at the end of the day Curry was only SUPPOSED to be Shaq because a few idiots from the bulls thought he would be and we paid him like he would be and that isn’t his fault.

I would rather evaluate him for what he is and let the chips fall where they may than talk about why he isn’t Shaq and why he can’t rebound. We know why. He doesn’t have the desire. If that lack of desire was caught when the Bulls were going to draft him nobody would care that he lacked desire. But because THEY didn’t suddenly Curry is the poster boy for sucking.

Maybe Curry is only average and maybe that’s ok. Next time we need to be smarter and not give a huge deal to a guy that has only proven to be mediocre. Then we won’t complain about the mediocrity. We’ll accept it for what it is, just like we accept Rick Brunson for being what HE is.

Where we CAN nail Curry is if he ever regresses. Then the kid gloves come off and the bashing can begin in full. That’s the price you pay for being what you are….you can’t regress or else you will get nailed for it.

Anyhow, I don’t know if I even believe all this, like I put at the top this is just something I started thinking about and I don’t have my ideas fully formed on this yet. But it seems a different way of looking at things and I’m always trying to do that when I can.

Second, as Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in his exchange with Bill Simmons, he’s probably scared of really putting in the effort in case he doesn’t succeed. As Gladwell says, if you don’t try, and fail, you have an excuse. If you try hard, and then fail, that’s very hard to deal with.

So basically what you’re dealing with is a player who, despite all his talent and intimidating prescence, simply does not have the determination or work ethic to become an elite player, nor the passion to become a champion. With a guaranteed contract to boot, its hard to see where Curry is going to get the motivation to become a league-leading player. None of this is to say he can’t improve, but someone or something is going to have to fire a rocket up his ass!

My word was “jeers”, which is all I have right now for the Knicks!

Two issues on the study.

1. Jayson Williams was a rookie who played 500 minutes. Maybe not the best sample to determine what kind of player he would become (Camby as a rookie played 1897 minutes at 22 vs Curry at 1808). Camby’s rates were 10% higher than Curry (whose numbers have dropped since he joined the league). Camby is an unusual player and may have had a harder time finder correct usage and therefore his early numbers reflect usage/positional issues not ability.

2. concerned about selection bias. Did the rate improve because some stiff at 23 wasn’t playing at 27. If you start with 27 year olds, and see how they did at 23.

I don’t think Curry will work hard enough to get significantly better, especially after getting a six year $10 MM per contract. With that said, his rebounding is up a little this year.

I think you state that a bit strongly. The evidence indicates that it’s not likely that Curry will become a strong rebounder or shot blocker, but it doesn’t categorically rule it out. (Personally, I think there is hope for Curry to bump his rebound rate up to around 16 or so instead of the current 14, but I doubt he’ll ever be much of a shotblocker.)

As for the approach used in this article, it’s interesting, but I wonder if there are better ways to approach it than just lumping together every player over 6’10″ at age 23. For instance, on the face of it it seems like the trends might be different for pogostick players like Camby or Gadzuric as opposed to bulldozers like Curry. Likewise, stratifying players by PER might show different trends for different PER levels.