Re: Ron Mercer

[Josh Ozersky <josh_ozersky@yahoo.com>]

This is the most intelligent analysis of Ron Mercer I
have seen yet.  Ship him off!  (But keep Tony.)


--- Alex Wang <awang@mit.edu> wrote:
> 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
> 
> 

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