Walker's potential

[Alex Wang <awang@mit.edu>]

Walker's April stats are actually pretty encouraging.

His "adjusted FG%" (adding the extra points from 3's) was a very
respectable 47.6% while his FT% was 76.7%. Straight FG% for a player
like Walker is deceptive because he puts up around 4 three-pointers
a game at a 37% rate, which is actually an excellent percentage. 
(You wouldn't complain about a guy who shot 55% on two-pointers,
which would give you the same number of points per FG attempt). 
The main thing to stay away from is the three-pointer early in the 
shot clock, but I think that telling Walker to never take three 
pointers and play exclusively inside would actually hurt the team.

If he hauls down offensive rebounds at the rate he did over the
first two years and changes some of his shot attempts to passes 
(and then attempts to rebound the resulting shot), he could come
very close to Pitino's 16/12/5 goal next year, while scoring in
a very efficient manner. As a side note, Barkley's stats were
16/12/5, I believe. 

Actually Pitino may have mentioned 6-7 assists per game as a goal
for Walker, which would make him the highest-assist forward in
the game; if he could add the 10-12 rebounds, he really would be
an MVP candidate (assuming the Celtics actually win games as a 
result).

Alex