I wish he were more effective at scoring outside of drawing fouls. His only consistent baskets are in transition and spot ups. One on one he actually struggles. That spin move fadeaway of his is not impressive. He's exactly as advertised and pretty good so far.
I like to see Martin play like Lowry. In other word, i don't want him to jet to the other end while the opponent is shooting the ball. I want to see him get back and help out the rebounding like Lowry did. Lowry also has a knack for rebounding even try to box out guys that are bigger than him. There are times where long shots result in the ball being bounce out to the perimeter and if Martin is to jet ahead (which he often do), you're giving the ball right back to the opponents...and i hate to see that happen.
I'm very happy with his addition. I'm a huge PPS guy, since scoring average alone doesn't tell you about how efficient a guy is - when a volume shooter like Antoine Walker (career 1.06 pps) is killing your team jacking up stupid shots, his 20 ppg isn't exactly helpful. Right now, Brandon Jennings (1.04) is looking bad for similar reasons. For those wondering, Ariza is also sitting on an ugly 1.04 average. Carl Landry has been outstanding this year (1.49, #8 in the league). So losing him stinks. But at least we replaced him with Martin, who's at 1.38 for us (would put him #16 in the league and #3 among all guards) I've made no secret about my issues with our former star SG's efficiency issues and his 5-17 shooting habit. Martin doesn't bring a lot of extra stuff to the table, but he's a fantastic "pure" SG.
Law of averages my friend. No one has that large of an improvement so quickly over a career average. His current FT% would be classified as a statistical outlier, just like any other slump or streak. I expect it to fall down and balance out eventually. History has yet to prove this wrong.
What about Jose Calderon? He whole career in Europe and his first two years in the NBA he consistently shot around the mid-80's. Two years ago he shot at 91%. Last year, at the tender age of 28, he shot 98%. This year he's down to 82%, but do you consider two straight seasons of 90+% shooting to be an outlier? Is that just another streak? Please note: that I do not think Martin will match Calderon's success at the FT line for that long a period.
I would say that the 98% and 82% are both outliers and that he is more closer to around 90% give or take within 2% if you give him a few more seasons. Of course considering he doesn't shoot too many free throws either, that could skew the data. His entire career, he has only shot 595 free throws at a clip of 1.74 a game. Martin on the other hand, has shot a total of 2196 FT's in the same amount of games at a staggering 6.42 attempts a game. What this usually means in statistics is that given his much larger sample size, he is less likely to skew from the mean. Then again, their are some exceptions to the rules, such as an external factor that causes your percentile to drastically change; injuries, change in shooting form, eye condition, ect. However, those situations usually render one of the sets of data useless as the conditions are no longer the same.
Got to start a new post since I can't edit. There is a reason that in statistics, people often throw out the highest and the lowest when you have a sufficiently large sample size. Sometimes stuff happens that normally don't.
Without Yao some big has to step up and recover some of those abandoned stats. Scola always had it in him, there just usually isn't a need for him to perform at that level since Yao is around.
I think he is doing alright, except this statistic doesn't illustrate his defense very well, he gambles a lot on steals, maybe it won't matter so much next year when we have someone to make up for any defensive mistakes.
