Nope, hadn't even known this was a facet of his doctrine. Way, way out of the loop on football, especially east coast football. (Didn't a local football team win something big? Believe I remember hearing about that...From: Kim Malo <kimmalo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Parcells disciple, are you <g>?
It's a good and fair question. What I meant anyway is that there is a general job description, including some critical key elements, and the player doesn't at least competently fill a reasonable percentage of those.Yeah, all this is true, but what if the job description of the position changes? That is, what if the PG's job on a certain team is to bring the ball up, pass off, then look for his (three-point) shot? Then the court vision thing is less important. (Of course, it's not like "court vision" is ever going to be a detriment to an NBA player.)
Doesn't have to be all of them, doesn't have to be superlative. It's not necessarily stats so much as what the 90s business buzzword refers to as core competencies. If you want to get fancy with it you can even weight their relative importance.
Anyway, an example - PG's key job at one end of the floor is to set up the offense. One of the core competencies tied to this is therefore court vision. Other positions CAN have it (Bird had some of the best every and Walker's ain't bad) as a bonus, but PG HAS to have it IMO. Delk from what I saw didn't look around him very much and did not seem to see what was there when he did. Without that you can't begin to distribute, control tempo, etc
Yeah, but the single core competency he is known to have is the ability to shoot, which belongs to the SG. It's a bonus in the point or else a lower level core competency (the old keep the defense honest) but it's the defining one in a SG and it's his leading skill.Is Delk's core competency "shooting" or "scoring"? I think he's labeled mostly as a scorer. He scores in many ways: slashing, some spot-up shooting, and certainly it''s difficult to say shooting is his forte. That's another reason why I generally prefer the numerical position designators over the labels. Especially nowadays, I think, the "small forward" often plays more like a guard, for instance. What if the "point guard' was the shooter and the "shooting guard" was the passer? The labels can help to create expectations that aren't necessarily valid.
I can go down more of these, but the net results to me are that he's a SG rather than a PG. He has at least some SG core competencies but doesn't even have enough of the PG core competencies from what I saw to be branded a swing guard or tweener. You can argue that he isn't a particularly good SG either, but he's a better SG than he is at any other position on the court.Yes, let's try to get me back on the track here. Hard to argue with anything above. I guess I'd classify Delk as a combo guard: he'll be used at point even if he isn't the best-suited for it, and he'll undoubtedly get time at the 2 with Obie in charge. Sure would feel better if Delk had some more "traditional point guard skills", though. One of the questions for me this off-season is "Where in the world does Tony Delk fit on the Celtics?"