The Warriors player seemingly has a lot in common with a lot of Celtics fans: he's hyper-focused on the last game, without any greater perspective.
Hayward has averaged 12.3 points, 3.8 rebounds, 3.3 assists, 47.8% FG%, .576 TS% in 24.6 minutes in January. That includes his poor offensive performance last night.
In other words, he's averaging a point about every two minutes, on very good efficiency. Sure, there are problems -- his aggressiveness, his outside shooting -- but his production is actually quite solid, especially with as many scoring options as we have. I mean, here are the guys on our team scoring 0.5 points per minute (i.e., 18 points per 36): Kyrie, Morris, Tatum. That's it, and Morris and Tatum are just over that threshold.
I get that a large percentage of any fan base will look for scapegoats, but let's actually pay attention to what guys have been doing on the court.
The defense rests. I find Gordon innocent of all charges.
It sucks that he's having that contract held against him. He earned that contract and has made every effort to fulfill it. If the production doesn't ever live up to the contract, that would definitely be a financial burden, but it was the price doing business. You can't account for injuries, unless there has been a history of them.
I disagree that his contract is being held against him. If Hayward was playing like Morris and Morris was playing like Hayward, contracts being as they are people would be calling for Morris and his 'friendly' contract to be benched. It's not about money now, it's about on-court impact.
And although I agree hyper reaction is happening, Hayward's impact on the team goes beyond his pts and shooting percentages. He is being attacked by opposing offenses (at least well coached offenses) and plays a slower pace than the Celtic's should be playing. One of our big advantages during last year's playoff run was our ability to switch on defense and athleticism/speed on the perimeter. Hobbled Hayward is gumming up that strength. It's an issue.
Comparing January, Hayward and Morris (and Brown) have similar levels of production in January:
PLAYER TEAM AGE GP W L MIN PTS FGM FGA FG% 3PM 3PA 3P% FTM FTA FT% REB AST TOV STL BLK
Jaylen Brown BOS 22 13 9 4 24.5 12.8 4.6 9.8 47.2 1.4 3.2 42.9 2.2 3 71.8 4.5 1.2 1.6 1.1 0.5
Gordon Hayward BOS 28 12 8 4 24.6 12.3 4.5 9.4 47.8 1.2 3.5 33.3 2.1 2.8 75.8 3.8 3.3 1.8 0.8 0.3
Marcus Morris BOS 29 12 8 4 26.7 12.3 4.3 10.8 40.3 1.9 5.2 37.1 1.7 2.1 80 5.8 1.2 0.8 0.8 0.5
This is really a value for money equation. Because everyone's expectations for Gordon are so much greater than for Mook and Jaylen and because he's getting paid more than twice as much as the both of them combined, he will always attract more scrutiny of his performance than those two. You could argue that given Mook's salary of 5m/year, we're actually getting good value for his production and should be happy with it, while we criticize Hayward for the same production. If Hayward was being paid $15m, got injured and then had this level of performance coming back I suggest that the level of vitriol regarding his performance would be much lower. People never like feeling let down from high expectations, and the general expectation of a max contract player around the league is to be a 20ppg scorer and significantly contribute to rebounds and assists, or both, depending on his role (though in this team there may not be room for a second 20ppg scorer other than Kyrie, not unless there's some players shipped out). And the expectations for Gordon when he signed were very high, he was going to be the second scorer in the team behind IT and was going to contribute in other ways. Then 2017 happened, and in 2018 he's a shadow of what we expected when we (or Wyc) paid through the nose for him. Even more infuriating is the fact that occasionally he comes up with gems like the 2 MN games, or the 16/10/8 game, that show his quality, and what he *could* add to the Celtics, only to follow up with a 2 or 3 point game the following night. Consistency is his biggest enemy right now.
Also, how many max contract players in the league have usages of less than 20%? There are only 3 in the league that I can count based on the query below, and we have 2 of them: Al Horford 18.4% and Gordon Hayward 19.3%. The other is Kyle Lowry at 19.5% (his usage significantly dropped with the arrival of Kawhi).
http://bkref.com/tiny/DjwkrAs for the "unnamed Warriors player", I have my money on Draymond
Topic: Unnamed Warrior: Hayward a “liability on both sides of the court” (Read 15501 times)