cjsweat wrote:Even if you look at Granger by his stats alone, he's better than Kevin Martin. He's led Indiana to be a three seed in the East. That's better than what Melo did. People pay way to much attention to points per game, you can have a great player that averages less than 10 points per game. When I'm judging a great player, I'm looking at how they are if you took their points away. Granger can rebound and plays excellent defense. He also does things offensively that he doesn't get credit for, he sets his team up to be great. That to me is a great player. He was completely shut down by LeBron the other night and James dropped 32 on him.
Additionally, there are other pieces to the Miami puzzle that explains why they can win without Bosh. They are much deeper than they were last year and the chemistry is there. Not to mention, LeBron is becoming one of the best 4th quarter players. Boston will give them a good series but Boston is a terrible offensive team and Miami is great defensively. You're doing yourself a disservice if you're picking a series based on regular season results. If you're looking at how a team does playing 4 games in 6 days, that's good research. But if your argument is record or team vs team W/L's, you're not making an accurate pick. Dallas won it last year as a 3 seed, Lakers won in 2010 with the 3rd best Overall record, Cleveland had the best record in '09 and lost in the conference finals, SA won in 2007 as a 3 seed, Miami won in 2006 as a 2 seed. The point is that the champions are rarely the best team in the league. Very few teams pay much attention to their performance during the regular season. I expect Boston to take one or two but they aren't going to beat Miami.
I'll take Kevin Martin over Danny Granger every second of the day and wouldn't even have to think about it for a second. Kevin Martin is a vastly more efficient scorer. THis year was an off year for Martin and he was still more efficient. He had a 55.4% true scoring percentage and it's normally in the 60%+ range. This year, Danny Granger checked in at 54.2% and normally his % fluctuates in the high-mid 50s range. Kevin Martin is also generally amongst the elite scorers in the league in terms of getting to the foul line and he converts at an 86% career rate from there. It was a very down year for Martin getting to the foul line (main reason why he had a down year) at only 4.5 free throw attempts a game, but he's been at or above 7.0 attempts a game since 2007. Kevin Martin also posted a 0.97 points per possession compared to 0.95 for Granger. Considering scoring is their only high level skill, I'll take Martin.
Oh, and Granger by no means plays excellent defense. When's the last time he even got a vote for All-Defense? He's a solid defender if that, and even then it's hard to tell since it's rare to see him guarding someone that's anything more than a spot up shooter unless he has to. You know how many small forwards got a vote for All-Defense last year (since it hasn't been released yet this year)? 11, and that doesn't include Granger.
Granger also ranked 19th at the small forward position in rebounds per 48, hardly anything to brag about seeing as how Steve Novak was 20th at 7.6 and he is considered a poor rebounder.
I do agree Miami can win without Bosh. THey should beat Indiana without Bosh. They can beat Boston without Bosh but i'm not overly confident with it. If Avery Bradley's shoulder continues to get worse, Boston is going to have one mighty hefty task facing them. The only time Philly really scored consistently for any stretch of time last night was in the third quarter, the quarter in which Bradley didn't play because of the shoulder. However, there's no way in hell Miami is going to beat San Antonio or OKC without Bosh.
- By LUGrad2000
- By ballah09