Walker's FG%

[Hironaka <j.hironaka@unesco.org>]

    Antoine can do a lot of things (he has 6 games with 12 or more
rebounds, and 8 double-doubles) but he's not an efficient scorer. After
17 games, he's at a career low FG%. Playing at power forward, he's made
half his shots or better in only 3 of 17 games to date. Last night's
6-17 performance marked the fifth time he's missed around two-third of
his shots (Pierce has also done this five times), including two games in
a row (14-41 versus the Clippers and Wolves). And don't look now but
he's 3-15 on treys over the last three games.

    This bears watching, how he'll handle his latest shooting slump.
Obviously he'll break out of it eventually, but the question is will he
ever break out of it permanently. He owes it to his team to be working
overtime on his shooting what with Orlando and Indiana coming up this
week. It isn't even a matter of shooting as shot selection.Walker is the
second-best freethrow shooter in our lineup after Stith. I think this
guy can shoot pretty straight and he probably has worked fairly hard at
it. He needs to back off the low percentage shots. I can live with a
4-15 night once in awhile from Pierce and Walker (that is the nature of
the game if you are mainly a one-on-one and perimeter shooting player).
But these 6-19, 8-24 games shouldn't happen.

    Walker probably knows he'll always be widely viewed as a flawed
player because of his low FG% for a 6-9 guy (and because his team
doesn't win either). He's like a 40 homerun guy who bats .220 every
year, like a Dave Kingman or whatever. It's hard to get used to the idea
of Antoine always shooting under 45% for the rest of his career. It's
hard to believe a championship contending team can co-exist with that
level of shot efficiency by your star (although Iverson and Co. are
doing just fine right now). I hope Toine steps it up as a priority. The
thing is, if he starts passing up likely bricks or blocks, he has the
talent to turn that into a nice dish off (what with three guys guarding
him by the time he's under the basket). He was headed in the right
direction last Spring in terms of assists and FG%. But even I'll face
the fact that with each passing season, it seems less-and-less likely
we'll ever see Antoine Walker shoot even as high as 47% over an 82 game
schedule and playoffs (like Bird did as a 24-year-old rookie).

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