Re: Golden State Radio Announcers

[Alexander Wang <awang@MIT.EDU>]

At 01:17 PM 1/6/01 -0800, Thomas Murphy wrote:
>The other comments concerned our favorite veteran all-star, Antoine (it
>annoys me to no end that they pronounce Jamison's name the same way despite
>the fact that it is spelled AntAWN). 

Evidently Antawn really is pronounced "Antoine". Don't blame the
announcers; if anyone's at fault, it would probably be the parents for
giving him a funny spelling. 

>Regarding Walker, they agreed that he
>didn't make his teammates better. In fact, they thought his play at times
>made it HARDER for his teammates to stay in the flow of the game, making
>reference to a few instances in the 4th when Walker would get the defensive
>board, dribble the length of the court and then call an isolation play for
>himself. They also called Walker one-dimensional, by which I guess they were
>referring to his selfish attitude rather than his physical abilities, and
>noted that for the number of times he handled the ball he should have had a
>LOT more assists. 

With Antoine it all seems to be where his brain is oriented. When he's in a
bad decision-making mode, which unfortunately is usually the case in crunch
time, he hurts the team in obvious ways -- basically by ball-hogging. He
has an idea that when it's close late in the game, he has to "take over",
and that means scoring in his mind. Given Antoine's talents, "taking over"
should mean drawing the double team and hitting the open man.

>They thought he would be a far better player if he were on
>a team with a couple veteran players (not necessarily all-stars but PLAYERS)
>who could slap him down and allow him to develop a more team-oriented game
>rather than constantly being the focus of offense and the oppositions
>defense.

This is true. I've been thinking more about the structural problem of the
team, which I'll write about in more depth in the future. But Antoine does
seem like the type of player who would be better as a facilitating player
on a team with better surrounding talent, rather than "the man." He's
simply not a dominating scorer. That leaves Pierce as another go-to option,
but he's got his own problems too. Just in general, right now in crunch
time we have two "go-to" guys, neither of them dominating. And then we have
three subpar talents -- Stith who is in a major slump, whoever's at point
guard, and either Vitaly or Battie. I mean, Antoine and Paul should still
pass out of the double teams, but I can kind of understand the pressure
they feel to score surrounded by these guys. Last year at least Kenny was
shooting well and could generally at the very least get to the basket when
we were desperate, and Vitaly was playing pretty decently. This year, come
crunch time, the other team turns up the defensive pressure and the offense
just shuts down.

The question is, how to solve the problem? I've been pondering it for a
while. I have to say that, since I really care most about having a
championship team, that I've been gravitating towards a "blow it up"
approach. I think Bird is one of the few guys who could get away with
saying, "Everything's messed up; I'm going to blow things up. We're going
to suck for a while but it's what we need to do to get banner 17." 

Alex