especially when you are your teams best player and teams gear their entire defense toward stopping you. you can ask paul pierce what thats like...or ray allen...or kg
Or Kobe.
Simply put: implying that Giddens is/could be/will be an efficient scorer because his college stats are similar to those of Paul Pierce is very misleading. Giddens was not a very efficient scorer during his college career when you adjust for the schedulle strenght; he won't be a good scorer in the NBA anytime soon and probably never.
I don't know what the fact that every player has more trouble in offense when facing better teams has to do with this. If Kobe, Pierce or Allen were facing WMC teams when they were 21/22/23, they'd be dropping highly efficient 40 points per game night in night out.
I think you guys are relying a bit too much on stats and making some big time assumptions. True Kansas played a tougher schedule than UNM, but Pierce played alongside someone by the name of Raef LaFrentz, who drew a decent amount of defensive focus, whereas Giddens was a one-man show at UNM. He drew a defensive focus like Kobe saw from the C's every time he went out there (or the opponents at least attempted that). Also, Giddens dropped 30, 28 and 26 in the last few weeks of the season on BYU, Utah and Cal respectively, with 37 boards over those 3 games. Your averages reflect one 4 point (on 2-8 shooting) outing vs. BYU where he only played 25 minutes. Take that out and, his numbers actually rose vs. good competition. (My point here is that 6 games is not a large enough sample size to reach conclusions about what he does against "good" defenses without actually watching the games). If you saw either his last game in the MWC tourney or the NIT game, you would've seen a fierce competitor who rose to the occasion and tried to carry a team on his back, and not just by scoring. He was passing, playing D, and leaving everything out there on the court. This is not just a player who padded his scoring numbers vs. bad teams. Two of his lowest scoring games were against New Mexico St. for God's sake. His 8% 3 point shooting (1-12) against "tough" competition is also misleading in that most games he went 0-1 or 0-2 and one game where he went 1-5 vs. Cal (but played an absolutely phenomenal game otherwise), hardly enough sample size.
I think you are overrating the major conferences as well. Danny Granger certainly hasn't found it very tough scoring in the NBA. He too came from New Mexico, and he too was the sole focus of defenses.
My original point in posting the comparisons to Pierce were not to say that he will rival Pierce in terms of his scoring (we could only dream of that). Rather, it was to say that Giddens is not a BAD shooter. His shooting percentages were very similar to Pierce's in college. An open look is an open look, whether it's vs. Iowa or Wyoming. Giddens is mediocre from 3 point range, but he's a rather efficient scorer in that he's got a scorer's mentality and NBA moves. He shot 51.6% from the field for God's sake ... I'd hate to see what it takes for you guys to consider him a good shooter.
I think, frankly, that many people on this board are overrating his defense and assuming because Danny and Doc say this kid can play defense from day one, that he's a Tony Allen clone. He's not. He's a well-rounded basketball player who will do whatever it takes to win. From the games I saw, he was a good defender, but by no means a lock-down defender. Perhaps since I'm sure he'll understand that his ticket to PT will be his defense, he may become a lock-down defender, but that wasn't his only role in college. He was the MAN on a rather poor team otherwise.
Topic: The get to know J.R. Giddens thread. (Read 54336 times)