Quote:
Originally Posted by GhostOfAdamMorrison
I agree that Monta has been great thus far...but your example doesn't really make sense. You act as though 3 rebounds and 2 assists from a starting SG playing 30+ minutes are impressive? Both are below league average.
|
Ghost has pretty much made the points I wanted to make on this front. He should be able to pull down 2 rebounds by virtue of being on the court for 30 minutes in a non-comatose state. It's not really to his credit that he can pull down 3. You look at Monta's rebounding numbers on a per-minute basis and compare it with all other guards who played more than 500 minutes last season, and he comes out in the bottom half of all qualified players. If you are going to throw out his numbers in an argument on his behalf, you need to put it into proper context compared with his peers as a SG. In that vein, you can argue that 2 assists doesn't fully capture his impact passing the ball, but 2 assists in 30 minutes isn't a really a credit for a guard. The steals are nice, but that still won't capture his entire defensive impact (be it positive or negative). The ten free throws are really part of scoring efficiency so I don't factor that a separate characteristic that still needs to be factored when I say his scoring has been impressive so far. I will note that if he's getting 8-10 free throws a game, we aren't going to need to worry about whether he's been scoring efficiently enough (an 80% FT shooter that gets 10 free throws is probably going to have an efficient scoring night).
For the reasons outlined above, Monta needs to be an impact offensive player, and the main way he's going to have to do that is to be an efficient scorer that can put up points in bunches. He's undoubtedly been doing so thus far, but the question is whether he will sustain it over the course of a season. The fact of the matter is that he's been an inefficient volume shooter for several years now. It doesn't seem to be a popular opinion on this particular thread, but I'm always a skeptic when it comes to players suddenly bucking a multi-year trend, even with a change in scenery. It can be done, but it isn't the norm. I will say that there have some encouraging signs so far (the note about him only taking 2 midrange shots in this game is my favorite), but you can't expect anyone to be convinced on the basis of 4 games. After all, remember all of the plaudits that Mayo and Collison were receiving at this point last season.
I do think his passing is a positive for a shooting guard, but not overwhelmingly so to the point that he can afford to going back to being a 20 point a game scorer on 50% TS%. If that's where we end up, he's not worth the $8 mil/year contract in my book.