Matthew Yglesias: Who Needs Adam Morrison?

« Is Our Children Learning? | Main | If You Can't Take The Heat »

Who Needs Adam Morrison?

Chad Ford description of the great white hope:

The Good: Some scouts believe he is the best basketball player in the country. He has an unbelievable feel for the game and combines that with a passion for winning that's nearly unrivaled in college basketball. Morrison also has good size for his position, has improved his long-range shooting and is a leader on the court.
The Bad: Athleticism is the biggest issue. Morrison is not a bad athlete, but he's far from an elite one. That means he has to work very hard to get his own shot. He's developed a number of tricks to make it happen on the college level, but will they work in the NBA? On the defensive end, it's just ugly. He can barely guard anyone in college. The fact that he has diabetes also creates a question mark.

So basically if Morrison works out, what you'd be hoping for is a high-scoring small forward who's a defensive liability. Now, oddly, the two teams said to be most interested in him are Portland and Seattle, both of whom are better on offense than defense already. Drafting someone with that profile seems like a bad idea under the circumstances. I think Atlanta's entire roster already plays the three, so that's probably not the best idea either. Chicago, by contrast, is significantly better on defense than on offense so there's maybe a case to be made for them. The team also seems so young that they should maybe try and trade their draft pick -- dunno if that's being speculated about. To me, that makes Orlando look like the team that could best use him.

March 15, 2006 | Permalink

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/4456366

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Who Needs Adam Morrison?:

Comments

And how athletic was Larry Bird? And how well did he play defense? I'm not saying that Morrison is as good as Bird, or even close (who is?), but simply that fans and scouts tend to overrate athleticism and underrate basketball skills. The dust bin of NBA history is littered with washouts who were big, quick, strong and athletic -- and couldn't play worth a damn. And meanwhile, players like John Stockton and Steve Nash and Chris Mullin and (just to show that it's not entirely a racist thing) Mark Jackson always have to fight questions about their abilities.

Posted by: Fred App | Mar 15, 2006 8:26:48 AM

Sounds like he could be the second coming of Kiki Vandeweghe. Not entirely a bad thing...

Posted by: Gib | Mar 15, 2006 9:16:36 AM

Is it me, or is it tough to figure Chicago's offensive prowess relative to its defensive prowess? They have a 0.0 points scored/points allowed differential. And while they seem to rank 15th in points allowed, they rank first in opposing FG%. How do they do that? I don't watch a lot of Bulls ball anymore, but Heinrich doesn't strike me as much of a perimeter defender. Probably has something to do with Deng's long-ass arms. Surely some reader smarter than I can help a novice like me interpret these stats?

Posted by: DJ Ninja | Mar 15, 2006 9:52:16 AM

Help! We need Morrison. Or anyone.

Signed,
New York Knicks

Posted by: Peter | Mar 15, 2006 9:52:32 AM

Chicago already has Deng and Nocioni at the 3, so they probably don't need Morrison; instead, they need more big men, or a big guard who plays defense (seeing as how their three guards are all 6'3" or under).

Posted by: Al | Mar 15, 2006 10:28:52 AM

Well, I certainly haven't watched enough Chicago games to know either. Hoever, I note that, taking a look at the Hollinger stats, Chicago ranks 23rd in the league in offensive efficiency, but 7th in the league in defensive efficiency. So I can see how their points per game scored is about equal to their points per game allowed - they are as good defensively as they are bad offensively, making them a mediocre team overall. Their record is slightly worse than mediocre, but I guess within the realm of a few bad breaks during the season against them.

Posted by: Al | Mar 15, 2006 10:34:41 AM

Look, I'm on record as something of a Morrison skeptic, but I'm not denying that someone should draft him, just trying to think through who it really makes sense for. Adding a potentially excellent wing scorer at the price of a defensive downgrade isn't an implausible decision to make, but it's also not an obviously correct one either. As it happens, the teams near the bottom of the league pile right now tend to have more defensive problems than offensive ones.

Posted by: Matthew Yglesias | Mar 15, 2006 10:47:00 AM

1. I think "great white hope" should be capitalized: "Great White Hope." It's a title or office, like "President."

2. players like John Stockton and Steve Nash and Chris Mullin and ... Mark Jackson

Many people believe that Morrison will do fine in the NBA. It's possible to so believe and still recognize that he is wildly overhyped. Right now, people are pretending that Morrison is a legit number one pick. Just to get a sense of the lay of the land, I went back to see whom I might have picked prior to the other players you mentioned.

Stockton ('84): Hakeem, Jordan, Barkley. (NB: I love Stockton, so there might be other players that that would be picked prior to him, and I'm just blind to it.)
Mullin ('85): Ewing, K. Malone, Dumars, Porter
Mark Jackson ('87): D. Robinson, Pippen, R. Miller, H. Grant, Reggie Lewis
Nash ('96): Iverson, R. Allen, Kobe. Others I'm on the fence about: J. O'Neal, Peja, Stephon.

Morrison's overhyped. If you're a glass half-full type of guy, think of it this way: he'll get picked too high, and a valuable player will fall farther down the draft list than he should.

Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Mar 15, 2006 10:50:59 AM

You'd take Ray Allen over Steve Nash?! - I mean, he's got a sweet J and he *did* play Jesus Shuttlesworth, but...

With the caveat that March Madness could change a lot of perceptions, I don't think Morrison ends up #1 (Gay or Aldridge, the latter probably more deserving), but probably somewhere between 3-5, which I think is probably a fine place for him. Teams drafting that high rarely prioritize positional need, anyway, and is there a justifiable top 5 talent that's noted for his D? Most of the defensive beasts in the college game seem to be 6'8" centers, who are always (for better or worse) unlikely to get taken in the lottery, though I imagine Sheldon Williams goes pretty high this year.

Posted by: Quarterican | Mar 15, 2006 11:05:56 AM

Q: Nash is hard to appropriately position in that draft . He was very good in Dallas, but the last two years have been a revalation. Some of that is him, but some of that is the system. If you exclude those two years from his resume, you would definitely pick O'Neal before Nash, and probably also pick Peja first.

Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Mar 15, 2006 11:25:37 AM

Fred, just to answer your question about Bird on defense: he was a mediocre man defender. he was an outstanding team defender, just outstanding.

as for morrison, i don't watch college hoops so what do i know about him? what i do know is that it's amazing how many white players are said to have a great "feel" for the game, and how few black players are.

Posted by: howard | Mar 15, 2006 11:37:56 AM

Hey, I didn't quibble with your fence-sitting -well, I would quibble at Steph, but it was Ray that really surprised me. I agree w/your fence-sitting re: J.O'Neal and Peja, but I'd definitely take Dallas-vintage Nash over Allen, almost certainly over Marbury. Of course, two years ago O'Neal wasn't also solidifying a rep for maybe being fragile, and Peja hadn't started his recent decline (how's he doing in Indy? I haven't followed that story) - he was arguably the best small forward in the league for half a season back then.

(Also: Larry Brown's recent Marbury rip? Downright nasty. The Francis trade makes more sense now - there's no way Marbury's playing in New York next year. Unless they package him for KG or J.O'Neal [and I have to think either ex-Celtic could get and would hold out for a better package] they're probably taking back...uhm...dimes on the quarter, for that one? Nah, Steph's definitely not a quarter, but he's not quite a dollar either.)

Posted by: Quarterican | Mar 15, 2006 11:38:57 AM

Yeah, I can't, for the life of me, figure out who would want Steph now. Are there $20 mil. worth of contracts out there that other teams would actually consider less valuable than Steph's services? There isn't a package out there that's obvious to me. Cripes. What are the Knicks going to do - I hate them, and I'm starting to think of them as a sad NBA tragedy.

Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Mar 15, 2006 11:49:48 AM

there's no way Marbury's playing in New York next year

Who would ever take him??? I agree with SCMT that there probably isn't a team with that much in bad contracts to send back. I think the Knicks would not get dimes-on-the-dollar for Marbury; rather, they would have to pay another team to take him. It seems to me pretty clear that you can never win anything with Marbury.

Posted by: Al | Mar 15, 2006 11:59:33 AM

Ha! Did we actually get a Larry Bird comparison on the first comment of the thread?

Posted by: JP | Mar 15, 2006 12:11:07 PM

Whoa whoa whoa, a white guy who's not a tremendous athlete but has a great feel for the game and a real passion for winning? I'm sure he's also scrappy, determined, disciplined, and has a lot of basketball smarts. The top pick in the draft tends to be more of a raw athlete though, a somewhat undisciplined player who needs to learn how to harness his explosive talent in order to truly become great.

Posted by: Barbar | Mar 15, 2006 12:15:44 PM

That was sarcastic, BTW.

Posted by: Barbar | Mar 15, 2006 12:16:56 PM

What I think is unfortunate from Starbury's perspective is that three years ago he had a great year in Phoenix with the rookie Amare. They made the playoffs, made the Spurs sweat, and had every reason to believe they'd get better next year. Then they stumbled a bit, Amare goes down, and Steph is traded and the Suns get to spend most of the year with Barbosa starting at the point. Then when Nash comes in, at least half the MVP chatter is based on how much better he'd made them, with the clear implication that the improvement vs. the previous year's record was an improvement of Nash vs. Marbury, which wasn't fair. (I mean, Steve is better than Steph, but the comparison between last year and three years ago is more honest, and also less extreme, not to mention the addition of Q. vs. GimpyPenny, the improvement of Amare and Joe Johnson, and the flourishing of D'Antoni's system.)

Posted by: Quarterican | Mar 15, 2006 12:27:56 PM

Barbar are you channelling Billy Packer? My left eye started twitching reading that...

SCMT, Terry Porter over Chris Mullin? That's just...nutty. As a player, Dumars over Mullin is a stretch, and to go Benston, I know Joe Dumars, and Terry Porter is no Joe Dumars.

Posted by: Pooh | Mar 15, 2006 2:07:19 PM

As for Morrison, it's really tough to tell. His defense is absolutely awful, but that seems at least partially an effort issue - they need him to do so much on O. There have been times at the end of games when he makes big steals, takes a charge and what not.

On O, can he get his own shot in the League? In his favor, he is a very good "bad shot maker", so what might look like an unwise shot isn't a terrible look for him. Put it this way, he's no worse a pro than Wally-World, who's been serviceable to very good throughout his career. And he has more upside.

As for Rudy Gay, is it possible to watch him and not think of Tim Thomas? That might give me pause, to say the least. The guy in college right now who might turn out to be the best pro is Julian Wright from Kansas.

Posted by: Pooh | Mar 15, 2006 2:11:55 PM

Quarterican, i don't think there's anything unfortunate from Marbury's perspective: he showed the kind of person he is when he couldn't find a way to coexist with garnett, way back when. he's extremely well compensated for having loads of physical talent and limited team awareness, and he's made his own problems.

Posted by: howard | Mar 15, 2006 2:12:52 PM

howard, I'm not saying Marbury doesn't deserve his rep, I'm just saying that one aspect of his rep - that Phoenix is another place that improved when he left - isn't really fair. I have a negative opinion of, say, John McCain, and am happy to get on board with some McCain bashing, but if it were conventional wisdom on the left that McCain was a bad person for letting himself get captured by the VC, I'd point out that he didn't deserve that particular criticism. A ridiculous analogy, I know.

Posted by: Quarterican | Mar 15, 2006 2:20:34 PM

Quarterican, fair enough (although your analogy might improve if you said that at least mccain opposed some bush tax cuts). still, it's hard for me to feel any sympathy for marbury under any circumstances.

interestingly, when marbury was first acquired by isaiah, both al and i posted at matthew's old site about exactly how unlikely it was that a winning team could be built around him, and i notice that al and i are back out today (al and i almost always agree on sports, it's only on politics that we differ).

Posted by: howard | Mar 15, 2006 2:46:56 PM

Pooh:

I just went and googled the stats for Mullin and Porter. I retract. My only defense - Porter was better than people seem to remember, and apparently Mullin was much better than I remember. I stand by Dumars over Mullin. And I call that if you don't agree with me on this, you are clearly a racist.

Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Mar 15, 2006 3:38:08 PM

Dumars over Mullin is defensible, though I disagree. Make of that what you will. Wasn't meant as a slam on Porter btw, in his day Mullin was what the kids call nice.

Digressing, but he's responsible for my favorite basketball highlight of all time: Probably about 93, SportCenter is showing Warriors highlights, Mullin gets bumped coming down the lane, the whistle blows and the ref clearly makes the "on the floor signal". Mullin takes one more step to about the bottom of the circle tosses up a hugely high-arcing one hander. That stays off the top of the screen for almost 3 full seconds. And then comes straight down through the hoop as everyone on the floor starts laughing. I think Mark Jackson was watching the game and that's how he got the idea for the teardrop...

Posted by: Pooh | Mar 15, 2006 4:08:40 PM

I hope it was clear that the "racist" thing was a joke.

Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Mar 15, 2006 4:20:33 PM

A bit off topic here, but I remember some NBA preview mag I got back in the mid to late 90's that went back and retro-actively re-ranked all the drafts to the order they, with 20/20 hindsight, would have drafted them. I don't remember all the details, but I do remember 2:

1. Forwards had the highest variance, and were more likely to be busts than guards or centers.

2. White players were, on average, drafted *lower* than they should have been.

They only looked at 10 years, so there may have been some small sample size effects. Nonetheless, it's an interesting exercise. I'd hope any NBA GM worth his salt would have somebody doing analysis of this sort to try to figure out what factors are more or less likely to indicate future NBA success.

Posted by: Doug T | Mar 15, 2006 4:21:45 PM

SCMT, absolutely. Though I thought I was at FreeDarko for a second...(I kid...)

Posted by: Pooh | Mar 15, 2006 5:03:34 PM

FWIW: True Hoop has a rundown on the Brown-Starbury meltdown. The question that remains: how many of the young guys Isiah will have to package with Marbury in order to get someone to take him. What a disaster.

Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Mar 15, 2006 6:45:56 PM

SomeCallMeTim: thanx for the lead. Marbury's even more of a flaming ass than i thought, which takes some doing....

Posted by: howard | Mar 15, 2006 7:01:56 PM

Marbury's behaving like an ass, but I honestly think the blame for the media feud is more on Larry than Steph. (As opposed to the basketball, where I think Steph is more to blame than Larry for the Knicks woes, though both are culpable and Isiah above all.) But this was one of the greatest obscure smack talk lines ever:

"I went to the conference finals with Hawyoode Workman as my point guard..."

Posted by: Quarterican | Mar 15, 2006 8:35:41 PM

"I went to the conference finals with Hawyoode Workman as my point guard..."

Yes. Where I'm from, I believe we call that "Pwned"

Posted by: Pooh | Mar 16, 2006 5:40:31 AM

"The dust bin of NBA history is littered with washouts who were big, quick, strong and athletic -- and couldn't play worth a damn. And meanwhile, players like John Stockton and Steve Nash and Chris Mullin and (just to show that it's not entirely a racist thing) Mark Jackson always have to fight questions about their abilities."

All true, and all sorta irrelevant.

Mental abilities can often be taught. Physical skills and attributes can't be taught.

It's generally smart to draft bodies over minds. Do you take Dwight Howard or Emeka Okefor with the first pick? Okefor's got the better game and Howard's got the better body. The smart GM goes with Howard.

All rules have exceptions, of course.

Posted by: Petey | Mar 16, 2006 12:19:32 PM

"Marbury's behaving like an ass, but I honestly think the blame for the media feud is more on Larry than Steph."

All true. LB is a coaching mad genius, but he tends to win asshole of the year every year.

Steph's point about private talks with the coach inevitably getting splashed across the sports pages with Brown's spin all over them is quite on point.

I watched the Brown-Iverson partnership quite closely, and despite Brown's skills, I wouldn't want to be in a foxhole with the guy. You know LB never has your back.

My favorite LB moment of all time was after Game 5 of last year's Finals. (That was the game with Rasheed's screwup on Horry's 3 pointer.) Brown started out his press conference with 30 seconds of boilerplate about how no one player was responsible for the loss, how the team won and lost as a team, and how defensive breakdown's were always a coach's responsibility. He then followed up with 10 minutes of blaming Rasheed and repeatedly insisting that he had properly instructed his players on how to handle the inbounds play.

As always, LB is one classy guy.

Posted by: Petey | Mar 16, 2006 12:29:02 PM

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/46398

Ha.

Posted by: Barbar | Mar 16, 2006 8:02:14 PM

"Ha."

Indeed.

Posted by: Petey | Mar 16, 2006 8:45:32 PM

What's being white got to do with it? weirdos

Posted by: janine | Mar 16, 2006 11:00:38 PM

I am a 34 year old Black Male from Baltimore, Maryland. This "Great White Hype" thing in Basketball is Stupid. To be honest, I do not here any Black people complaining about the "Great White Hype". It is coming from White people. When Steve Nash won the MVP last year, it was a white reporter from Miami who started that crap. While the majority of Black players and sports reporters did not complain.

When it comes down to it,the only color that maters is orange. That is the color of the basketball. On a final note,there is no color on talent and and color does not matter when people win championships. Color does not matter.

Posted by: Tommy 2 Chips | Mar 22, 2006 5:50:36 PM

When it comes down to it,the only color that maters is orange. That is the color of the basketball. On a final note,there is no color on talent and color does not matter when people win championships. Color does not matter.

Posted by: Tommy 2 Chips | Mar 22, 2006 5:54:23 PM