Links To The Present: Thursday, December 17th, 2009
2009-12-17
-Delonte West is starting to break his media silence. Here’s a fabulous article on Delonte and some of the issues he’s faced this season from the Philadelphia Daily News.
-Well, this is a fascinating Wizards-related contest.
-Adventures in meta-notes: Fearless leader picked me up for the bullets today, and decided to quote the paragraph where I attributed Holliday and Mbah a Moute’s defense to evil magic obtained by selling their souls. I really hope that the fact I’m a junior at USC and was being satirical comes through in that context.
-National television shows the world what the privileged few already knew: Tyreke Evans is a freaking beast. I was definitely thinking this when Tyreke made that one-handed running back drive to the hole in the first quarter, and Colin from Cavalier Central tweeted it: The kid looks like a point guard version of LeBron James, and Evans’ 20/5/5 average seems to support the comparison.
-Going to the 82games to compare Tyreke’s season to LeBron’s rookie season, all the numbers are pretty similar in terms of their shot efficiency and tendencies, save for one. Despite the fact Evans is a pretty bad jump shooter, with a 37.1% eFG that’s well under league average, defenses have been completely unable to keep Tyreke out of the paint. He takes more than half of his shots at the rim, and he averages 20 points a game. That is absolutely off the charts for a high-volume perimeter scorer.
The caveat in comparing his rookie numbers to LeBron’s rookie numbers is that LeBron made one of the biggest rookie-to-sophmore leaps ever, improving significantly in almost every aspect of the game, and that’s not something that can be expected to happen. In particular, his finishing percentage around the basket went up over 10%, and that’s usually a number that stays pretty static. Still, keep both eyes on Tyreke as he matures his game and improves his jumper.
Tweet of the day, from N’Gai Croal: “James Cameron to Michael Bay, McG, and other pretenders: ‘Daddy’s Home.'”
Tyreke’s been an absolute joy to watch. Mini LeBron… damn. Just scary.
iiii just wanna tell u how im feelin…gotta make u understand. Never gonna give u up, never gonna let u down, never gonna run around and desert you.
I don’t know what’s scarier…. that Tyreke is actually playing like a mini LeBron, or that, despite being much larger than most opposing point guards, calling him a mini LeBron is a true statement because LeBron really is that much bigger.