Ron Mercer

[Alex Wang <awang@mit.edu>]

Ron Mercer is a nice player that doesn't fit in with the other
talented stars, Walker and Pierce. In particular, he and Pierce
don't complement each other (as KK noted). It's possible that
they could co-exist (like Houston and Sprewell on the Knicks).

Ron basically has a single halfcourt offensive talent, which is 
to run off screens and hit 18 foot jump shots with a decent 
percentage. This is better than it sounds and a lot of teams 
could use him. I could see him being very successful as the
prime outside offensive weapon on a thuggish defensive team. 
He's the type of player where you can call his number all day
and he'll put the ball in the basket at that 40-45% clip for 
20 ppg at least. If you combine that with good defensive players
you could have a pretty decent team. And there are a lot of teams
that are short of offensive players.

The problem on the Celtics is that they have more efficient 
scorers than Ron, despite his sweet looking jump shot; Walker is 
slightly more efficient (and gets his own shot) and Pierce is far 
more efficient. When you have more efficient offensive players, you
don't want to throw the ball to the less efficient player twenty
times. In addition, you probably want to get Potapenko the ball
quite a bit too because he can draw fouls and even double teams.
So it's hard to justify paying Mercer upwards of $50M.

Why isn't Ron an efficient player? First, he doesn't hit three 
pointers. Second, he doesn't go to the foul line. His first season,
he had a FG:FT ratio of 5:1. This year, 7:1. Compare to Steve Smith
who historically has around 3:1, Mitch Richmond 3:1, Reggie 
Miller at 2:1 to 3:1, Iverson close to 2:1, Rider around 4:1,
Sprewell better than 3:1. Why is Ron so bad in this department?
He doesn't have a post up game and he doesn't take his defender
one-on-one. 

He certainly has upside and there's one thing he could do that would
help immediately, which is improve his shot selection. Pitino pointed
out during one of his shows that Ron tends to take his shot off the
screen even when the defender is on him. I have a feeling that Ron is
the one that Pitino is talking about when he says that there were 
other players with equally bad shot selection when Walker was being
booed.

Alex