Forget Mac-- keep him as trade bait, and trade him ASAP. Adelman needs to be creative enough to start Chase Budinger at the 2.
why don't we start Lowry,Battier,Ariza,Hayes,pops and lock down the starters.then have a bench of Brooks,Taylor,Budinger,Scola,Andersen come in and blow out there bench.
No, he just looks forward to Tracy finding open players and making the game easier for them. Contrary to popular belief, T-Mac does way more for the team than jack up 20 foot fade-away jumpers. But I'm sure Chase Budinger and Carl Landry should be running the offense since they're such efficient players.
No. Tracy was injured to start the year, and we were playing great without him. So when he came back, he was forced to fit in. For a little while, he played defense and ran the floor.
Interesting take by Rick on Artest vs. Ariza. For all his "eccentricities," Ron was an effective defender. The guy is more Battier-like than he let on. I still think that Ariza is a better defender overall because he can move so much better than Ron. Ron may know where to be better than Ariza does, but I don't think he can actually get where he wants to go sometimes due to the wear and tear on his wheels.
Ron's a veteran, a smarter defender than some people give him credit for. He's also really, really strong. Probably as good a defensive matchup against LeBron James as there is in the league. Maybe the Rockets' data tells them something different, but the public-domain defensive adjusted +/- stats show Ron to be one of the top defenders at his position the last few years. And we shouldn't discount how steeply the Kings fell last year after Artest left their team. I'd say he does more to positively impact the bottom line than, say, Kevin Martin. With all that, I'm quite happy with the "trade" for Ariza. More upside, and he'll be a much better complimentary player to Tracy/Yao (or whoever we get to replace them) than Artest was.
I think a lot of Adelman's words are meant to put a fire under Ariza to take the next step towards being a veteran who makes better use of all his physical gifts, because when you think about Ariza on paper it really is surprising that he has only been able to make a role-player out of himself to this point. Adelman isn't the type to take locker room spats out into the public realm, so if he consciously chose to throw that out there, then it must have been an intentional effort to produce in Ariza a positive response. The dude's a physical specimen; you guys are probably like me, doing a double take when the camera zooms out to wonder if T-Mac has returned to our team in his 2004 form. Yet this T-Mac is so much more timid and raw, despite having the same speed and ups as the previous one. Let's see if #1 is ready to take the next step with us.
