re:Latest AW thread

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

Mishra wrote:
"Let's face reality here: Walker is an all star, he is among the 5 best
PF's in the game. Mercer is a nice
player with potential, let him be among the 5 best SG's in the game,
then one can contemplate about
paying him a 6 year 100 mill contract."

****

While I agree with Mishra's latest post and his views in general, I do
NOT believe Ron Mercer will ever command anything near "Antoine Walker"
money, even if we optimistically assume Ron raises his average to 20ppg
next season. Let's remind ourselves that AW delivered 47 double-doubles
last year (#2 in the NBA). Ron Mercer got ZERO double-doubles last year
(as far as I know, he never even came close).  If you're keeping score,
that's "47-0".

Granted, Ron Mercer is a guard rather than a forward, so it's not fair
to compare them.  But then how come AW also averaged more assists and
steals than Mercer?  Well, let me guess...

It's NOT because AW is one of the hardest working forwards, has never
gotten in trouble except in our wild imaginations, is the statistical
definition of a self-improving player, is absolutely fearless in the
fourth quarter, or that he stays in fantastic shape (to my knowledge, no
Pitino player before last year has ever been asked to play 40
minutes-per-game in that system). Nope, it must be because he's so
"selfish" about rebounding and stealing the ball so damn much, plus he's
likely to get himself fat and on drugs, just like any other dark-skinned
athlete who wiggles so much.

Sorry, that's more than enough sarcasm from me. I guess I'm starting to
sound like a broken record when I say: "Don't judge 'Toine by the
cover". In principle, it frankly doesn't matter if Mishra, Greg-O,
Icarus (et al) and I are dead wrong about AW and the rest of you guys
are right. What matters is that it is unfair and "un-American" to
pre-judge this kid.  IMO, it is prejudicial in the broadest sense of the
word.

My larger point, however, is that signing Antoine Walker at "market
value" today might not financially blow up the Celtics in 2001-2 (as
we're being led to presume by Peter May etc.). I think most
knowledgeable basketball coaches/GM's would recognize that the
charismatic Ron Mercers, Ray Allens, Kerry Kittles and Kobe Bryants of
the world aren't half as valuable to winning basketball as a consistent
double-double player. If a team needs 15ppg and little else from the
two-guard, a GM can find dozens of 6-5 affordable FA veterans who can
step in and deliver (that's why two-guards are so relatively cheap).
IMO, even a Dana Barros could have nearly produced 15ppg and 2.2 assists
(Mercer's numbers) if he played the same number of minutes. But take
away Antoine Walker from last year's team (or even trade him for
Vancouver's Shareef Abdur Raheem) and IMO your talking about a .200
winning percentage, rather than a promising 21-win improvement over the
previous year. After all, Antoine Walker's fellow starters (Greg Minor?
Andrew DeClerq? Barros/Billups?) were inferior to the Vancouver starting
unit ("Big Country" etc), which still managed to lose nearly 80% of
their games under Shareef's "leadership". I also love Shareef as a
player, but with him on the Celts last season, we would have ended up
drafting Paul Pierce with the 2nd overall pick instead of at number 10.
I truly believe this.

As I've said before, the Celts finally have enough good-neighbor,
Clark-Kent/Superman-types (Mercer and Pierce) to make every one of us
fans happy (even Kevin Lok's wife, I hope!). But puh-lease, let's also
re-sign Antoine Walker so we can have a chance to actually win big
games. It's pretty clear that Antoine Walker 1) wants financial
"respect" (thank David Falk in part for that),  2) he wants to play to
win in important games, plus 3) he wants to thoroughly dominate the best
forwards in basketball. Do any of you guys really believe that getting
just one of the above (money) will be enough for him?  Especially under
Pitino's coaching, AW has a chance to continue improving each year until
he's a far more dangerous forward than Karl Malone was in his prime. In
three years, those 17 million clams might actually look like a fair
bargain; and in seven years, it might look a lot more like today's
"Scottie Pippen" money than "Kevin Garnett" money.


"Beat LA in 2000"


JoeHironaka
Paris

****

P.S. I didn't plan to comment on Peter May's latest hatchet-job of
Antoine Walker, until Dorine posted it for comment.  As someone who
works for a living as an editor (believe it or not!) , I feel that May
should have shown the journalistic integrity + the balls to express his
opinion ("run Walker out of town") in a sports columnist format, rather
than constantly cloaking his biases in pseudo-factual reportage. Every
other line of May's article comes straight from the Joseph Goebbels
school of propaganda. It's really kind of creepy how natural this style
of writing comes to him. I don't think I'm being too harsh.