Owly wrote:AEnigma wrote:Owly wrote:What was meaningful was ... what I said. Was Hakeem just not utilized or was he not good (or willing) at a thing. You asserted it solely as the former. I argued it wasn't. You object to this.
No, you read it solely as the former because you prefer to argue the latter.
Feels like Hakeem gets penalised because he was not used as a team playmaker for the first half of his career,
You putting forth Hakeem's non-passing solely as result of utilization.
Please bold the word solely for me.
I have repeatedly said there is no set image of what would look like with earlier utilisation. You are either not paying attention or engaging in bad faith. Although maybe I should leave open the possibility for both.
You only talk about utilization.
Which is not the same thing as saying it is a sole result — and the ludicrous suggestion that every possibility must be addressed, lest some reader think there is an invisible “only” at play, also lends itself to a conclusion of bad faith intent.
And, fwiw, the point is much different if it comes with "which was inially correct given his inexperience".
No, and for future reference, I tend not to write out of concern for possible pedantic misinterpretation.
The versus Embiid is a strawman.
No, it is literally the thread topic
and the subject of Tsherkin’s comment.
A strawman is attacking a position that was not made, such as arguing against the unstated idea that the only possible difference was utilisation.
It is a broad contextual background to your comment but not at the core of whether Hakeem was willing and able and merely mis-utilized.
Unfortunately you have continued to not bother exploring either. Again, as soon as you come up with an explanation as to the magical change wholly independent of Rudy T that gave Hakeem the sudden and previously inconceivable ability to playmake effectively, please edify us. Until then, this is offering nothing more than a conversational derail.
Uh huh. In observing that 1999 usage increase, did you happen to notice that the team lost its top two highest shot rate players? And its fourth highest shot rate player? And that Pippen had a lower shot rate than all of them? There is a difference between being asked to be play within an offence and being asked to shoulder a higher scoring load when other options suddenly become scarce.
Right ... so we've gone from the idea that he can't be a playmaker playing next to Pippen and Barkley, despite Barkley being there before to what ... ? That he can't be a playmaker without Clyde Drexler and Kevin Willis he needs to bump his usage up?
More strawmen. Who said cannot? You are the one caught up on projected inability. My sole stance is that I do not think Hakeem forgot how to pass during a now extended offseason and that the logical place to start when confronted with some box score implication of suddenly forgotten skill would be to consider a change in scheme or team approach.
What of willingness?
What of it? Are you under the impression all player habits are a matter of conscious will?
Why must everything be "all" with you? No. I am raising the possibility he may have been an unwilling passer. There are allusions to the possibility in '93 after his improvement, for instance (again per Cohn)
Hakeem could always score, rebound and block shots... Now he's finally clued in to the fact he could help his team by distributing the ball
That isn't
necessarily saying unwilling, it could be saying he legit thought the shooting through aggressive coverage (e.g. the cited triple teams) was the best thing ... then it's more a shot at his BBIQ at that time.
And whose job is it to demystify those “incorrect” impressions?
He may have been unwilling. He may have been unconfident. He may have been mechanically incapable. He may have been too damn stupid apparently, like anyone who does not take the mathematically correct basketball action at any given moment.
What is not a
may is that Rudy T took over and suddenly none of that seemed to prevent him from being an effective playmaker. Still seeing zero constructive purpose to any of this.
One could just as well argue Isaiah Thomas put up a 6.7 BPM season so he could always have done so.
There are better uses of my time than engaging with bad faith non-sequiturs. If you are this bored, I am sure you will find some willing partners on the General Board.
There's nothing bad faith about it,
Highly doubtful.
nor non-sequitur for that matter.
Wrong.
Your oversimplification could equally have applied to Thomas.
Wrong.
The "sudden development = latent ability" or "already there and unshown by scheme" as the only alternates could just as well apply to Thomas.
In a deliberately absurdist bad faith extrapolation of possibility, sure. In an honest assessment, no.
To the extent this could have ever been a sincere attempt to engage, there is no one specific element of Thomas’s 2017 that was impossible to envision based on prior production. It was the conflation of a one-season scoring explosion across the board that was sudden, not “increasing shot volume” in isolation or “shooting x%” in isolation.
It isn't to say the situations are perfectly analogous
They are analogous in the sense that both gesture at basketball improvement. Which makes for a **** analogy absent anything more.
but it fits your "one thing or the other" framing just fine.
Wrong, and outright misrepresentative — which of course furthers my confidence in this entire bad faith effort at a derail.
You continue to have nothing to offer to the thread topic.
