I never understood this "You have to be ready NOW!" mindset that some folks have about top picks and even first round picks. Players get drafted early on for all sorts of reasons and the same applies for the top picks. You draft someone in the top 3 because you think they will become a franchise player or at least a star. There is no timeframe on that.
It's only an issue due to how the player was sold. If he was sold as an incredibly raw prospect that will take several years to develop.....and his playing time reflected that, I don't think anyone would be as critical. Unfortunately he was sold as the most NBA ready prospect and the next coming of MJ/Kobe....someone who will win the ROY and be the next NBA great and future HOFer. When a player is sold like that and they come out as the worst rookie in the class according to several metrics, it causes concern.
It causes concern because it means the management team that picked Green was wrong about their assessment. Go back to the introduction press conference, Stone tells you why they picked Green, it was because someone with his combination of athleticism and shooting ability is rare, you usually get one or the other, that was their entire rationale. In reality, they got suckered by a 15 game sample size in which he went on a 5 game hot shooting stretch. Green was a 28% 3pt shooter throughout 4 years of highschool, he is a 31% 3pt shooter now, there is no surprise. It is incredible that a front office that pioneered analytics in basketball is now in charge by an idiot that got fooled by a 15 game sample. As it turns out, Green is not some unicorn combo of athleticism and shooting, he is the classic Stromile Swift jump high athlete that lacks any semblance of basketball skill. Now we can hope and pray that he improves to become a decent basketball player still, but its not too early to say that the entire stated premise of why he was drafted where he was has already been proven wrong.
Jalen Green and his agent sold himself as that, and the idiotic Rockets management and some gullible fans bought it hook, line and sinker. They thought putting up mediocre stats in the g league was supposed to mean something because he was playing against “grown men professionals”. This is the same league that Daishen Nix is now putting up far better numbers than Green ever did. Are people really still so blind as to not see that the entire premise why he got drafted was a lie? Y’all got scammed.
The top US superstars were ready from Day 1... superstars from Greece, Serbia etc took longer..... I am okay with just an all-star, just saying.
When you draft someone like Alexsej Pokusevski you know going in that it is all about upside and in the short term you are getting a bad basketball player. When Jalen Green was drafted he was one of the front runners for ROY odds and everyone was saying how ready he was due to playing professionally for a year against grown men in the g league. Are we really going to lie and completely reverse the narrative now? What kind of Russian propaganda is this? Dude is much worse than anyone could have imagined, including those who were down on him from the beginning like me.
CF are fanatical when it comes to potential scoring leaders. And many were same posters who criticized ad nauseum one of the most prolific scorers in history of NBA. CF needs to learn from history and stop pushing for Banchero in next draft. I'd take the 2 way players with unicorn upside EVERY TIME.
The "he's playing against grown men" narrative was crafted by the fans and media. I'm sure the front office did their due diligence on him and worked with him privately. If the Jalen Green we saw right before the break is the Jalen Green we see for the rest of the season, what would you think of him then?
It depends on what you mean when you say "right before the break", if you mean the month of games before the break, he was actually worse than he has been overall this year. How small do we have to make the sample to make it appear as if Jalen Green is a player that should be on the court? 8 games? 4 games? To answer the hypothetical, if Jalen Green manages to be every night the player we've seen in the fluke handful of decent games he's played this season, then he's back in the conversation as one of the top 10 rookies in this class. Would he be worth the #2 pick? No, but it wouldn't be quite as embarrassing that they wasted that pick on him. Will that happen? Almost certainly not, but it's fun to dream.
Maybe though I'm less sure of that. His sophomore slump had more to do with his lack of a jumper than substance abuse imo. The Kings would eventually move Tyreke to SF and soon realized he simply wasn't very good when he didn't have the ball in his hands full time. Reke would then go on to NO, but dealt with injury issues during his stay there. By the time he was traded back to the Kings he was already almost out of the league. Next he's off the to Grizzlies and shows up with a jumpshot after all these years and is made to play PG again. Not surprisingly this is his best year in the league since his rookie debut. Shortly thereafter he's moved to Indiana where he performed well in the playoffs before being banned for drugs.
8 games. Last 8 games I believe his ts% is 60+%. Remember for ts% anything above 60% is considered elite efficiency. So if he maitains 60% ts while averaging 17 ppg for the rest of the season. So there is your defined constraint so there isn't ambiguity. So what if he plays like that the rest of the season? 17 ppg on 60% ts.
That's what I thought, we needed a super small sample so that one or two decent games would make it appear as if he was doing well. Like I said, if he continually plays like the handful of fluke decent performances, he might be a break even player which would put him in the top 10 rookies. He was sold as a one way player, if he pulls it off, he'd finally be that one way player.
Let me check back on your post history to see if you made any comments about Jalen Green and whether he's a failure after his first 8 games.of the season. Btw 8 games for Green is 20% of his NBA career. You are willing to make claims about him being the next Corey Brewer over a smaller percentage of games of his NBA career. So ya for a rookie, a trend of 8 games is enough for fans to think "maybe he can sustain this for the future". Because that's the nature of someone who played 40 something games for their entire NBA career.
Lol I made my stances clear on Harden plenty. I said he's a top 25 player of all time. His play style was just not eye pleasing in his last couple of years here and it effected him in the playoffs due to limiting where he can score from. The odds of Jalen Green sniffing Harden's bootstraps are slim. I just find his game more exciting if he reaches his potential but I have lower expectations for him than Harden.
