I've had this discussion on a different forum and i've had to break down Steph's career and the teams he's been on. Suffice it to say that when he's had a decent team he's made the playoffs. Yet still his best teams have been unfortunately teams with very young players just starting out and not yet ready to contend.

Steph's rookie yr, 1st yr with Minny - 1996-97 He had KG & Gugliotta.
their record 40-42 made playoffs for 1st time in team history, the year before Steph they were 26-56. They were Swept by the 57-25 Rockets, who went to the West Conf. Finals, in the 1st rd.

Steph's 2nd yr in Minny - they had the teams 1st winning season, went 45-37 lost again in the 1st rd. in 5 games to the 61-21 Sonics.

Was this somehow a bad showing by Steph? I would think that this was a great job by a very young Steph and young KG. This team was a few years from being ready to contend. No one could blame Steph for this team losing to more experienced superior teams.

NJ was an injury riddled disaster his whole time there. His 1st year with NJ, was the lockout shortened year and he came to the team on Mar. 11th and he played 31 games for NJ. So we can't count that year for much. The only player to play all 50 games was Kendal Gill. jayson Williams, Seikaly all missed 20 or more games.

His 2nd yr. 99-00 they went 31-51 under Coach Don Casey. Kittles only played 62 games. Steph went down with a Knee injury the 1st week in April. He played in only 74 games and the team was officially eliminated from playoff contention on Apr. 7th. Mind you there was no Kmart or RJ on that team. Really only KVH was there to help in a big way. Casey was fired and Byron Scott hired.

His 3rd year 00-01 he only played 67 games and Kittles, Van Horn & Feick, didn't start the season with the team. they went 26-56. KMart had a good rookie season. Still this team was also snake bit from the start with injuries.

His 1st yr in PHX 01-02 they went 36-46. Penny came back from playing only 4 games the yr before as did Gugliotta after major Knee reconstruction. Jake Voskuhl was the Center along with Marion. This was not a very good team. Scott Skiles resigned and Frank Johnson was named coach.

His 2nd yr 02-03 they went 46-36 and were the Eighth seed against the Spurs. They lost in 6 games. Amare had a great Rookie season and won ROY, but they weren't ready to beat the eventual champion Spurs.

So you guys tell me at which stop along the way was Steph supposed to be able to pull his team out of the depths and win? The last year with the Suns, Amare was injured after playing only 18 games with Steph and then Coach Johnson was fired and then they made the trade of Steph & Penny. Now this wasn't because Steph was a horrible PG, it was a financial restructuring. They were capped out with both Steph & Penny's contracts and had no way to improve. They knew they had a nice young nucleus to build around and they took a chance at FA's. Now they didn't know they would get Nash, so don't try to make it seem like they had it all planned out. They just got lucky, that Dallas didn't want to pay.

These are the kinds of things that were being said about STeph when he was with the Suns:

"Steph was huge," Suns coach Frank Johnson says afterward with requisite amazement. "He wouldn't allow us to lose."

"Most importantly, in his second season with the Suns, Marbury has pulled this preseason lottery lock into playoff contention with hard-nosed play and solid team leadership. Simply put, there's not a point guard in the game who's outplaying him. And Marbury's clutch-time performance--measured by the NBA as production in the last two minutes of games and in overtime--has been among the best in the business all season long."

www.findarticles.com/p/ar...i_99848989

So lets kill this noise about him not being a clutch player. Who the heck did he have on the Knicks that could help him out. Its so much easier for a team to stop one player when he's the only real threat. Ask Kobe about that or even Jordan, before his team was good enough. Now that we've finally started to put a team around him, I think we'll be just fine and over the next few years we'll really get to see what this team can do WITH STEPH.

Great post Nix....In fact, excellent post.

1 thing Steph did do for Phoenix NJ and now NY is get them good lottery position.

NJ was able to draft Griffin whom they traded for RJ.

Phoenix was able to draft Amare.

NY was able to draft Frye, even though the trade made NY miss out on a shot at selecting Igoudala Al Jefferson Sebastian Telfair or JR Smith

I just hope that Steph is given the time to develop with the young players that Zeke has drafted. Enough with waisting this guys' talents...Let him grow with our youngins, and maybe at the end of the season, he will be able to prove to the world that he is worthy...Steph deserves a chance under Brown. If Billups and Iverson progressed under Brown, Steph will also.

Posted by McK1:

1 thing Steph did do for Phoenix NJ and now NY is get them good lottery position.

NJ was able to draft Griffin whom they traded for RJ.

Phoenix was able to draft Amare.

NY was able to draft Frye, even though the trade made NY miss out on a shot at selecting Igoudala Al Jefferson Sebastian Telfair or JR Smith

Posted by Bonn1997:

I had no idea this thread was gonna generate 130 replies so far. It must have been a great thread! On second thought, Simrud's (in)famous "manup" thread had several hundred replies!

IT takes a great man to make a great thread! This is a big day for you.

One hundred and fifty Responses! Wow! Freaking awsome!

This validates your existance and maybe if someone put up a poll of top posters you might make the list this year!

Keep up the good work, and esepecially posts like this that self validate! They are most helpful.

[Edited by - nalod on 10-24-2005 11:48 AM]

Let's be conservative here and say that with Marb's faults he is the 15th best point guard in the league... shouldn't he still start at PG for us?

preach on nixluva

KG

* in his first 2 full seasons with Steph his fga's were 1100 and 1293 for a total of 2393 fga's and 272 and 332 fta for a total of 605 fta.

* his first 2 full seasons with a real pg in Terrell Brandon he got off 1526 attempts in 99-00 and 1475 field goal attempts in 00-01 for a total of 3001. Also in 99- 00 he went to the line 404 tmes and 00-01 467 times for a total of 871.

2393 fgas to 3001 fgas and 605 ftas to 871 ftas. WOW!

Needless to say, he got the ball a very considerable amount of times more. And it wasn't that Terrell Brandon couldn't score (look at his no.s asa full-time starter in Cleveland and Milwaukee), he was just SMART enough to realize the team would do better the more scoring opportunities KG got.

http://www.nba.com/playerfile/terrell_brandon/index.html

its funny for a guy that is supposed to be a top 3 pg, he has been moved 3 times for another pg.

I wonder why that is?

whats stranger

in each instance, the teams pf shot attempts and overall scoring numbers improved. KG K-Mart and Amare each experienced lifts with better, more unselfish, point guard play.


[Edited by - McK1 on 10-24-2005 1:20 PM]

[Edited by - McK1 on 10-24-2005 1:20 PM]

Posted by McK1:

the funny thing bout all this is that his chief backer didn't realize until it was too late that for all of steph's street cred and Rucker moves, his game is tailored best to play with the "less athletic" guys he shipped out.

So what does he do - he begs LB to take on Steph as an Olympian with the hopes that playing with the games top athletes would switch the after-burners on. Instead LB wasted time and likely victories giving Steph 20 minutes at point and finally did the only logical thing which was move him to the 2 and let him shoot to salvage a Bronze.

and I'm not sleeping on how good the Euro's were but outside of that Argentenian team with Manu, Oberto, Delfino, and Walter Hermann, the US had the players to domiate.

well what about this when it comes time to dole out responsibility for the u.s's miserable showing in the olympics - how about lb's use, misuse and non-use of lebron, wade, amare, carmelo?

WE have how many pt. guards on the team? Does brewer count?

Steph
Craw
Brewer

Why are we even discussing this?

I see it like this,,,,Steph was never coached on how to run a team proficiently...with the help of Brown he will finally have that opportunity. It won't be easy for him, but he will get it. Brown will find ways to help him get it. I expect his scoring to go down this year, but he will collect a lot of assists, steals and rebounds...

Its not Steph's fault. Maybe he should've stayed at Tech and got zone offense down pact before jumping. And LB should've given play-making responsibilities to someone else from the giddy-up.

[Edited by - McK1 on 10-24-2005 1:57 PM]