Random question bout hawes
- Thread starter mac
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SacKings384
Starter
lol that was good.
Rookie
Starter
I'm one of them. When he makes one, that is where he going to be on the next play.
I don't even want a big man that can shoot in the low 40ish% 3 pointer....why would I even want a 30ish one shooting them?
I'm one of them. When he makes one, that is where he going to be on the next play.
I don't even want a big man that can shoot in the low 40ish% 3 pointer....why would I even want a 30ish one shooting them?
A big man who can shoot 3s well is a huge asset. It opens up lanes in the offense, which is very important in a team with Tyreke as the franchise player, and other key players such as Donte, Beno, and Omri. If Spencer can develop his shot to consistently shoot 3s in the low 40s, this will upgrade the Kings offense significantly. Of course, he needs more work on his game under the basket, but him shooting 3s is by no means a liability, in my opinion.
Bricklayer
Don't Make Me Use The Bat
A big man who can shoot threes is at best a gimmick with almost no history of success in the NBA (note: I separate here from the occasional 4/3 reserve that provides change of pace, Horry, Kukoc, Odom etc.). The problem likely being not so much the occasional three itself, as the incredibly soft and pathetic mentality that would cause a 7'0 tall man to run all the way out to the perimeter to avoid having to be physical underneath the hoop. Soft big men and championships are oil and water. And Big Zs little abberant display agianst us the other night aside, if in his best years Jordan could "get by" with non-3pt shooting big men (Cartwright, Grant, Longley, Rodman), and Kobe could get by with non-3pt shooitng big men (Bynum, Gasol), and Wade could get by with non 3pt shooting big men (Shaq, Haslem), and LeBron (Z, Varejao, Gooden earlier), and CP3 (West, Chandler) etc., I am thinking that having a 3pt shooting big man is basically as important to Tyreke as...well rather than search for a colorful metaphor, let's just say its not. Its an on paper asset which has completely failed clinical testing out in the real world.
A big man (at least, a center) that can shoot threes may have very little history of success in the NBA, but also has very little history of failure. There simply haven't been that many who shoot threes on any regular basis.
A search using http://www.databasebasketball.com/ shows that there have been a grand total of 10 - only 10 - centers in the history of the NBA who have averaged 0.4 three point attempts per game with at least 100 games in the league. That's 2 3PTA every 5 games, and only 10 guys have done that.
Those ten players include noted "softies" Arvydas Sabonis, Bill Laimbeer, Jack Sikma, and Vlade Divac.
There are three players noted for actually being soft on the list: Raef LaFrentz (who leads the field in 3PTA by a wide margin), Brad Miller, and our own Spencer Hawes. And there were three washouts: Wang Zhi-Zhi, Alexander Volkov, and Peja Drobnjak.
You claim that only "incredibly soft and pathetic" big men shoot threes, yet 40% of the top ten three-point shooting centers (by volume) of all time were clearly neither incredibly soft nor pathetic.
As for "history of failure" - I'll take those ten centers against any randomly selected group of ten centers any day of the week. That list simply does not smack of failure.
The reason there haven't been a lot of successful three-point shooting centers is because there haven't been a lot of three-point shooting centers, period. It's not because they're all weenies.
Rookie
Starter
Shooting 3 isn't bad if you can do it well, but you still need a big inside to get you that 2nd chance, block shot, rebounds and all the things that need to be done under the basket. It's hard and he needs to be in there to develop those skills. Playing outside is not going to help us get the big we need.
JT is coming along, and as long as he keeps on playing around the rim he will be better at it.
Brockman is playing exactly how I want Hawes to play. Imagine a 7' Brockman...we would of got our team set.
JT is coming along, and as long as he keeps on playing around the rim he will be better at it.
Brockman is playing exactly how I want Hawes to play. Imagine a 7' Brockman...we would of got our team set.
Bricklayer
Don't Make Me Use The Bat
Or alternately its because they are so pathetic as a group that a) the league doesn't want them, and b) when the league does accept them they are placed where they belong -- deep on the bench, and c) because they are so soft the league tries to stuff them into "smaller" positions so that they won't be run over by the real bigs inside. Hence Brian Cook or Terry Mills or Sam Perkins become PFs, not Cs. The overall result being the "rank and file" interior big men stay in the league and fill out rosters and rotations. The rank and file 3pt shooting big men get tossed out with the trash where they belong.
As an aside, one of the qustions with Vlade was ALWAYS was he too soft, and Sikma was pretty close to it by the time he became a 3pt chukcer. Both he and Laimbeer turned to the tactic after they got old and quit rebounding. Same thing that happened with Perkins. Old man basketball -- your legs go, so stand around outside.
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Yet Spencer does not fit any of those three criteria. He appears to have solidly cemented a position in the league, he is not relegated to the deep bench, and he hasn't been moved to a smaller position. So he is an unusual commodity. Sure, toss out Sikma and Laimbeer because they developed a three late. Toss out Zhi-Zhi and Volkov and Drobnjak as bench fodder. That brings you down to a total of five guys (including Hawes) who had that 3-PT skill set at the center position from the start and DON'T fit the criterion of not good enough to play long-term in the NBA.
All I'm saying is that it's an incredibly small sample of guys. LaFrentz, Hawes, Sabonis, Miller, and Divac. That's it. It's hard to make a sweeping generalization based on that sample size.
On top of that, Spencer is still very young. He broke 2000 minutes in his age 20 season last year, earlier than any of these guys (Divac 22, LaFrentz 23, Miller 25). Yeah, he's too soft right now. But these guys had per-game rebounding/block numbers that peaked between 25-27. I'll choose to give Spencer a few years to develop rather than dismiss his future based on that small sample size generalization.
I don't think the 3 point shooting is necessarily a bad thing. Anything you can use to create a mismatch in your favor is potentially a benefit. Dominant shot blockers don't like to follow their matchup out to the perimeter because it mitigates their best defensive skill. So that leaves your 3-point shooting big wide open or matched up with a shorter defender who probably can't contest their shot. Most of the time the three point shot is not a high percentage shot though. For guys who aren't three point specialists coming off the bench, you'd prefer they balance their outside shot with a good mid-range game and the ability to drive all the way to the basket if possible. That's why Dirk is unstoppable. If they can pass too than you always keep the defense guessing. Hawes is showing potential as a consistent three-point threat but he's got to be consistent on the mid-range shot too or he's going to be wasted on most possessions.
It is a problem if your best rebounder spends half their time on the perimeter where they are unlikely to get any offensive boards. The flip-side of the offensive mismatch is that putting your 7 footer on the perimeter might get him a wide open shot, but you're also leaving the other teams best rebounder unchecked under the basket. If you're going to run that play consistently than you need to bring someone else under the basket to get the rebound. Dallas always plays a rebounding specialist next to Dirk for this reason. Considering that Spencer isn't a dominant rebounder anyway, and Jason Thompson has one of the higher offensive rebounding percentages in the league, it's possible their play styles could work together. Casspi has been grabbing more than his fair share of rebounds this year, Donte has a size advantage at either SF or SG, and Evans is going to consistently out-rebound most PGs as well so there's enough reasons to think it could work.
Given the choice I'd much rather have a dominant post player than an outside shooter at the center position -- it just makes the game that much easier for everyone else. But since we don't have that player and we do have Hawes, I think we'd be better off taking advantage of what he does well instead of trying to mold him into something that he's not. If Spencer shows that he can hit the three point shot consistently -- I don't mind that he gives Evans one more target to kick out to when he can't get all the way to the basket. I would guess Spencer is going to end up wide open on 90% of those situations anyway because his man is going to want to rotate over to Evans. Then it's up to the coaches to design plays that put both of those guys in good positions and everyone else rotating to help on the boards.
It is a problem if your best rebounder spends half their time on the perimeter where they are unlikely to get any offensive boards. The flip-side of the offensive mismatch is that putting your 7 footer on the perimeter might get him a wide open shot, but you're also leaving the other teams best rebounder unchecked under the basket. If you're going to run that play consistently than you need to bring someone else under the basket to get the rebound. Dallas always plays a rebounding specialist next to Dirk for this reason. Considering that Spencer isn't a dominant rebounder anyway, and Jason Thompson has one of the higher offensive rebounding percentages in the league, it's possible their play styles could work together. Casspi has been grabbing more than his fair share of rebounds this year, Donte has a size advantage at either SF or SG, and Evans is going to consistently out-rebound most PGs as well so there's enough reasons to think it could work.
Given the choice I'd much rather have a dominant post player than an outside shooter at the center position -- it just makes the game that much easier for everyone else. But since we don't have that player and we do have Hawes, I think we'd be better off taking advantage of what he does well instead of trying to mold him into something that he's not. If Spencer shows that he can hit the three point shot consistently -- I don't mind that he gives Evans one more target to kick out to when he can't get all the way to the basket. I would guess Spencer is going to end up wide open on 90% of those situations anyway because his man is going to want to rotate over to Evans. Then it's up to the coaches to design plays that put both of those guys in good positions and everyone else rotating to help on the boards.
Bricklayer
Don't Make Me Use The Bat
The funny thing is that as Dirk himself has gotten more and more serious about winning, he has taken fewer and fewer threes. When he was young and dumb he was chucking nearly 5 a game. Its been years since that number was even 3, and this year its down to fewer than 2 a game. And that's from the PF most often pointed to in all of basketball as the example of three point shooting working for a big.
I have no problem with Spencer playing a finesse game right now.
I started riding motocross when I was pretty young. In my early teens, companies started producing 4-stroke motocross bikes and shortly thereafter, they began dominating motocross to the point that 2-strokes weren't competitive, and certainly weren't the bike that would win you a championship. The 4-stroke was a heavier bike, but they produced a ton of power, and they favored the bigger, stronger guys, those with a more powerful style of riding, over the 2-stroke bikes which required more finesse with trying to stay in your powerband and keeping up your momentum. The problem I had was that I was a scrawny little kid at the time and the 4-strokes were too heavy for me to handle. It didn't take long to figure out that the only way I would ever win a race was back on the 2-stroke, even if it wasn't the way the champions were doing it. Like 4 or 5 years later, I finally started to fill out and was as strong as the guys I was riding against, and was able to finally handle one of the 4-strokes, and was consistently beating the guys that had switched to the more powerful bike early, in a large part because I had developed other skills on the track than the guys who just relied on the power from the start.
Same with Hawes, the guy just doesn't have the strength and makeup right now to be able to produce in the post, so the only thing he can do is go outside and finesse it up. IMO he is much closer right now to being a guy who is stuck on the bench than he is competing for a championship, so he needs to do what he can do, eventually the strength will come, and if he isn't a complete weenie he will gradually use it more and more. If he turns out to a big wuss, there is no denying that an effective jumpshooting finesse center holds more value around the league than an ineffective post player who doesn't get off the bench. Let him bomb away from three if that's what makes him effective and builds his value, and use the next year and 3/4 that he is on his rookie contract to decide if he is a guy to
keep or move. At least this way if he's not a keeper, you can still get value back for him.
I started riding motocross when I was pretty young. In my early teens, companies started producing 4-stroke motocross bikes and shortly thereafter, they began dominating motocross to the point that 2-strokes weren't competitive, and certainly weren't the bike that would win you a championship. The 4-stroke was a heavier bike, but they produced a ton of power, and they favored the bigger, stronger guys, those with a more powerful style of riding, over the 2-stroke bikes which required more finesse with trying to stay in your powerband and keeping up your momentum. The problem I had was that I was a scrawny little kid at the time and the 4-strokes were too heavy for me to handle. It didn't take long to figure out that the only way I would ever win a race was back on the 2-stroke, even if it wasn't the way the champions were doing it. Like 4 or 5 years later, I finally started to fill out and was as strong as the guys I was riding against, and was able to finally handle one of the 4-strokes, and was consistently beating the guys that had switched to the more powerful bike early, in a large part because I had developed other skills on the track than the guys who just relied on the power from the start.
Same with Hawes, the guy just doesn't have the strength and makeup right now to be able to produce in the post, so the only thing he can do is go outside and finesse it up. IMO he is much closer right now to being a guy who is stuck on the bench than he is competing for a championship, so he needs to do what he can do, eventually the strength will come, and if he isn't a complete weenie he will gradually use it more and more. If he turns out to a big wuss, there is no denying that an effective jumpshooting finesse center holds more value around the league than an ineffective post player who doesn't get off the bench. Let him bomb away from three if that's what makes him effective and builds his value, and use the next year and 3/4 that he is on his rookie contract to decide if he is a guy to
keep or move. At least this way if he's not a keeper, you can still get value back for him.
M_Barragan
Bench
A
AriesMar27
Guest
being able to shoot threes and actually puttung in the effort to shoot multiple threes are two different things. the fact that he can is great, the fact that he does isnt.... as a bilout shot, okay... but just for the sake of taking a three, no.... hell no... get in the post and earn three the old fashioned way.
mr. moustache
Bench
Hawes needs the 18-20ft shot, he should only be shooting 3's in end of quarter situations. He also needs to get stronger because his very decent post game is being wasted because he can't maintain position and he can't finish. A 15% increase in strength will dramatically increase his inside game.
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