Durant traded to Houston for Green, Brooks, #10 pick, and multiple 2nd rounders

Amen and FVV are better than Jalen Green.

 

Could be as simple as knowing that when the main shot-taker off the court, you're expected to take more shots to make up for it.

 

It does seem that KD has become increasingly more toxic as he's gotten older. We'll see how it plays out.

 

The lower points production is not surprising. You don't get as many shots playing with a high volume shooter like Jalen Green, especially in Jabari's role. But the efficiency parts ...

I guess the narrative that Jalen's "gravity" helps our offense is overblown.

 

Be ready. Him and his stans are coming.

 

That's the thing, Jalen's rim pressure for us was kind of overblown. He had the quickness and hops that you would envision him having good rim pressure, but the reality is that his actual % of shots at the rim was fairly low for his physical archetype. If you look at guys like D-Wade or Russell Westbrook, they were getting to the rim more than 50% more often during their 20s than Jalen did the last three years. The only season where Jalen even got above 25% of his attempts 0-3ft from the basket was his rookie season. Since then, his shooting splits (20.3% of shots 0-3ft) have actually been more in line with a young Steph Curry than with a top rim attacking guard.

 

Good thoughts...I'll try to research later when I'm not busy here at work to see who Jabari mostly played with in Non Jalen lineups. But tbh, it may not matter who else he played with and just simply have more to do with Jalen not being out there. I think someone else posted that everyone saw a dip in their numbers when Jalen was on the court.

Jalen was fairly ball dominant...but he wasn't really exceptional in any area...shooting, passing, finishing...

 

I think it's clear he totally worked on and tried the wrong things for the attributes he actually has. He should've played more like Maxey, blowing by people for easy layups. Instead he stayed trying to do stepback 3's, off balance fadeaways and doing everything but leveraging the natural gifts he had when driving. Imagine if you had a player like Tate and gave him Jalen's athleticism? He'd probably be a top 10 player tbh.

 

Yes. And I suspect the underlying problem is that Jalen wants to play what he perceives as a beautiful and graceful game, gliding to the rim or swishing stepbacks. He doesn't want contact. It's striking how easily he's cowed (given his advantages in a confrontation) by a defender trying to block his way.

The #1 thing Jalen could do to achieve his potential as a freak athlete is to accept and seek out the contact, so if he doesn't get the bucket he gets the free throws.

Maybe getting traded will spark him to take that on. I did see him get more serious about defense in his time here. But my worry about him is that aversion to contact might just be fundamentally to his personality. And maybe that's why the Rockets began looking to trade him. Maybe they reached the conclusion that he just wasn't going to change.

 

First, Jalen et al had to change into NBA players, not unformed talents. Alpi did it.
Second, Jalen et al had to change to meet new staffs’ realities. Jalen didn’t.

IMO JG4 is an upper tier basketball talent who improved mightily under Ime and company; but just isn’t very good at winning basketball.

Poor Book. He only got a hunnert and fitty mil to be next in line to take our fella, oops his fella, to raise.

 

Yeah we can say it, he p*****s out like a mother****er. Ja is nowhere near as tall as Jalen and also built like a twig and he just goes over/through people because he's got the balls to do it. Jalen's actually so athletic that he could probably jump over the majority of the people who'd guard him at the perimeter, he'd just rather try a circus shot then to either go past them too quickly for them to react or over their heads because almost nobody can genuinely jump with him, and one of the people who can used to be his teammate. Looking back I'm not sure I've really seen somebody at that level of natural gift who seemingly hasn't actually focused on using a single one of his natural advantages in designing his game. It's ****ing weird tbh.

 

An absolutely terrifying post y'all.