dc wrote:boogiezen wrote:But the purist of the game will say that's not winning basketball.
Indiana Fever has good young core. If you want her to continue what she has done in college it will depend on the coach. Clark has the greenlight in Iowa.
Iowa gave Clark the green light because it gave them a better chance of winning, not because they didn't like "fundamental basketball" or they were going out of their way to promote her as some transcendent player. She was efficient even at her volume and usage rate. It's the same thing with Steph. A bad shot from him was still better than a good shot from his teammates. That's literally what they said about him in his highlight video the moment he was announced as the #7 pick.
Fever might have a good core, but they've been a bad team for several years in a row now. I mean, that's how they're getting Clark in the first place. If her game indeed translates, they're going to let her play the way she played in college.
Important basketball points here.
There have been many college basketball players, of both sexes, that have been given the greenlight, and traditionally we didn't have the ability to see the data on how that worked out for their teams. I firmly believe that on any level you'll sometimes get players who just are given the greenlight to score every time when they shouldn't. But Clark's Hawkeyes had a considerably stronger offensive effectiveness than any of their competitors by the metrics I've seen, so clearly, she earned that green light.
Further, Clark had the green light from Day 1 freshman year and it immediately made the team's offense better than before, which is a relevant thing to realize. I don't think there can be any doubt then that here high school impact as at least as dominant when she played with green light, and that means she's been doing this for 7 years now through one jump in competition.
This then to say that if you want Clark as your franchise player because of how you've seen her play, and you'd like to see her lead your team with similar excellence, why would you have her learn some other role at the start? It's a rare player that can succeed in doing this of course, but that's what you were betting on when you drafted her.
I would say that the Fever should plan on handing the offense over to Clark unless something specific causes them to hold off.
Something of a tangent:
The recent player who she surpassed in the record books who had a similar green light is Kelsey Plum. And Plum talked about her own struggles coming to the big leagues, which is a reasonable - and humble - thing for her to do.
The thing is though, while Plum was drafted #1 overall, the team felt like they already had a core of scorers that they were excited to build around, and they decided not to change up everything to fit around the rookie. While playing in a very different role than she did in college, Plum struggled - which left everyone feeling it was justified that the team still focus on their existing trio.
A couple things though:
1. They had the worst ORtg in the league both the year before they got Plum, and in her rookie year, so what they were doing wasn't working.
2. In addition to being more hyped than these other players, I would say that there's a pretty strong consensus that Plum has proven the best of the bunch by a good margin.
So yeah, I think they maybe should have just handed the reins over to Plum, and had they done so, the results might literally have been better than the worst-in-league offense the team actually ran. I'm sure there would have been struggles, but I'm real curious about what might have been here.
Of course the thing is, things couldn't have turned out better for the Aces in the long-term than they already did. They kept Plum, and gradually developed her into a secondary star with a green light on perhaps the greatest women's team ever assembled.
