Gee my math says 18th out of 30 is below average seeing as how 15 would be average. Did u study the new math? So playing 26 minutes against Portland is quite a bit below average. He wasn't hurt and he was playing well - 60% shooting and 67% 3 pt shooting. So what's up with that?
The point that you constantly miss is that it doesn't matter since the Rockets are playing well. If the Rockets won the championship this year would you care if Lin stayed on the bench the entire time?
You "assume" too much. What we know is that he was still recovering from injury last summer. If anything, he was probably working on rehabbing, not conditioning. He wasn't even fully recovered until this December, which is evidenced by his weaker explosiveness at the season's start. How could his knee be conditioned to the trauma of starter minutes, when it wasn't even fully recovered? And quoting McHale about Lin being in great shape is laughable. They are just making random harmless comments to the media. What do you expect them to say - "Oh yes, our PG is still working out his injury, so other coaches, please take note, his drives will be weaker so you don't need to sag off as much. Players, you should try to turn him on his left because he is still slow defending in that direction due to his weak knee. And if you are a dirty player, please don't hit his knee too hard because he may reinjure himself. Oh, and companies, you may not want to sign those big advertising contracts because our doctors put a 30% chance he injures himself with heavy minutes before seasons end. And Lin fans, he may be disappointing, so please don't tune in and boost Houston ratings." Seriously, any competent professional just shuts up and makes bland, useless comments to the media.
Amen to this. Though i love watching lin play. Hey a win is a win. I have no doubt this team needs lin to win. He may not be the superstar, buy harden alone with beverley or td can not make it. So, lin's pt is ok. You of little faith on lin. Relax, lin will always be there when wins are needed.
Yeah Bobby u right. Disrespecting your starting PG doesn't matter as long as u win. Builds confidence for the future.
So giving him as many minutes as Tony Parker and nearly as many as Chris Paul is disrespecting him? Got it. I love that one minute people cry that Lin isn't getting "enough" minutes and then the next cry that Harden is being run into the ground because he's getting slightly over 5 more minutes a game....
Not talking about averages Bobby - quit twisting my words. Talking about when he plays below average minutes even when playing well - like against Portland.
Cuz I'm bored, I'm gonna reply to you. I agree Lin was a bit misused before, but that was just McHale being a poor coach. He (or his staff) also misused Asik at critical points in the past. Or what about when comedic-relief Aldrich gets major minutes? Harden also has gotten way too many minutes in a few blowout games, risking injury. The poor substitutions are not particularly Lin-specific. 26 minutes against Portland was low, but they were never losing for the entire game, and it was a good chance to get practice in for Beverly, especially with TD injured. Beverly needs a chance to develop chemistry with the team, and coaches need to see how he plays. The offense can get a little stagnant at times without Lin, which makes developing the backup PG position important. Finally, Lin's mpg are not abnormal for a starting PG. The use of stats on this site, while commendable in effort, is incompetent, to say the least. Lin has 32.8 mpg. I assume the top 30 mpg listed by PG are all starter for the 30 teams (maybe a sixth man in there, didn't bother to check). For the top 30 PGs by mpg, this gives an mean value of 33.4 mpg with a standard deviation of 3.30. I entered these values in manually into some crappy website, because I don't have Excel on this computer, so I may have screwed up. But anyways, continuing, this means that the difference between Lin and the mean value is 0.6 mpg. Dividing this by the standard deviation, we get the Z-score as 0.18. Converting to that to a p-value, we get 0.86. The simplest interpretation, while not rigorous, is that there is an 86% probability that Lin is getting average minutes, and the difference is entirely due to chance. In other words, there is nothing unusual about Lin's mpg. It is, statistically, what you expect for average starter minutes. As a general rule of thumb, you would want at least one standard deviation away to claim some statistical significance. So where does that leave us? 33.4 + 3.3 = 36.9 mpg Who is getting 36.9 mpg or more? There are only 5 PGs in the league getting that many minutes. Lin is not a top 5 PG yet, sorry.
Again, and yet his rebuilding team that is the youngest team in the league with the smallest payroll is on pace to make the playoffs....
I don't know Bobby - random fan says he's a poor coach and his math is so good I guess I'll just have to side with him.
One can only hope that Steal and Deal is not representative of Lin only fans. So Mchale cut Lin, resigned him to a bigger contract next season, then only play Lin at an nonoptimal rate at the risk of losing his own job to prove a point that he was right in cutting Lin in the first place? This is Linsanity minus the "L". /Popcorn
If that's the explanation then it's a good coaching move and egg on my face. That would be good to know we don't have a biases or incompetent coach. Still this has been going on all season and not with just Lin but Asik as well.
The reason might be this or something else. I am sure it is not a case of hidden agenda on McHale's part though as he sucks at managing the minutes for all the players on this team.
Lowry was benched in favor of JLIII today even though he was playing very well. I guess his coach doesn't like him either. Oh wait, or it could be that his backup was doing a decent job.
