LMAO, he's answering this because a reporter asked him about it. As for why Felton over Lin, he already said they knew each other back in high school or whatever. What was he supposed to do, take a dump on his high school buddy for someone he doesn't know? Plus, his comments aren't that bad as well. Sure Lin outplayed him last year, but prior to that Lin didn't have a contract while Felton was at least a rotation player. Its on Lin to prove everyone wrong, that he wasn't just a flash in the pan.
roslolian, i'm jealous of your ability to be in a great mood all the time, you lmao in every post... :grin:
I don't think he said anything remarkably rude or anything. Just that Felton is more proven than Lin, which is true. I still think Deron Williams is one of the most dour d-bags in the league though.
Dragic's 25 starts prove that he can play, but Lin's 25 starts are called 'unproven,' and even a fluke. This shows that double standards continue to be applied to Lin.
I'm not comparing Lin to Dragic, though. I actually think Lin is better than Dragic, though most Rockets fans wouldn't agree with me. Felton is more "proven" -- he's been a starter for a long time. I think he's trash, but that's just my opinion.
I think Dragic is an excellent PG. My point has nothing to do with which PG is better. I'm simply pointing out the implicit standard that DWill and many others use to separate proven players from the 'unproven' Lin. In the case of Felton, the best stretch that he had was no longer than 30 games -- it is basically the same sample size as Lin's. (Meanwhile the other, subpar stretches of Felton's career are conveniently ignored in order to isolate one particular stretch as representing the 'real' Felton.) This sample size is considered enough to show that Felton and Dragic are proven, but in Lin's case the very same sample size is somehow not enough. What's more, Lin's 25 games are sometimes even dismissed as a total fluke. See what I'm getting at? When people readily accept the notion that Lin is 'unproven,' it's actually a subtle way of applying a double standard. This is I think what Lin was talking about when he said in the GQ interview: "I'm going to have to play well for a longer period of time for certain people to believe it because I'm Asian. And that's just the reality of it."
he barely shot 40% last year and his defense has looked crappy in NJ without Sloan to help him out. he's falling off.
I totally get what you're saying, but I think it has to do with Lin's question-mark status. Was Linsanity his absolute ceiling? What is his floor? Over a full season, what will he look like, consistently? Felton and Dragic have played longer in the NBA, so I guess people feel they have a sense of their ceiling and floor. Lin is polarizing because of his "small sample size" and because of his hype -- you can dismiss him as a fluke, or you can love him for his upside, or you can just say he's "average" (like a lot of people do, who prefer to hedge their bets). I'm a big Lin fan, but I think we won't see his true potential for a few years yet. By the way, I think Deron is jealous of Lin. Not for basketball reasons, but for his popularity, hype, and media exposure. Deron has never received as much, despite his max contract and top 5 PG status.
DWill and Felton go way back. He's just sticking up for his friend which is what friends should do. Can't fault him for that. It's not a typical PR-managed comment, which we should probably welcome. It's certainly more interesting than the emptiness of boilerplate. To me, the salient point is not who DWill says is better but the pervasiveness of 'unproven' as a talking point.
You are now simply trashing Felton. There's a reason why Felton got 7-8 mil a year in New York in 2010. He earned it in Charlotte. Yes, his offensive stats were better in NY because D'Antoni system is just so much more point guard-friendly than Larry Brown's. But Felton was a good player for years, and anyone who bothered to watch Charlotte knew it. He was a good defender, good shooter, good floor general. Felton was horrible last year in Portland. But overall, he's an antithesis of a one hit wonder. He was Lowry-level point guard for many years. Now I don't know if Deron is a racist or not. But misconstruing facts and trashing Felton isn't a way to see it.
@ DonatasFanboy I don't know if you are misunderstanding me or deliberately misconstruing what I said. It's a simple point regarding Dragic. The sample size in which he shined was also roughly 25 games as a starter, and before last season his PER never exceeded 13. Yet it is unquestioned that this sample size is indicative of his actual skill, and it never comes up that sample size is an issue. That was my original point, which for whatever reason, you chose to ignore in order to put a different emphasis on what I said. As for Felton, I did not dismiss his entire career. It's a question of what 'proven' means. If DWill's entire point is that Felton has been in he league longer and started more games, then it's a completely meaningless statement isn't it? Sure, Felton has started more games. It takes no insight to say that. If the claim is that Felton is better than Lin, which is what DWill said, then the best stretch in which Felton's numbers come close is a small stretch that is no longer than Lin's. For that same sample size, Lin is 'unproven' but Felton is proven. If the sample size is too small, then how can they even be compared such that DWill can conclude that one is better? The whole position is self contradictory. (The sample size issue is even more absurd when Felton's career is cherry picked to ignore his season last year.) To say that Lin didn't play enough in order for us to be able to evaluate him properly, and also say that we know enough about Lin to conclude that Felton is better -- that's having it both ways. What is that if not a double standard? All the more egregious since Lin's numbers in 25 games were better than Felton ever had in his entire career, however you do the splits. As for Lin's GQ comment, I was not applying it specifically to DWill to suggest that his comment was racially motivated. (I get the feeling you're just trying to argue with me, cuz you're putting words in my mouth.) Rather, I was pointing to the general phenomenon in which there is a double standard applied to Lin. Eg, 25 games is not enough to say he is good, but 1 Miami game is enough to show he is bad. There is a consistent double standard regarding what counts as a legitimate sample size in evaluating Lin. There is a very unusual cultural phenomenon surrounding Lin that is immensely interesting from a sociological point of view. If you don't see that, then I doubt I'll convince you otherwise.
Deron Williams considered Gerald Wallace over a lottery pick. He's not exactly known for being good at evaluating talent. And I'm pretty sure he and Felton are friends.
you'll have to explain your argument better then, i'm trying to make sense of it but i can't. DWill said that Felton is better than Lin because -- while Lin played like an All Star for a stretch -- Felton is more proven. Now you COULD argue that proven doesn't mean better, and I'll agree. But i see multiple posts of you arguing that Felton is another '30 good games' player, and you compared him to Dragic or Lin. Which, as I said, made no sense. If that's not what you meant, then please explain. But if that's what you mean, then you are simply wrong. Felton's career is incomparable to Dragic. Dragic broke out last year. Felton was a legit above average starting point guard before his New York stint. He earned his 7-8 mil annual salary before that stint. I'm not even sure Felton's NY stretch was anything special. He played at a much higher pace (D'Antoni thing), was allowed to take more 3s (D'Antoni thing) and played more minutes (D'Antoni thing). Larry Brown has always been an antithesis of D'Antoni. Felton went from a slow grinding team that was using 92.8 possessions per game, one of the slowest in the league. To the Knicks that were using 98.1 possessions per game. He went from using 19.2% of those possessions to using 22.6% of them in a more chaotic, point guard-reliant system. If you adjust for pace and freedom factors, his NY stats would look more like 12.8 points, 6.8 assists and 1.4 steals per 36 minutes. Comparable to his 13.2, 6.1, 1.7 the year before in Charlotte. Yes, he got some fanfare because he played in NY and his raw stats were bigger. But what your '30 good games' claim is wrong. Felton has basically been the same player since the day he was drafted. His certain stats would go up and down, his defense improved, but overall he was doing the same things for years --- until he got fat during the lockout. Now, you downplayed Felton's pre-Portland career and finished it with Lin's "I have to prove myself more to certain people because I'm an Asian" quote. Maybe you didn't mean to make it sound like a racial justification, i don't know. But you can probably see how -- combined with the blatant misrepresentation of Felton -- these posts make you seem pretty radical and biased.
DonatasFanboy, I'll give this another go. Since you didn't follow what I said, then I must have been unclear. I wasn't dismissing Felton's Charlotte years. I focused on his NY stretch because the topic at hand is whether Felton is better than Lin and how they are to be compared. In other words, I was taking the comparison seriously. Now, If we look at Felton's career averages, then Felton looks quite average, in which case DWill's 'Felton is better than Lin' looks very weak. To give the claim the strongest possible formulation, I focused on Felton's stretch in NY. That wasn't my idiosyncratic take on the matter; I was actually just borrowing the way that a good number of Knicks fans discuss Felton. The excitement over Felton's return to NY has a lot to do with the perception that his best stretch was during the fifty odd games he played in NY in 2010-2011 (for convenience sake, we note that he put up his career high PER of 17.3 in his time in NY, while his highest PER in Charlotte was only 13.8). Aside from that stretch being his best, it is also the most recent period, and therefore the most reliable indicator of what his performance will be this year. After all, DWill is saying/suggesting that Felton is NOW better than Lin, instead of talking about the legacy of Felton's entire career. (And for the sake of fairness or generosity, we just dismiss Felton's Portland year as a weird anomaly.) Of those fifty odd games in NY in 2011-2012 (we recall that the other 20 games were in Denver), one good stretch was the 29 games of November and December. You can do the splits differently, but if we didn't split up that NY stretch in some way, then Felton's stats would not come close to Lin's. That is why I talked about a stretch of 30 games. It was to just say that even during Felton's highest ceiling, it is not obvious that he is better than Lin. I think what was confusing about what I said was discussing Dragic and Felton in the same breath. Certainly I see that their situations are not comparable. I wasn't trying to conflate the two, but brought them together under the general idea of sample sizes. In the end, I am not even really interested in the discussion of who is better. What interests me is the pattern of those discussions, such as how the idea of sample size is applied to Lin in weird ways. This weirdness must have something to do with the narrative surrounding the player; otherwise, it is totally inexplicable to me.
