Dulling

[Kim Malo]

At 09:42 PM 8/31/2007, Peter Delevett wrote:
>If Ainge truly believes Ray and Tony Allen can log
>meaningful minutes at the point, he's an idiot.

In fairness - and don't get me wrong about how I feel about Tony at 
the point, although he has at least actually improved his dribbling 
quite a bit - if you check the Herald article, what Danny actually 
said was that the offense ran more efficiently ***for that one string 
of games (after the injuries)*** (emphasis mine) when Tony was at the 
point, than when anyone else was vs some sort of broadbased 
endorsement of Tony as a PG, as was implied in posts here. That's a 
pretty limited endorsement, in a specific situation where Tony's 
helter skelter game best suited the players we were forced to give 
minutes to. And my memory is that he was right, in that limited 
period -  Tony did get the ball moving quickly down court and took it 
to the hoop vs the tendency of others to walk and just pound it 
dribbling while deciding what to do (before taking a shaky jumper 
with the clock running out and no motion by anyone else).

Of course that "efficiency" was even more a function of how Tony 
himself was our hottest player at that time and was taking a lot of 
the shots, which were mostly high percentage drive it to the hoop 
shots vs settling for those outside jumpshots, as everyone else 
seemed to. Obviously the all Tony all the time show is NOT an 
efficient way to run an offense for any length of time, especially 
with all our new offensive options, no matter how well it might have 
worked then. But it might be an occasional second team, pedal to the 
metal drive it down their throats change of pace option option if 
Tony comes back with anything like the game he had before. That total 
failure to drive it down other teams' throats when they're tired, 
after TO, and missed shots, etc is one of my major pet peeves and has 
been for years. It was at the core of Red's winning style. And a 
totally different idea than Tony as a regular part of a PG rotation.

That being said, Bulpett had the best thumbail analysis of our PG 
situation - it's basically Rondo and a bunch of guys who can play 
there (which is not the same as should play there or can play there 
well). I always think Danny's view of this whole PG function, 
especially the back up PG function, is highly colored by the fact 
that he himself was essentially a 2 guard playing there himself and 
that didn't cost them games....   Of course this ignores the better 
coaching  players came into the league with and who he was playing 
with and how much they actually needed someone to feed them the ball properly.

Kim