A lot depends upon the others on the team as to whether he gets some time. Novak is a slow footed SF, and that is about the ONLY position he can play and somewhat compete. And he is behind TMac & Battier...and there are not a lot of minutes left over after those 2 get done, usually one of them is on the floor at the SF position, even when Battier goes out, usually someone else comes in ...say Luther and it slides Tmac to the SF postion, then when Tmac goes out he is replaced by Battier.... Novak is the odd man out......but, I think with a shot like his, he will find a spot in the NBA, somewhere between Bullard and Korver/Kapono. DD
Novak has the same lethal weapon as Peja (shootings). I am not surprised he is groomed to be him but Adelman but whether he'll be as good as him is still not known. Have to wait and see.
I find it funny that people are already calling him a waste, or a bust..... The guy made HUGE strides between his rookie year and his 2nd year, and no longer looks completely lost on defense.....well not all the time anyway, and his confidence came back. Players break out in their 3rd and 4th years.....let's see how Steve does this year.......if we bring him back. DD
Don't know that a 2nd rounder can be a bust, most of them don't make it in the league for long. But...HUGE strides...really? The only difference i saw from last year was that he played almost exclusively at the 3 and took the shot when he was comfortable not just whenever it got to his hands. The problem is that it looks like Adleman has helped his game more than he has. I honestly hope he can get better but the problem isn't that he is just below average at certain things. The guy has poor basketball instincts for a college freshman. I'm not sure but didn't he play a big position in school. I think one of his biggest problems is that he doesn't have the perimeter game to go along with his lethal perimeter shot.
Too bad we couldn't send him to Europe for three years. He will still be able to shoot in 3 years and maybe he could develop a a little bit of game as the development league helped him a bit. Right now aside from his shooting when completely wide open or his man goes flying by him, as another poster said, he has to have about the worst game defensively and offensively of anyone in the League. I strongly suspect he is a hopeless case.
The problem I see is that he has not even shown flashes of being a good player down the road. He isn't like most good, young guys that put together a great game or even a great quarter and show you that once they get comfortable with the pro game and get confidence that those skills will be something they bring every game. I know he has scored well in a few games but that was more about what the defense was giving him than it was about him showing growth as a player. I've never seen Novak do anything other than hit open jumpers. Certainly that is a nice skill to have but he hasn't shown any real improvement in any other facets of the game. Nobody is asking him to be a great rebounder or a great defender but if he is a liability in every aspect of the game other than making long, open jumpers then isn't going to last in the league very long and certainly won't be in a winning team's rotation for long.
Just like someone said earlier, he's a slow footed 3 in a 4's body. So what he needs to do is get stronger all over and become a better rebounder and defender. He has to be able to defend guys in th post and rebound a little. His shooting is special, make no bones about it and if he were 6'8 it would be easier to get him time, but he's not. Garrity is a guy of similar skill set, but with the slowness of yao and the none shotblocking ability of our scola or landry. he's going to be pressed for minutes. He's a situational guy to me.
Peja was a very underrated defender. Novak can't even look like he's playing defense. Novak also looks lost in almost every offensive set. He's a spot up shooter(a very good one) and that's all he is. Ok Kuksoo???
OMG, here we go again. Whoever thinks Peja can play any defense at all simply hasn't been watching him all season.
haha. dae. you're crazy. i was just saying peja liek role, not that he'd BE peja. and yeah. i dont' really think peja was that great of a defender. i was just watching some old kings vids and some of the few novak vids, offensively their games are very similar. not saying novak could ever start, but peja really blew up in adelman's system as a catch shoot guy. novak might have the same. there's a reason adelman didn't cut him asap.
Notice How I said was in my original post, meaning his days in Sacramento. I haven't watched much of him in NO but in comparison to Novak, I'm willing to bet he's much better.
No, he's not. He just gets covered up and a lot of his garbage is erased by Chandler. Novak should be McGrady's replacement at the SF spot. Defensively, he should play way off whoever he is defending and just give them the 3 pointer and concentrate on not letting them beat him with the drive. Comparing Peja to Novak, Peja has more end to end speed, slightly more. But it's not significant. And there is no first step quickness difference. Peja is not quick. The difference is Peja has played major minutes in this league and has figured out how to get his shot off when he is overplayed. He's figured out how to play in the league. Novak hasn't been given minutes to figure all of it out. Everybody makes such a huge deal about his defense. And it's bad, I'll grant you that. But there are plenty of players in this league that play bad defense, that either can't play D or they just refuse to play D. So, not being able to play D is not the end of the world, especially in a league that CATERS TO OFFENSIVE PLAYERS. The NBA is an offensive league. Each team routinely score 40+ baskets per game. That's a lot of offensive scoring compared to any other sport. The way to make a player like Novak have positive impact on the game is for him to score a point a minute when he is in there. He's got to be run off multiple screens and get his shot off. And he's got to be given minutes to develop his dribble drive a little bit, at least to use to fake and dribble under, and duck under move to get the shot off. He is too good a shooter. He is a better shooter than Peja. He's as efficient as scorer as Maggette. He's a better shooter than J.R. Smith. When you have a guy that can hit 50% from 3 point range, that's 1.5 points per shot. That's at the top of the NBA as far as offensive efficiency goes. You gotta get him shots. Nobody complains about Maggette's defense. And Maggette's defense is nonexistent. Why? It doesn't matter when you can give a team 1.4-1.6 points per shot. The team just plays around it and all the other players compensate slightly to help if Maggette is matched up against somebody that is torching him. In my opinion, if we do not give Novak 20 minutes per game next season or if we have no intentions of giving him significant minutes backing up McGrady, then we should trade him. We should showcase him in the preseason to get his value as high as possible and then we should trade him. There's no use having a guy like that sitting on the bench as the designated 3 point specialist at the end of the quarter/game when we have a single possession and 3 seconds left on the shot clock. IF...............we do NOTHING this offseason, we should start the season with Novak as the backup to McGrady/Battier at the swing position. And quit fooling around with Luther Head. Novak has earned Head's spot ih the rotation. Neither Head nor BJax is effective enough for us to be playing a small backcourt. We should go big at the swing positions and just run Rafer and Brooks at the point. That much is very clear to me after last season.
if novak can become a player close to that peja in sacramento, ROX will DOMINATE the entire league for many years...
here we go with the old "look at player B's shooting percentages their better than player A so player B must be really good". I don't know if you guys are all die hard baseball fans but stats don't translate directly in this league. Novak, just like many player's would see his fg% drop as he begins to see more minutes and take more shots. It is impressive that shot such a high percentage this season but to say he is a better shooter than Peja is crazy. If Peja got the kind of shots Novak got he might shoot 70% and he had way more skills than Novak his first couple seasons.
I'm not looking at percentages. I'm looking at him playing with 4 nobodies at Marquette and being chased and double and triple teamed constantly, running off 2 and 3 screens and draining the jumper with inches of daylight before multiple defenders dive at him. I'm seeing him upfake the defense off their feet, then take 2 dribbles down the the FT line and shoot layups. I'm seeing him pass to wide open teammates for layups when the entire defense collapsed on him to stop his jump shot. Yeah, I know it is college. So what. He was the offense at Marquette. And every team he went up against, their entire focus was to stop him! At lest some of that does translate to the NBA when you are playing alongside a post threat like Yao/Scola and other players that can finish, especially when he is coming off the bench and going against the opponent's second unit. Novak has better mechanics and a much smoother release and better footwork than Peja. Peja's mechanics has his arm and wrist all twisted up. Novak's problem is JVG tried to make him a PF. He ain't. He's a slow SF, a bigger, just as deadly Jason Kapono. Novak's problem is we really have never ran the offense when he was in the game that was designed to get him the ball coming off screens and pin downs and shoot it. 90% of the time, Novak gets the ball after spacing the perimeter and he is working off what somebody else created. Novak needs to play a J.R. Smith type role on this team. You set screens for him, throw him the rock, and let him operate. This is essentially what we do for McGrady. That's why I say, Novak should be McGrady's designated backup. Give him 15 minutes backing up McGrady, then give him another 10 minutes or so working alongside McGrady giving Shane Battier a breather when the opponent's perimeter force is taking a breather, so Shane can come back fresh and defend Kobe/Manu/etc. Novak's percentages may drop with more minutes, but the dropoff would be negligible. You have to remember, most of the minutes he has gotten, he is out there rushing to get up shots, either at the end of quarters/games, or he is playing out the string with the ragtag bunch, so everything is helter skelter. That can actually hurt a player's shooting percentages. What hurts a player's shooting percentages with additional minutes is fatigue. You tell me what you think he would shoot if he was playing on the offensive end with Yao and some of the starters. I think he would shoot durn near 50% from the 3 point line. And I think he'd shoot close to 55% or so from midrange. His finishing ability around the rim is weak and will always be weak because of his lack of athleticism. But he can shoot from midrange better than half the players in the NBA can finish. Peja's first two years in the league, he shot 38% from the field and 32% from the 3 point line his rookie season and 45% from the field and 37.5% from the 3 poine line, taking almost 9 shots a game. let me ask you, if he was on the Rox shooting those percentages in his rookie season, and playing the kind of D he plays now, much less the kind of D he played as a dumb rookie, do you think Peja would have seen more minutes than Novak has? Nope! However in Sacramento, Peja got minutes and developed. They could see he could shoot the basketball and they gave him the minutes to develop his game. By contrast, Steve has gotten barely 2 shots per game over his first two seasons, the majority of his minutes coming in garbage time running with guys like John Lucas III. Not exactly the ideal setting to get shots and put up some points. Novak has gotten a shot up every 3 minutes of play. In Peja's first two years, he got up a shot almost twice as often, every 1.6 minutes. We can discuss numbers or we can discuss actually gameplay. It don't matter to me. I know what I see out there. I am making a case with numbers AFTER watching Novak play. His defense is way overblown and he was misused by Van Gundy and at the beginning by Adelman. I think Adelman has finally figured out that he has to play at the SF slot or with a smaller lineup at the PF when we are trying to run. I also think it took Adelman an entire season to figure out Luther Head and Bobby Jackson weren't the answer. I figured it out a lot earlier than that. In my opinion, Head shouldn't have been playing any at all and Jackson's minutes should have been limited to about 10 unless he was red hot, which more than not, he was not. That means that Novak should have been getting some minutes. I think if he gets 15-25 minutes playing in the rotation, he will be productive, a lot more productive than Head and Jackson. Remember, those guys can't stop anybody either. We ain't got them out there for defense. They're out there to score the ball. Might as well put in a taller, much more efficient scorer. Give him minutes or trade him. Don't matter to me. I just know we're wasting a roster spot if he ain't playing. If we don't think he can play, we need to trade him, because other teams in the league would like to have him.
Novak can shoot ... and that's about it. If I was Houston, I would not pick up his team option for next season. Probably the slowest-footed SF in the league.
Bobby and Head play alot of minutes because they are our backup guards. Novak can only play SF, that's why he has trouble getting on the court. The only reason for him to be on the court is when either Tmac or Battier is off the court which actually isn't that often. I've only seen highlights of him in college and he just didn't look atheletic or fluid enough to pull off those same moves in the NBA. If you went to Marquette or watched him in college i'm sure you would beg to differ. Peja's offensive skills, atheleticism, and bball IQ are very underrated. He can actually dribble drive past SF's while Novak can't do it to PF's. You may be right about the stuff you've seen in college but all i can go on is what he's done in the league. I don't care if he's the best shooter in the world, if he's terrible at everything else then he isn't much help.
