Brooks is awasome man. He has developed quickly. But he still has to work on his turnovers and decision making. He can light it up tho from ne where!
No way, not me and not a bunch of other people. I'll say it again--the guy's just coming off his rookie season. What he needs are minutes so that he can just settle down and play.
Bibby with the Grizzlies before he went to the Kings was a balanced passing/scoring point guard with big assists numbers. With the Kings he didnt become worse of course, but his assists went down and became more a shooter and scorer * Because of the Adelman system * Ya know, other people on the team besides the point guard can be involved passing the ball, too. Chris Paul for all his extremely high usage and high assists numbers, being THE guy to run his team's offense, the Hornets were 13th in the league in team assists last season. To further complicate it, 4 teams who scored less points per game were ranked higher in team assists than the Hornets. Meaning a higher % of those teams' made baskets were assisted. The Hornets had the 3rd best record in the league. You can arguably say the Hornets did MORE than just use Chris Paul's passing magic. -Either they had just enough players creating their own shots, -Chris Paul opened it up for other's to score without receiving a pass (off offensive rebounds, etc) -Chris Paul a lot of times drove it to the hole all by himself coast to coast without needing to pass, one man fast break* * Sometimes it comes down to just if a guy can put the rock through the hole more than the other team can, without killing your own team's offensive flow in the process. Brooks has shown he can get his, and involve the 3 point shooters on the kickouts. Safe enough approach for me. Rafer missing shots really is like another 2 turnovers a game.
i don't see it happen until brooks improves his defense significantly. brooks can be great offensively, but unless he can prove that he'll not get abused by bigger player defensively, he will continue serving as a back-up.
In last season's series against Utah Rafer was abused by Deron Williams over and over. It's not like Brooks is the only player who has problems defending bigger guards. I would say that the question of who's better defensively is still up in the air. Who's better offensively? There's no question that Brooks is a better shooter, that he's better at penetrating into the paint and that that opens up his teammates in ways Rafer can't. Von Waver said it the other night. Brooks is a problem.
I undertand what you say, but the bigger pgs abuse rafer too. Davis,miller,billups,williams all abuse rafer. Hell, they abuse any pg that's not their size for the most part. Tony Parker had trouble with the strong guys then and he still does, but he puts pressure on them because he puts them in retreat mode a lot. His penetration to the hole and like the guy said "one man fast breaks" are what team fear more than him dishing. Terry Porter was more scorer than passer as well as Bibby once he got to Sacramento. The "system", much like the triangle doesn't rely on the traditional pg. With a guy like Tracy,artest, and to a lesser extent barry, that guy can be a scorer. That's why bibby never avg more than 5 asst per in sacramento, but as a team, they were always a high asst team.
Brooks is a nice spark plug to bring off the bench for 10-20 minutes a night. The starting lineup does not need a scorer at the point with mcgrady, artest, yao and scola in that unit. I'm not a big rafer alston fan, but getting ron artest made his job a lot easier. All he has to do is hit three point shots at a decent rate and run the offense which he can do well enough.
DV- I know what ur saying about a "decent" rate, but what is decent for a guy standing butt naked all the time? The Jet used to be around 40%. BJ,Paxson, Fisher and guys like that were always 40% or better. What is Rafer, 35 maybe? When he's hot or on fire he's at 38%. The looks he gets and the chances that are there, that guy has candy in front of him and needs to capitalize. I think from my time watching brooks is on closeouts, players will be a little more hesitant because of his dribble drive. Now what happens, more pockets are opened wider and the defense is slower to respond because once a player gets ft line and lower, he collapses your defense and it also opens up offensive rebounds. That's why a guy like parker kills teams eventhough he's not a good 3pt shooter. That's why even a guy like avery could play well on a championship team because he could always get his feet in the paint. That's a killer for opposing defenses.
That's exactly right. If you make the other guy work his ass off to defend you you're going to have a much easier time handling him on the other end of the floor.
That was inspired leebig. Seriously, you've made some very interesting observations about Brooks/Rafer that I perhaps hadn't weighed correctly.
That's true. Kinda like what Kevin Johnson did for the Suns. He was such a great player because he was quick and added a mid range game to the mix...
I think he is capebale of that. but that will come. i've seen a couple of times guys sag off the screen to stop his dribble penetration and that gives brooks ample opportunity to start using his mid range game. if he starts hitting those shots, damn, he is gonna be awesome.
I'm not going to lie, when they first drafted him, I thought the rox had another jl3 clone. Then I actually started watching his tools, calm demeanor and got my hands on some college film of him and started taking notes. Then when he started getting good minutes and watching how he was blowing by people off the dribble, I really started taking notice. I could see what adelman had seen when he was out a yr and watched the guy play the entire season. Link that up with his play when Alston was hurt, I thought adelman should have kept Jax as the off the bench guy and let brooks start in the playoffs. Once they got artest, I really wanted to trade rafer. The thing is he has special qualities. When a player has special qualities, he can become a special player. Rafer has no special qualities at all. He doesn't even have a good quality. I think people expect him to be a finished product offensively and defensively right now, yet we settle for rafer shooting 3-9 60 nights out the yr and 4-10 the other 20 nights and think that's the way to go. Not only that, the trouble off the floor it seems like every summer. At some time, you just have to turnthe page and move forward. With guys like rafer, we've seen the best of him and we know what it is. Brooks has way moe upside that can add a element to this team that few can compare to. He's more atheletic and has longer arms than his body would suggest and is a b**** off a miss moving forward. If all rafer will do is push it up and hand it to tracy, what good is that?
LOL that's pretty much as biased an assessment on a starter and a bench player as you can get. Preseason talk FTW!
I admire your enthusiasm for Aaron Brooks as I'm a big fan myself, but let's not get carried away here with the comparison. For all his warts, there's few guys that run a team as smoothly as Rafer and make as few mistakes. Rafer is quite the paradox however. Aren't playground point guards known for their ability to penetrate? Rafer Alston at the point guard is like running on 3rd and long. You're playing it safe, you won't see many mistakes, but you're not really getting anywhere unless you're lucky. Aaron Brooks is the hail mary. Huge risks but huge potential rewards. I think on this team, we can afford it off the bench.
I'm going to assume ur new to the board. I didn't nor haven't based this off preseason this year. I based my opinions on what I see. What can rafer do really well? People will say run the team, but tracy does that. People will say pass, but how many penetrating passes does he make? Some will say defend, but this is a team defense that has been good since jvg got here. What about his shooting? Go check and see what a good shooter shoots especially when they get ope looks all the tiime.So once u strip it down,what u have is a poor shooting pg who really plays 2 guard that can't hit a mid range shot to save his life, nor does he shoot from 3 well enough to really be a viable consistent threat. Did I mention he has no upside? This isn't about Brooks being all world, but like I said earlier, the spurs thought enough of parker to get rid of johnson's replacement and start a rookie because they knew all daniels was and would ever be is a backup. Even Daniels the backup is a better player than rafer the starter right now. I wish they would have traded rafer or at the very least, maybe brooks can drop his time to 23 mins a night.
All say AB is not a pure PG. I agree. But I don't have a problem with it. When you look around the league, how many decent pure PGs are there? I remember when Billups and Nash were labelled as "not pure" at the very beginning of their career. So what? AB may be effective under the system of motion offense. He can be our Mike Bibby who's better at shooting than playmaking. If you want playmaker, we have Rafer. If you want to penetrate, we have AB. I don't care who's a better PG if they play as a team.
For those just getting on the Aaron Brooks bandwagon welcome I got blasted earlier in the summer when I compared him to Tony Parker. I want to welcome all of you to the bandwagon.
And you will still be blasted for comparing him to Tony Parker. Tony wasn't as accomplished in his outside J when he first came into the league as Brooks is now, Brooks doesn't drive and finish as well Tony. Brooks was scouted by every NBA team when he got drafted, everybody knew his weaknesses that's why he was drafted so late. Parker was hardly known when he got drafted, Parker was a bona fide steal as the 28th pick. I want Brooks to succeed badly as the next guy, but the comparing to whatever all world PG that everyone does is comical.
Call me crazy but I could see Brooks being very similar to Parker in a few years. His development has been very exciting to watch, and I think he is just going to get better and better.
