22yrs old!! Most of us were still in college at 22yrs old. So my question is how can you define who a person is or to become at that age? Especially since this is his 2nd yr playing that position. Assessing a PG when he is playing with a rookie, two 2nd yr players and one 3rd yr player during a season when EVERYONE knows they are trying to tank is absurd! Yet, he is able to get you 20/6/6 most nights and people are saying he's a 6th man or to trade him. Even worse, there are people saying he should be CUT to make the team better!
He isn't doing this though? He's more like 18/5/6. People saying he should be cut are wrong, I think he has value as a player or in trade. But his lack of efficiency and need to dominate the ball without being efficient with it are problems for him as a starter. It's true he's still young, but he's also not really showing progress. His numbers this season are almost identical to his first year here in 2020. To the point where the differences could just be random variation. It's fine to give young players a chance, but they need to show some improvement from year to year if you want me to believe they have more potential. What he's providing right now is fine, don't get me wrong. I just think in the context of him being ball-dominant, it's not really "starter on a championship team".
Imo it's been a tale of two seasons with him and overall he's taken a tiny step back imo I think he's regressed most on defense . But his offense early on was not great, and that was with us playing Bruno to help him. More of a "2" than a 1 and his processing speed hasn't seemed to tick up I get **** for it , but tate is still the best player on our team ( and that's with him missing half a year ) look at how much faster and decisive tate is with the ball . Kpj is the second best player . He's definitely the best shooter and best offensive player at his peak ... but he's been inconsistent . Hard to evaluate given the youth and relative suckage around him . I give him a B He's learning how to share more , when to "take over" . Still very much a work in progress. But so is the whole roster . Can't be too disappointed nor to excited . If he finishes the season strong I'd say overall he improved, but he's definitely taken a step back on D . Who knows how much Jabari and sengun are to blame . Kmj too . Kmjs dunking prolly helps with offensive pressure, but #1 Gordon was in that spot and #2 tate would help more on D Please play Kpj Tate Tari Jabari Garuba or sengun I would like to see that lineup more and see how much force we can bring on D .
Since Christmas KPJ is shooting 40.3% from 3 with an 18.4/6.5/5.6 line and a TS% of 59.6% BY FAR the best player on the team during that time. You'll notice the irrational hot takes about him are always "eye test" nonsense or simply emotional arguments they can't put any numbers to them because the narrative will fall apart. The cognitive dissonance when it comes to KPJ always gets the usual suspects up in their feelings when you point out how ridiculous their narratives are....deep down, they know, they just can't bring themselves to admit the obvious.
I think your assessment is incorrect! You say he lacks mentality, court vision and passing ability, yet he's had several games with over 10 assist this season and if we had shooters, I'm sure his assist numbers would be higher. A team's offensive ratings are based upon several factors, not just one player. However, if that player is vital to that team, as is KPJ, and he's NOT PLAYING, when KPJ was out 20 games, the team's offensive rating dropped. I'm not seeing what you're seeing
This is cherrypicking the data. #ArbitraryEndPoints stuff. You can't just choose whatever date cutoff makes a player look how you want him to look. His overall numbers in 2020-2021: 16.6 points, 6.3 assists, 3.8 rebounds, 42.5% FG%, 31% 3P%, 31.9 minutes per game His numbers this season: 18.6 points, 5.9 assists, 5.5 rebounds, 43.7% FG%, 35% 3P%, 33.9 minutes per game He may have made minor improvements on his three point shooting and rebounding, but they're almost within the margin for error in terms of random season-to-season variance. He's treading water in every other category. It does seem like he's improved slightly as an outside shooter to me, and the data backs that up. That's good. But I'm not seeing enough progress in other areas to think his ceiling is much higher than what we've seen overall this season.
I thought he clearly looked like our best player earlier in the season. We played well and kept the games close but our g league bench and rookies were not playing that well I just need to see him playing to win with real veterans and goals of reaching the play in. Might be to late though with Henderson and Harden rumors Id do everything to keep him though. Never know if a injury could happen to Henderson or Green. He’s great insurance I remember watching his highlights on the vipers with us. To me he’s like my first born son of the rebuild so I want it to work out. Kid can hoop I would rather draft a sizable sharp shooter like Miller over Henderson and run it back with KPJ one more time
Ball dominance stems from having to score when no one else can. When the ball is in your hands and your teammates are not scoring it becomes PG's responsibility to make it happen. Who else on this team was scoring consistently?
That's a really shallow way of looking at things and you completely ignore efficiency....and the fact that he only played 26 games in 2020-2021, he started that season for the Rockets down in RGV because they wanted to convert him to a PG. Another thing, it's not really "cherry picking" when I'm giving you a wide variety of stats during a certain time frame. We know he started the season out poorly, as did literally every player on the Rockets, but the reason I show his number since Christmas is to show just how much better he's been since that point. It's the same reason I point out that Jabari Smith shot 29% from 3 from the start of the season till 8 games ago and has shot 47% since. The drastic turnaround is noteworthy.
Jalen can score, just not efficiently. Give him 20 shots and he'll give you 20 points pretty consistently.
That’s what I’m saying. I don’t blame him. If im watching shooters brick shots all season, Bari & Tari air balling layups and close shots, I’d just go try to do it my damn self too KPJ fighting for his starting spot to not get replaced by Henderson in the draft on a team doing everything they can to sandbag their record. I honestly don’t blame him trying to play hero ball with how bad teammates were playing earlier in the season
The drastic turnaround is a lot more noteworthy when you're talking about a rookie whose MO in college was as a sharpshooter (meaning Jabari). It's a guy returning to what he was already expected to be. It's less important in KPJ's case since you have a large NBA sample to look at with the player and he's in his fourth year in the league. Could just be a hot streak. Also how did I ignore efficiency? I included both field goal percentages, yeah? I guess I did leave out the turnovers, which were 3.5 in 2020-2021 and 3.3 this year, so extremely similar.
I think you misunderstood what I said. I said 20/6/6 on MOST NIGHTS but If he's avg 18/5/6, that's damn good on a team with no 3pt shooters.
Not just you but there are many others as well that micro analyze KPJ and one way they do it is through efficiency. No other player's efficiency is more analyze as his on this team. To me there are so many other factors that determines a players efficiency numbers, the main one being the OTHER PLAYERS on his team. Same with any other player; LeBron, Jokic, Harden, Curry, etc. You're only as good as your teammates, no matter how good you are. Dont put too much into efficiency
So one of y'all is accusing me of ignoring efficiency (which I didn't) and one is saying I read too much into it. Okay. Seems like a cop-out to say "he's on a bad team that's why he's inefficient", by the way. He misses the open man, dribbles out the clock, and takes bad shots multiple times every game. You know who else was a combo guard on a bad team at age 22? SGA over in OKC. And he managed to score significantly more points on fewer shots and fewer turnovers than KPJ has this year. ...now I'm sure you're going to come up with some excuse about how OKC had better shooters or something because the goalposts must always move and it cannot be admitted that KPJ is not the future of the point guard position in Houston, and is, at best, a good bench player on a contending team (which isn't even a bad thing to be!).
Well thanks, I really do intend to do about one a week on every player that matters going into the offseason. I think it's fun to talk about but I also want to come back in like 3-4 years and see how wrong my takes are lol... This offseason is pretty pivotal. I guess by May 16 we'll have a little more clarity on the draft but we're going to have a good laugh in a couple years when we win the 2027 chip over all these outlandish projections about guys who aren't on the team anymore! The bolded point you made above is spot on. The investment in Jalen is too great to ignore and the Rockets are going to build around him, do everything they can to make sure he succeeds. Drafting Henderson certainly would improve the team. What to do about Porter then? And don't say he starts over Jalen because that'll never ever happen and you know it. Harden was a lot better than Porter too. This is revisionist history, the baby-Harden thing was as rampant in the beginning as the baby-Jokic thing is with Sengun this season. Calling Jalen a Kobe clone... calling Garuba Draymond Green. I swear I remember some people comparing Tari to Kawhi. Why are we like this? Sounds like the young role players are leading the team to wins.
Well, the most obvious would be KPJ moving to the 3 since he has that versatility if you don't plan to move Green to a 6th man role.