| 5 Steps to a Successful Season - Part 4 |
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| Written by Chip Crain |
| Monday, 07 September 2009 07:31 |
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This is part 4 of our 5 part series on what the Grizzlies need to achieve to consider this season a success. Part one was defining what success should look like this season. Part two dealt with the enigma that has been Zach Randolph. Part three dealt with the star in waiting Rudy Gay. Today I want to look at the largest area that needs to develop for the Grizzlies, the center position.  The center position has to come together. The Grizzlies have three legitimate young big men. None appear to be the complete package but all three could be reliable NBA players and in the NBA today that may be all that is needed. Their main drawback is also their strength. They are very young. However, with youth comes mistakes and frankly the Grizzlies centers have played a grand total of 101 NBA games. That means there is still a lot of mistakes to be made. If Hamed Haddadi's comments show anything from this summer it is that the center position could be a powder keg. Marc Gasol has had a great summer playing for Spain and is the clear cut favorite to start heading into camp. He looks to have lost weight which should help his mobility, speed and endurance. Marc plays a physical brand of basketball which is very different from his brother and that physicality made he a crowd favorite right from the start. However a big man who only averages 11.9 ppg and 7.4 rpg isn't exactly a long term solution. Can he improve on those numbers? He should be able to improve. The problem is that he averaged 12.4 ppg and 6.9 rpg in November and 14.2 ppg and 7.4 rpg in April. Not exactly a rapidly rising chart there. At 24 yrs of age one has to wonder how much more upside he truly has. The good news is that Gasol has been playing with the Spanish National team this summer and with his brother out of the picture (Pau broke his finger) has taken on a much more important role on the team. The results have been promising. Then again with Mayo, Gay and Randolph all looking for their shots you have to wonder if Gasol will even reach last season's scoring marks. Gasol could easily improve and still see his absolute numbers decrease.  Thabeet is raw but when a team uses the second pick on a player they usually want to see what he looks like in real game situations and pretty quickly too. That could be a problem judging from what was seen in the Summer League. In his first exposure to something resembling NBA basketball Thabeet looked out of shape and lost on the court. His 43% FG percentage was horrifying considering he usually had a huge height advantage over his opponents. He was called for more fouls than he could grab in rebounds too. He didn't block that many shots but teams still struggled to score against the 7-3 big man. Heisley said the day after the draft that Thabeet was a work in progress. That may be true but Memphis fans are going to want to see some progress in the works or they will turn on him and quickly too if past history is any indication. Thabeet may not be used to receiving abuse from the home crowd so how he reacts emotionally will say a lot about him as a person. Of course that wouldn't be a problem if he can come out and play well from the start but not even his most fervant fans are willing to predict that.   Haddadi would appear to be the man left out but he performed very well in summer league and in limited action last season. He also made some comments/jokes to an Irani media person that implied he felt he was better than he was allowed to show last season. He has a good argument if you believe Dave Berri's Wages of Wins work. Both Hollinger and Berri rated Haddadi the best player in terms of helping the team win games last season. Not coincidently the majority of Haddadi's minutes came in April when the franchise had a winning record. Haddadi's PER numbers actually surpassed Zach Randolph's last season and Randolph was a 20/10 performer! Then again Haddadi never scored more than 5 pts a game in April, never grabbed more than 5 boards or blocked more than two shots for the month either. This was a decrease from his surprising March production where Haddadi averaged 4.7 pts and 4.0 rebounds in just over 7 and a half minutes a game. That decrease in production may have been because he wasn't in good enough shape, he struggled with varying minutes, the competition was preparted or the March run was just an illusion but whatever the reason he didn't finish the year as strong as his fans wanted.   On a side note Marcus Williams is pre-season rated lowest PER on the team. More on that tomorrow. The drawback to Haddadi playing more is as much cultural as technical. Haddadi didn't speak a lot of English last season and that makes it hard for his teammates to converse with him. In the NBA you don't have much time to relate messages to teammates and if that teammate doesn't speak English at all it is that much harder. So the Grizzlies have three young centers who all need to develop more. Is that one center too many? Both Gasol and Haddadi will be a restricted free agents in two years so the Grizzies are running out of time deciding which player should be kept between the two of them. That is good for Thabeet since the Grizzlies have him for at least four more years. That should make for spirited practices but also someone getting left out of the rotation. How they respond to the NBDL or sitting on the bench may become as big a story as Zach and Rudy's development. However, for the Grizzlies to surprise people on the upside one thing is clear. The team is going to need two of their young centers to play consistent minutes and produce at or near the average centers production in the NBA. They don't need one of them to become the next Dwight Howard but they do need solid play that doesn't make the center position a liability. NEXT UP: The Backcourt |
Comments
Oh yeah, and lift some weights, Hasheem.
One more thing, Hasheem. The time will come when you need to develop your offensive game. So WATCH THIS VIDEO. Then PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE.
http://sports.espn.go.com/videohub/video/video?id=4245522" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://sports.espn.go.com/videohub/video/video?id=4245522
I'm trying to post the video ESPN had a few months ago about Kareem Abdul Jabbar and the UNSTOPPABLE skyhook. I posted it in June here before so here's the link to that post:
http://www.3sob.com/archives/14-june-2009/533-message-to-has heem-thabeet-wa tch-this-video