and once again you provide zero actual claims besides your personal worthless observations.

http://turkey2010.fiba.com/pages/eng/fe/10/fwcm/team/p/eid/4728/rid//sid/4728/tid/379/profile.html

I’m sure the coaches aren’t asking Stephen Curry, Billups, Rose or Westbrook to rebound either but they are all vastly outrebounding EJ on a per minute basis and total rebounds. In fact EJ has the 2nd fewest total rebounds of anyone on the team despite playing the 4th most minutes.

And EJ has one assist (1!) in 113 minutes of court time. That’s pretty hard to do… even Tyson Chandler has 4.

So the pros are simple, EJ is shooting extremely well, something I think everyone already knew he was able to do. The cons are equally obvious, he still lacks play-making skill and is a disinterested in rebounding.

he isn’t being asked to create for others, Coach K wants him to be the designated shooter and a good defender. Also EJ doesn’t handle the ball enough to generate assists and usually the moment the ball gets to him, he shoots which is exactly what he is supposed to do.

Is this how it’s going to be ALL year? Are you really going to do this from now until the end of the season?

When it costs his team the game then we have a problem, but it doesn’t matter or impact the game at this point, nor will it ever.

but the point of this thread was that EJ doesn’t seem to have learned this rebounding thing over the summer.

Physically there is no reason EJ can’t be at least an average rebounder, why are you guys so adamant about making up excuses for him. He needs to get down with the bigs occasionally and get his own damn rebound so he can start a fast break. If he does this once or twice a game he would be a 20 point scorer and no one could say BD has some invisible bias against him.

rebounding, ball handling and passing. I/we already knew he could shoot and we knew he could play good individual defense. We’ve yet to see play making, improved ball handling (he’s been a catch and shoot guy for Team USA) or rebounding. Team USA might not need him to do those things and win but the Clippers aren’t afforded the luxury of having guards average less than 3 rebounds per 36 minutes.

There are certain blanket statements like a missed 3 leads to a long rebound and a fast break that have generally been accepted as truths.

 If a company hired enough people, they could look at every missed shot from a certain distance from the basket and make a sort of weighted average of how valuable a shot is too. I would venture to say there have been some attempts to do this in the blogging world, but they haven’t been as widely publicized (there was a nice one on why Nash was such a great shooter even beyond his effective field goal or true shooting percentage).

As an example, the long two pointer is one of the worst shots because it generally has a low percent chance of being made (relative to something like a layup or 15 footer), can lead to a long rebound, and is only worth 2 rather than 3 points.

You might also factor in whether the shot was attempted against the strong side or weak side of a defense and whether that may impact rebounding rate. Would the angle you shot it at (relative to the basket) also effect rebounding in the case of a miss? There are numerous variables to take into account, but like John R said we only need to account for a certain amount of these because we already have a close enough approximation. (Example: 1/10 + 1/10000 is still pretty much 1/10).

As another example,if you look at the Lakers, whenever they attack inside (or at least relatively close), Bynum, Gasol, and Odom get tons of what may seem to be high percentage tip attempts. Game 7 against Boston was an extreme example of this.

Similar arguments happen in other sports such as whether it is more effective to go for a 2 point conversion or just go for the 1 extra point in football. There was a statistical analysis done on this, but I guess it sometime depends on the score and situation.

Another nice thing I saw a while back was which point guards gave the best passes to lead to a good assist. A good assist being one that leads to a high field goal attempt. Baron was near the top of, or on the top of this list.

BTW, would you stipulate that on a per minute basis EJ’s scoring in FIBA has been elite?

Not sure why I’m asking, as I’m well aware of the small sample size issues and the competition (Clippers don’t play Angola in the West.)

That’s a really good point. I’ve been riding on the fact that it’s silly to knock on EJ for a few weaknesses when he’s got a lot of really great strengths. But I don’t think he’s as good at his strengths (shooting, scoring, drawing fouls, on-ball defense) as those guys are at their strengths (rebounding, blocks, on/off-ball defense). I think he definitely COULD be that good, though. And I think things like Team USA are exactly how you get that good.

Not sure how this makes him below average, though. He may not be one of the best ____ of all time (like Rodman and even Ben Wallace were), but he’s still pretty darn good.

Either way, it was really fun to watch (from my fantasy homepage, that is).

Joakim Noah has some very specific talents that VDN helped bring to the surface. One might wonder if this would have happened under any coach. Perhaps, but the key is that VDN gave Noah the playing time to properly assert himself. Remember, most of the other Bulls didn’t even like Noah, but VDN helped cultivate an atmosphere on that team in which Noah was able to flourish both on the court and in the locker room. Playing time is one of those things that is completely in the coach’s hands, and can completely alter the trajectory of a player’s career.

On the other hand, he didn’t get anything out of the perennial “potential” guy, Tyrus Thomas. Though, I’m beginning to wonder if there’s really all that much there, other than athleticism.

every time you post something without providing any proof besides your personal opinions. Please bother to post some meaningful statistics rather than your own opinions which are usually poorly thought out.

This team has a ton of problems as one would expect from a team that has gone 23-59, 19-63 and 29-53 the last 3 seasons.

Rebounding is a big problem, the team had two atrocious rebounders on the wings last year (Rasual Butler is terrible too). BG and Kaman have to be terrible rebounders to make up for their deficiencies.

Defense is another big problem (once Camby was traded). The Clippers gave up 110 points per 100 possessions last year, among the worst in the league.

On offense only Baron Davis is capable of creating offense for the other players. Kaman can’t handle double teams, EJ has issues dribbling in traffic, BG is a rookie and Gomes is a marginal starter who we hope can make jump shots but have zero expectations of creating other shots.

So yes, the team has numerous problems, ignoring one (weak perimeter rebounding) because there are so many doesn’t solve anything, it only keeps the Clippers further away from being a competent team.

the deciding factor in the Clippers decision was the FO thought EJ could make the transition to PG… 2 years later I still don’t see that happening.

Bayless actually has pretty comparable numbers to EJ. He’s a better rebounder (of course) and passer (4.7 assists vs. 3.0 assists) and is better at getting to the FT line (6.7 vs 4.8). It’s too early to call on these young guys but clearly EJ has had a easier road to getting playing time on two bad teams while Bayless is behind a perennial all-star.