Wolves Updates 9/1

You say that he is Darko is bad and that he is below average, but that is not true. What numbers are you using? I averaged out all the centers ppgs last year and Darko was above average. Where are you getting your stats?
Darko will easily be the best center the Wolves have ever had and by the numbers he already may be.

The negativity. My initial response was what it was, a blog response written hastily during a 15 minute lull in my day. The organization was sloppy and the wording imprecise, but then again I didn’t expect it to get torn apart like a doctoral thesis torn apart by a bitter academic who thinks he should be in the Ivy leagues, but ends up a part time lecturer at North Hennepin CC, hell bent on picking apart the smallest faults even if he has to twist the words around, take them out of their original context, or misinterpret it to do so. But, nonetheless, I stand by my arguments. I’ll try to expand on my initial post and respond to it without sinking to your level of negativity.

My overall point was that Darko is actually a ‘good’ player in most categories of basketball player that one compares him to, culminating ultimately with the argument that compared to centers in general and especially twolf centers he is actually ‘quite good’.

"He’s an NBA player, so he’s already awesome" – an argument that would apply equally well to Calvin Booth or Hamed Haddadi.

Since Darko became a twolf, I’ve followed his career more closely and I’ve seen a large amount of hate and negativity directed at him from a host of sources, bloggers, sports writers, even commentators et al, and its disconcerting. Like playground bullies they see a weakness and keep trying to exploit it, constantly repeating the mantra ‘Haha, Darko sucks’, without concern for the verity of their statements or the affect their negativity has. This is a man’s life and career we’re talking about and yet so often his accomplishments are summarily discarded as worthless without understanding the context in which they occur. How many times has Darko been called a bust by fans, writers, etc.? That can’t be good for a person’s psyche. How would you feel if you were constantly told you suck?

I was simply trying to point out that by any normal basketball standards, Darko is hugely successful basketball player, managing to play and start in the top forum in the world. So I find it annoying when small people with small lives, who only wish they could play basketball half as well as him, constantly try to belittle his accomplishments to bring him down their level. I got a similar impression from the initial post by Magoo, that he was just some guy jumping on the ‘darko sucks’ bandwagon. The wording sounded trite and the only seemingly objective analysis was rounded off by the one line joke ‘passes like Vlade’. So, I was wondering if he randomly ran into Darko at a pick up game would he have the balls to say ’you’re not a very good player’? If I’m wrong in my impression of magoo, my apologies.

He’s been around 7 years and put up "good career numbers." I guess we’re making the "good is a vague/debatable term" thing extra clear with this one. He’s done some things. He’s also done some things, like fail to rebound all that well and commit inopportune fouls, that have gotten him a lot, lot, lot of bench time.

Completely taken out of context since in the next sentence I clarified that definition with ‘respectable numbers in decent minutes’.

"(D)espite basically missing the first 2 1/2 years of his career." Do we not recognize the tenets of Randy Foye Syndrome any more? Darko wasn’t hurt, either; he got doghoused and lost his confidence.

That phrase is part of the larger argument contained in the paragraph. Your strategy of attacking the individual sentences completely takes them out of context. That’s fine for the Fox news crowd or Rubechat, but I thought this forum was a little more discerning and intellectual. No idea what you meant by the ‘Randy Foye syndrome’ or its connection to what I wrote.

"still on the upswing"

Once again you take small quotes out of context and misinterpret them. Looking at the numbers of the rest of the 2003 draft class, minutes played, total points, rebounds, Darko ranks in the mid to late twenties, however, in the next year he will very likely surpass guys who are older and finished with the NBA or very much ‘on the downswing’, guys like Pavlovic, Marcus Banks and Luke Walton. This is despite being benched, somewhat unfairly I think, the first 2 ½ years of his NBA career. Therefore I would argue that if the teams could magically redo the 2003 draft, Darko would go around 20… and in terms of overall performance he still has much more potential upside than many guys ahead of him so his total career numbers could easily end up being among the top 20 of his class…

Then we get a "best draft of all time" claim. 1984 still has to be that year.

…In what I consider to be the best (at the top with LeBron and even more so in its depth) draft class of all time.

This puts him in the second quartile in his class. Generally, students who finish at this level, be it kindergarten or post grad, earn, at the very least, the label ‘good’.

He’s 7’1" and a true center. An argument that can be made in defense of Kyrylo Fesenko.

Once again, you completely take my words out of context here. You take sound bytes and try to twist them to fit your agenda. I was attempting to define the parameters of the ‘best center’ argument by separating the ‘true centers’ from guys like Al Jefferson, who aren’t really centers and have a lot of trouble guarding the ‘true centers’, but are labeled as such because they’re the tallest guys on the court and there is a paucity of healthy, available big men. After all, technically speaking, the greatest Wolves center of all time was KG. By the same token he also happens to be the best point guard since at one time or another he played both positions, however briefly, during his tenure here. I was simply trying to give a more precise definition of the term center for the rest of my argument.

"Those guys are the first to get injured…"

This means that when you make a list of the top centers, invariably you’ll notice that some at the top of the list, Yao Ming, Oden, Bynum, spend a lot of time injured or have their careers cut short because of injury and…

"the first to get subbed for…"

unlike some of the backcourt positions they have trouble playing 40 minutes a game or even 30, making the centers further down the list (those who are ‘not very good’) even more valuable than players further down their respective list at other positions.

There was so much mockery of the signing of Darko, but what were the other serious options? Take a look at the list of yet unsigned centers, very sparse indeed. Then look at the other positions, still some guys who could fill in, possibly even make a difference. And what would they have done without another ‘good’ center? I think a pg like Ridnour could handle an increased workload of 40 mpg, until Flynn comes back, with Telfair picking up the extra minutes, but I doubt Pek would have been good to go for 40 minutes a night, and what type of shape would we be in with Kostas Koufos (or egad, Hollins) doing 20 minutes a night or 30 when Pek fouls out early?

I don’t know if my initial point was expressed very well and it may have been slightly flawed because I didn’t have time to do a lot of research, but I’ll reemphasize that this is a blog, and not a published academic work and I’m not sure it deserved the vitriol you threw at it.

Then you make a list of Wolves centers, which as others have observed is missing a few of the obvious names even from Minnesota’s anemic history of bigs. You also say "those are the top 10" after listing only 7 names in addition to Darko’s.

Once again, just a blog. I was naming centers from memory in no particular order. My twolf history has some gaps in it and this is what I could think of, I assumed Rasho was number 1 but in my haste didn’t state it, I thought I had number 10… Oliver Miller, but obviously I forgot to write it down. I don’t even know if those are the top ten, it was who I could think of, but that in and of itself shows that they were pretty unspectacular, which proves my initial point and the main argument of my post: that when you call someone ‘not very good’ it very much matters who you are comparing to, and when compared to 20+ years of twolf centers, he’s actually ‘quite good’.

But whatever.

But whatever.

Is there anyone who thinks Darko is "a very good NBA center" out there?

There are several degrees of ‘good’-ness between ‘not very good’ and ‘very good’. I never called him the latter, simply disagreed with the former.

Do we have to paper over that opinion with rhetorical fig leaves?

That’s your conclusion? What does it even mean?