yes for his career, he's a poor 3pt shooter. but i'm sure you're assuming he's not going to improve anymore. he's only freakin' 24 years old. and oh great, use the best defense in the L as the baseline for how he'll do v. the rest of the league. i mean, having a ron artest on you most of the time while your role is basically a spot up shooter allows you to do so many things? he knew his role in LA and he did it great. now adelman will give him some more "room" to operate so we'll see if he can be better than he has already shown. i've agreed with you that he's not going to be anywhere close to a star or even a 3rd option of a championship team, but he's going to be worth his $5-6 million/year salary. if shane's worth it, he'll be worth it. swift also has no basic fundamentals of basketball and has one of the lowest basketball IQs of mankind. he's clueless out there on the court most of the time, so yes, having athletic gifts would be rendered useless if you don't know how to use them. ariza, however, does. like i said, the triangle offense is unique. everyone plays a role and ariza played his. in adelman's system, it'll be more movement and creativity, which should fit ariza's style even more. shane is a better spot up shooter? who would have thunk that after last year? his great defense saved him. i mean, he shot 34% overall while kobe was roaming around and leaving him time to sniff the coffee, read the spalding label, spin the ball, then shoot. really? defense is the calling card for shane right now (best perimeter defender). ariza is better than him in all other aspects. he doesn't fill a need for the team? at worst, he'll do what shane does, with better offense, but not as good defense. i mean, shane is getting paid SIMILAR MONEY. and ariza is YOUNGER. so it's like having another shane, but to go with the younger core. no, he won't suddenly get sick handles or step back jumper. but nobody is calling for him to be a star, but a star has those attributes. ariza was NEVER known as a spot up shooter before this. in fact, he wasn't known as a shooter at all. suddenly, he's one of the more reliable spot up jumpshooters in the L. sure he played with kobe and gasol, but you make it seem like it's so easy. we have guys here playing with tmac and yao and they can't make an open jumper to save their damn lives, and that includes shane more often than not. ariza will be a valuable player for us in the future, once we do get that star again. hell, he'll flourish playing with tracy if tracy returns healthy. but he can also be a tradeable asset b/c his contract is a good one.
My bad, you're right. I was counting the stats from each team. So it's 5 years. Still, it makes very little difference. I stand by my take that he has done nothing to deserve the amount of money or the length of his contract.
Yeah, these guys expect a replacement for Yao with the MLE. It's nuts. Ghettocheeze said it best. http://bbs.clutchfans.com/showpost.php?p=4625257&postcount=9
Did I? The author says the Rockets made a bad investment. I say it's too soon to tell. He says Ariza is not worth the contract. I say he probably will be.
if you take out the small sample of 2 games in october last year, his 3pt% hovered around 20-25% for 2 months, the got up to around 34-35% for the rest of the year. in the playoffs, he CONSISTENTLY made his open jumpshots to the tune of 47% in the playoffs. if you think that's not "improving," you should put the pipe down. he's one of the more reliable OPEN spot up jumpshooters in the L now. i'm sure you hear the analysts say in the playoffs: AUTOMATIC a lot of the time when ariza shoots his jumpers. shane, well, never mind.
The author says he is in the top 10 soon-to-be overpaid athletes. Ariza has the same contract as Artest, even though Artest has lost a step. Artest's only defense left is fouling the opponent as they blow by him and hoping the ref allows him to do it. You could see it all season. It's more noticeable in the 2nd half, when he is too winded to keep up with his man. The only thing he is good for is 3pt shooting, which is fantastic. However, if they are paying the full MLE for just an aging 3pt shooting fouler that has lost a step, Artest is the overpaid one. Ariza shouldn't be on the list. He's an above average player with an average salary.
I don't know if Go to Guy never sign for the MLE. I don't think he knows to much about sports. He is a perimeter defensive players for years to come an MLE is great price to pay. Is the same that Battier got plus he is a little better upside as an offensive player.
Now for the zombies on this board I have to simply this thing over and over again. Tell me something, 1) How would you best describe Trevor Ariza as a player? a. Scrub b. Average c. Good d. Great Now if your answer is B: AVERAGE. Then please care to explain why he doesn't deserve to be paid the AVERAGE salary of a player in the NBA?
Dave78, I hear what you're saying, but what you have to do is project young players like ariza. The one thing I really like about him is he stepped up in a dire time and came through. That tells me that when or if the rockets ever get into a contender status, they have a guy who will take and make big shots. I think the problems the rockets had in the past was getting a bunch of standstill players. They need guys like ariza,brooks,scola, and guys like that who can move without the ball, run the floor after rebounds,steals,and blocks, and a guy who will finish at the rim. Ariza in his time with La displayed the ability to play off the ball, slash and make useful cuts, and he will defend. He's always been a good defender and that's what you want. MLE money is not too much for a guy with his skill set and age in todays market.
And in that same seven year stretch, Artest has been suspended for a significant portion of the season twice. More deserving indeed.
I think the MLE is the "mean" salary rather than the "median" salary. If so, it would not be true that the MLE means Ariza are is getting the compensation of an "average" player in terms of half of the league making more money than you do. This is because the "mean" is skewed upward by the relatively small number of players on Mega contracts. For instance, Rockets certainly don't have half of their roster making more than $5.8 million a year and they are in the tax territory salary wise already. Neither do most teams, in fact. Not a whole lot of NBA players actually end up getting above MLE deals, actually, since rosters are often filled with a few "stars" and a lot of few rookie-scale players and and guys making the minimum or very low salaries (particularly when you are talking about end of the rotation 9th-15th guys). There are usually 14-15 guys on a team, certainly the 7th or 8th highest paid guys on the team usually don't make MLE (unless you are the Knicks). However, if you exclude still on rookie contracts or guys who are not getting minutes (i.e. whether a guy is paid "average" among players in NBA rotations, or average among players not on rookie scale) then it would likely be true. In any case, $5.8 million for a guy who can give you 30+ minutes of elite defense and generally effective play on a good team is not bad. Like someone has pointed out before, if Morey is happy to pay Battier MLE money, I don't see how he would be unhappy to pay last year's version of Ariza the same.
I preface this by saying that I loved the Ariza signing and think he's definitely worth the contract. But you can't say that an "average" player in the NBA deserves the "average" salary. The NBA salary structure is very bottom-heavy, so the medium salary is much lower than the full MLE. Full MLE players should be above average players, at least based on salary slotting. IMO he should at least be a 4th or 5th best player on a .500 team. Which I feel Ariza is.
Trevor's 6 mil/year outweighs Jermaine O'Neal's 22 mil/year? I swear Ariza is more productive than O'Neal. No?
I agree with you on this. But who is going to be our go to guy this year before tmac returns (assuming he won't return on opening night...I am guessing probably around december to fully return)? brooks, scola, laundry? everyone on this team will be a go to guy, depending on the matchups. The thing with ariza is that i feel he can't create his own shots. Which will really hurt his efficiency. Someone else posted that he is still young and still could develop. My idea of developing someone is a 2-3 year deal, not a five year deal. If, that is if he does not develop, we are stuck with a contract for 5 years. I am hoping that the rocks signed ariza hoping that he will be in a battier/gay type trade. his stocks are high right now from last year, so true contending teams this year might want to trade some young assests from him, just my speculation....lol.
Here's the way I see it. If I'm starting from scratch, with no players on the roster and zero money on the books, then Ariza is definitely worth the money. However, when you consider that $40 million worth of our payroll is out long-term, and we're paying 7 million to a fairly similar in Battier, we might have been better served addressing other positions. Ideally, I'd have rather spent the Ariza money on a center, and the Andersen money on a swingman, specifically a "shooting guard*. That's really my only reservation with the Ariza signing. * Btw, when I say shooting guard, I mean somebody who can actually play as the second most "backcourt" player in the lineup. How much time have Ariza and Battier spent in their careers playing alongside 3 players more "frontcourt" than they are?
Battier had always been the SG when playing with Artest, Harris and Bonzi at SF. Even with T-Mac in the lineup, Battier would be matched up against the opposing team's SG quite often.
Really!? For Mid level money for a midlevel player who is not expected to be our star like the stupid experts keep accusing us of us of expecting out of him? We paid him mid level money and not top dollar. Mid level is not even what most starters make on every single team. If anything he could be underpaid if he does more than he did in LA as a starter. For one because he is young and has many years left and the major sticking point? its not that much money for a starter at all. More LA fan sports writers hating on the Rockets for taking their chance to repeat out the door.
