It is generally accepted that it takes a player a few years to reach the point where their skills are honed to the point whereby they reach their potential. This is especially true of players that come out of college early. For this reason, it puzzles me that so many people on the list want to trade Walker. In my opinion, he has shown that he is progressing as a player and it appears to me that in the coming years he'll be one of the top players in the NBA. This question is for those who want to trade him--why? Why are you unwilling to let Walker grow with the Celtics?
First, I think fans associate the "Walker Era" with losing and mediocrity
(a phenomenon they are not accustomed to) and move to the possibly unconnected
and illogical conclusion that Toine must be the problem (as opposed to
the weak and inexperienced talent around him) rather than part of the eventual
solution. The press fuels easy assumptions that jetisoning Antoine will
make the team better.
Second, I think there is an inevitable time lag between Antoine's actual maturity level and how fans perceive him to be. Last season, Antoine undeniably turned a corner in terms of maturity by proving he could drop the wiggle, get up to 70% as a FT shooter. To many fans, this was no doubt a bigger deal than the fact that he dished for more assists per game than Kenny Anderson over the past two months of the season or led the Celtics (a top rebounding team BTW) in rebounding for the fourth straight season.
Believe me I'm not a big fan of using the age excuse, but when the player in question is a 23-years-old (until August 12th), you're really talking about someone only a few months older than some of the untested rookie draft pick projects (Thakalidis) we feel will make the team better.
I don't mind reading serious trade discussion about Antoine on this list, but despite the "franchise player" numbers he put up in the last two months of the season he frankly still has an unacceptably poor theoretical trade value. By contrast, Paul Pierce (who got named in th press as one of the most underrated players in the NBA etc.) has a much better trade value. Walker got bashed last year really for the first time by the national media in some "cut&paste" hatchet jobs, which in turn is bound to effect his popularity with fans in other cities. Moreover we would only get half his cap value in a return trade.
Plus I can't help thinking at this stage that trading Walker is a bit like selling out your partner stake in the next Yahoo! or Nokia just a few weeks before a billion dollar IPO. I seriously doubt even the biggest "dump Antoine" advocates on this list believe that the Celtics brass spent the last four years nurturing Antoine's excruciatingly raw talent in order to dump him just as the eventual decade-long dividends of his all-around skills and competitiveness first start coming into clearer view.
My point then is that the Celts can always trade Antoine down the road if the last two months of this past season prove to have been a fluke (that's possible) and his shot selection and decision making somehow regresses next season. But of ALL the times not to trade him, right now seems like the stupidest and least defensible one.
****