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He still can improve and absolutely has value to an NBA team but trading him (particularly for a solid player at the same position) does not cripple Memphis’ lofty aspirations in any meaningful way.
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Keeping all of this in mind, it feels like those who hate the trade for Memphis are more in love with the idea of Rudy Gay and what he could become as a basketball player than the understanding that a 26-year-old playing in his sixth season as a full-time starter can improve but just will not become the superstar everyone hoped he would progress into. By just about any measure, Rudy Gay’s 2012-13 has been a disaster thus far.
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Even 55th in the league does not mark any sort of elite player, especially considering Rudy has played substantially worse than that level this season. Incidentally, each of these high water marks occurred during the 2010-11 season where Rudy missed the end of the regular season and Memphis’ playoff run. If you prefer PER, his best final position is 55th. Among players who logged 15 minutes per game and participated in at least half of the games in the season in question, the best Rudy Gay has ever finished in the league in WS/48 is a whopping 87th. It takes the normal Win Shares concept and adds in a component scaling it for minutes played so it does not reward volume of time on the court and instead goes for something more akin to impact per minute played. While no single stat gets particularly close to establishing player quality, my personal favorite is Win Shares/48. The same story persists for those who prefer a more statistical edge to analysis. 1 Spurs in the 2011 playoffs did so with Rudy missing the entire postseason due to a shoulder injury. 8 seed Grizzlies team that shocked the No. As Memphis went from being a rebuilding team to one that made the playoffs (incidentally helped by the reacquisition of the player Gay was traded for originally, Shane Battier), it became clear that while Gay had talent, he was not an essential cog in the Memphis machine. That description of Gay stuck and it created a persona of a guy who could do it all physically and was developing into a player who could take control of a team and a game. Immediately after he was drafted, Jay Bilas described him on the broadcast as "Incredibly athletic, he's 6-foot-9, he's got really long arms, a wingspan of about 7-foot-3, he plays bigger than he is, he's got every skill, every piece of ability you would want in a player." He came into the league as a physical specimen with some impressive hoops instincts as well.
Rudy gay trade to sund professional#
In many ways, the critics of this deal are doing so from a love of the idea of Rudy Gay rather than the details of what he actually has been as a player thus far in his career.Īs someone who got into professional basketball by writing obsessively about the NBA Draft, I fully understand the appeal of Gay. You have to love them for their details, for the little things that are true of them and only them.” You can't love someone for what they stand for or seem to be. But I think what you love right now is the idea of me. Immediately after reading Wojnarowski’s piece, a quote from an unusual source came to mind: in Win a Date with Tad Hamilton, one character turns down another by telling them it is “because you don't love me, you maybe want to love me. What makes this discrepancy so striking is that it feels like the second group has positioned themselves this way based on an off conception of how good Rudy Gay has actually been as a basketball player. The early reactions to the Memphis Grizzlies trading Rudy Gay to Toronto Raptors seem to fall in two camps: one thinks the trade was a very good one for the Grizzlies while the other, most notably Adrian Wojnarowski, see the trade as some sort of demolition of the strong team Memphis had put together.