Eric Williams, second unit scoring, and the press

[Alex Wang <awang@mit.edu>]

Even though I've been one of the Eric Williams bashers on the list,
I hope that he does indeed develop into a potent scorer off the bench
now that he is back with the Celtics. His ability to get to the line
is very impressive (as is Fortson's, actually). I calculate his
"scoring efficiency", for what it's worth, as 48% last year as 
opposed to Ron Mercer's 46%, despite Williams shooting a horrendous 
36.5% from the field. His career efficiency is 50.3%.

It's certainly a change to think of having three guys (Barros, Cheaney,
Williams) off the bench who have in their careers shown proven ability 
to put the ball in the basket. Contrast with last year where you'd see
sometimes see a lineup of Barros coupled with a scoring challenged group
of Riley, Battie, McCarty, and Bowen. The press should be much more 
effective with this new group, since they might actually score enough 
to set it up.

I think we are going to see the press used much more consistently this
year, though probably more rarely with the starting lineup. I remember
Pitino mentioning that even when the Celtics pressed last year, it was
essentially just man-to-man coverage over the full court, rather than
the sophisticated system that he teaches emphasizing spacing and
rotations. I would think that he has enough athletic types on his 
team combined with enough scoring talent that he should be able to
field at least one effective press unit - Battie, McCarty, Pierce, 
Cheaney, and Turner seems like a possibility, though they'd take
a beating inside in a halfcourt game. Hopefully, the days of turning
over six players per season are over and the current unit can start
really learning and getting used to Pitino's system. The triangle offense
supposedly took two years to learn (and probably much longer to perfect).

Alex