you can't deny the opportunity hill has been receiving to play. so far, he looks like a just lilttle bit better than stromile, but not much. we have to ask ourselves a question. what blocks his developement? his bball iq or other things. i am afraid his bball iq may contribute most of his slow progress. we also have to ask ourselves why nicks didn't give him opportunities. knicks was really bad in last a few years. normally, a good prospect on a bad team will get playing time to develop but hill was not a case. maybe knicks coaches didn''t have clue. :grin: but i doubt it is the case.
Patterson looks like he could be a very solid player in the NBA, definitely seems to be making most of his minutes. Hill, on the other hand, still has those 'oooh aaah!' moments, at least once a game, and lately many more. His post moves are developing quickly, and his man defense deserves props. Unfortunately for him, he still moves his feet slowly on help defense, causing him to be out of position and foul, and his offensive moves, while worthy of praise, are too far apart. Is it logical to say that Hill, even though he is a sophomore, has more potential, while Patterson just seems to be better now? That is how I feel about these 2. If I had a choice of one to trade, I would still rather let Patterson be the one, I dunno, there is just something about Hill, if he can just put it all together, he can be really special....
You assume that something blocks his improvement. What is the basis for that? It is crystal clear that Hill is improving quickly. Improving and having upside doesn't mean that Hill is a serviceable starter right now, especially not out of his natural position. You have to understand: developing a player takes time. It took time for Aaron, it took time for Steve Nash, it is still taking time for Bynum, it is still taking time for Dwight freakin' Howard. You just shouldn't think that a player with less than 1400 minutes of playtime should just easily, flawlessly compete with veteran players who themselves are very talented. With raw big men, well, with every player, bad games or slumps happen. What we now know for sure is that Hill is a nice enough guy, says all the right things, makes both astonishing plays and fundamental mistakes. The question with him is: can he lower the number of mistakes and increase the number of astonishing plays? I think it's very possible he can. In the near future, too. Can we ask him to just become a strong NBA starter during these next 10 games? No, I don't think it's fair to ask any sophomore big man to not make mistakes. It really sounds strange, but PGs and PF/Cs take the longest time to develop. Why? It's simple. On offense, a PG has a vast multitude of options to choose from and he has to make the right decisions. The same goes for the rim protector big man on D. He has to choose his position, when or how to gamble, be prepared to make these decisions, watch out for cuts, basically they have the same task the PG has on O. They see the whole court and they have to read it. Now there are people blessed with the ability of reading situations quickly and thus be NBA ready before others. But to some extent, this can be learned just like a PG can learn to be solid decision-maker on O. From what I've seen, Hill usually over-gambles which is not a bad thing to start from. A big man has to be aggressive, has to try to go for blocks, to pick up a man who has blown past his defender, etc. When he overdoes defense, the game just slides by him if his gamble doesn't succeed and he can't recover. With time, he will learn when to just not interfere and stick to his man. I've seen him try to save a play about 20 times this season, where he could've just watched the play develop, but instead he tried to stop it (so he got all the blame). It's OK, he will slowly learn to see, when his interference does more harm. What you CAN'T teach is the urge to overdo defense - that is, he has the will to play D, he just doesn't know yet, how to adjust. That usually comes with experience. So: the key word is again patience.
This is an easy question. Swift's greatest problem was that he was a knucklehead. Hill isn't. End of story.
i am not sure how long you have been a rox fan. i still remember so clearly the day we got stromile. i clearly remember a lot of fans asked for patience on him after a year or two. i hope you're right but i am afraid you're going to go through what i did, disappointment at the end.
The guy with the best basketball skills will always have more upside. Patrick Patterson has more upside. In fact, I don't even know why this is a debate. Patrick Patterson is better RIGHT NOW than Jordan Hill is.
I won't be disappointed, since we got him for peanuts. Second: every young player deserves patience. Every single one. Hill is quite a cheap experiment, he seems to be a really nice guy, no ego problems, knows his role, there will be no drama with him. If every single experiment would be like him, GMs would sleep quite well, about all of the time. If you are evaluating a project player, you should do so by watching trends, not actual results. Put it like this: last year, Hill was basically an energy garbage man. He rebounded quite well, made threw down putback dunks all the time and generally just ran up and down the court. Nothing else was asked from him, and he yielded acceptable results. During the summer league (when he was injured), he tried to integrate some basic post elements into his game, well it wasn't that nice. During that time, most of the posters here thought that he is a bust, evidently. No one was disturbed by the fact that he was obviously playing out of his comfort zone: that means instead of using his simple go-to move A, he used move B to experiment with it. By the end of december, he uses these moves smoother, and he even added some more moves into his repertoire. He also showed that he is a very nice 1on1 defender and is quite humble. He is also foul prone due to overdoing D, turnover prone due to bad decision making (inexperienced) and is bad at team D (reading the game). He has become better on O and is eager to work in the system, thanks to Adelman and Brad Miller, who he listens to, and seems to be quite willing to improve further. Will his hands improve? Will his fouls decrease over time? Will his mental lapses decrease over time? Let's hope so. What we should know is that there were many-many players who didn't improve. BUT: most of these players were knuckleheads in the sense that they were not very willing to listen to others or correct their mistakes, or even admit that they made a mistake. From what I've heard from Hill, he is not that kind of a guy.
The guy without the mental capacity to utilize his physical tools will NEVER reach his "upside", so in that case was there any to begin with? Would you say Kwame Brown had more upside than Scola? He had a ton of physical tools, and some idiot obviously thought so otherwise he wouldn't have been drafted #1. But one guy looked like a statue on the court with hands of stone(sound familiar?) and the other guy was a master of his craft already as a teenager. To me it is clear who had more upside. You can tell me that is easy to say now since it is after the fact. Well, I'm telling you right now before the fact, Jordan Hill is headed down that same path. Come back to me and bump this thread in 2 years when he is 26 and languishing on the bench in Cleveland or Denver, with their fans still wondering what is his upside and what he could be if he simply put it all together. We'll have a good laugh at when there was a time when Jordan Hill was put in the same sentence as Patrick Patterson.
Um upside means: who can be better in the future, not RIGHT NOW. The guy with the best basketball skills cant grow a foot taller. The guy with more athleticism/height/quickness can improve his skill sets. This isnt who is more likely to reach thier upisde, its who has more upside. Yes Kwame Brown has more upside that Luis Scola. If both were 19 year old draftees right now and nobody knew anything about either, then 99% of GMs would draft Brown because he has more upside. Hill may never reach his potential, but thats not what this discussion is about. If you want to discuss who do I think will be a better player thats a totally different question.
knucklehead - if someone makes a mistake once, he/she is execused. if he/she makes the same mistake second time, he/she will be warned. if he/she makes the 3rd time, he/she is knucklehead for sure. hill is an important part of rotation so his opportunities are there. his problem is he was keeping lost on the court. that is exactly problem stromile had. stromile wasn't knucklehead until ppl gave up on him. btw, i wish you're right on him since he is still rox.
Not even a debate? I wonder what it is that you saw from the 2 10 rebound efforts from Patterson that has you so convinced that he's truly due for a better career than Hill? You may differ in your opinions, but come one LTF, it is definitely still arguable. I for one, still see more potential in Hill in the future, though he's a bigger project for sure. Maybe that changes if patterson keeps getting double doubles :grin:
That's stupid. Upside by definition is how good a player could be, had he corrected all the mistakes and improved all his skills to his limits. Upside is the upper bound, the player that one could become. Now: physical limits are usually what they are by the age of 25. From what we've seen from many big men, many PGs, basketball skills are secondary when deducing what the upside of a player is, since they can be improved after arriving in the NBA. We should also take the mental capabilites of the player into the account. Namely willpower, work ethic and general mentality. A cocky player who doesn't accept criticism, or doesn't accept his responsibilites is less likely to improve his skills. A lazy player? Well obvious. Patterson is a nice package. He has nice skills, good athleticism, is strong and mentally sound. He has nice upside. Hill is a raw package. Hill has a bit better athleticism, very agile, a bit thin, has good nature but his fundamental skills are suspect but improving. PP is a very nice player and his ceiling/upside is hard to determine. He may be very close to his ceiling which is a nice feat for him, since he worked a lot and developed himself as much as possible. Hill's upside is quite simply Amar'e Stoudemire with a bit less offense and much better defense. I'm not saying that he will be a better Amar'e, I'm saying I think it's possible. We should be quite happy. I think Patterson is a gamble like the following: there is a 65% chance that we get 100$ and 35% that we get 120$. Hill is like: there is a 10% chance that we get 175$, 20% chance the we get 110$, 40% chance that we get 85$ and 30% chance that we get 50$. Patterson's EV is 107 and has a low variance, Hill's is 88.5. Now the good part comes: we can keep both. If Hill doesn't develop, well, that's life, we have Patterson. If Hill develops into something over 120 (to stick with the example)? All the better. Morey is a genius. What he did is called a nice hedge.
I'm not sure what his definition of "knucklehead" is when he calls Stromile Swift a "knucklehead". If my memory serves me right, Stromile was mild mannered and nice enough of a kid. It wasn't that he wouldn't listen. It was he couldn't understand.
Was it against the Lakers, when Adelman and co. showed a video of his mistakes to Hill in the half-time break? After that, if I'm correct, Hill just shut down the lane completely and stopped Pau Gasol. I think that's all we need to know. Team defense is not an easy thing to master, especially when one has been playing basketball since what? 17?
If someone has a 0% chance of reaching his "upside", then there was none to begin with. Think about that for a second. Once you can wrap your brain around that concept, the rest of the argument will fall in place.
So you deduced that Jordan Hill has a 0% chance of tapping that potential. If not, all your reasoning just falls apart.
