Joined: 17 Jun 2003 Posts: 6280 Location: Central Coast
Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2015 4:26 am Post subject:
I say it was Glen Rice, even if his time here was very short. He played here when he was still quite a good offensive player, and it really forced teams not to overplay on Shaq. Ron Artest is probably the next closest guy on the list, simply by his body of NBA work. Ron was sort of like a Derek Harper guy, here at the end of his career, a little bit of a trainweck. He held it together just enough to get us that final ring. Rick Fox is sort of like AC Green, though I would argue that Green had the better skill set and the better body of work as a player.
Bottom line, we won most of our titles in the era on a shoe string outside of Shaq, Kobe, and Horry.
I assume this is while he played with them and not for their careers, so i voted for fox although its neck and neck between him and artest, and maybe ariza a close third.
Artest was the better player than both when he was here but fox did better at playing his role and being consistent, i was close though to giving it to ron for the gamewinner against the suns and the tree in game 7 but to often he was a lyability on offense and killed our spacing.
Note: We never saw the good versions of either Rice or Fox, the ones that played well in Charlotte and Boston. Rice was never the same shooter after wrist surgery and seemed a tad slower. Foxy was never as athletic as his Boston days due to recurring hip and lower back trouble, but did a commendable job compensating by playing the tough guy on defense. Rice on the other hand seemed indifferent.
Career wise it's definitely Glen Rice, and if he'd had a better attitude perhaps he'd been a better fit. The best fit was Trevor imo, and 2009 was probably the best season by a Lakers SF since Worthy. If you look back on that team, it was basically a two man team of Kobe and Pau (well, three man team if you count the nights that LO showed up). Trevor filled that no. 3 void nicely whenever needed and took nothing off the table with his timely shot making and clutch D. That gm 4 comeback vs Orlando wouldn't have been possible without Ariza.
Ariza gets a 'lot' of credit imo, and in some ways too much, for having 2 good games in the finals.
To me Artest's 25 vs Phoenix and 20 vs Boston in Game 7 while locking up Pierce for a series is the most important thing.
To me Ron was a better defender than Ariza, was more experienced, more complete and did something like lock up Paul Pierce for 7 games which Ariza wouldn't have done imo.
Ariza gets a lot of credit for a big shot in our comeback vs the Magic. But what he really gets rated on are his 3 back to back threes the next game which essentially buried the momentum the Magic may have had after he got in Turkuglu's face. But to me, what Artest did for the team, not just defensively but his lockdown defense over that 7 game series was extremely vital.
Artest was way too inconsistent and the offense in 2010 looked much worse with him than it did with Ariza. The 2009 offense was amazing. The 2010 team had improved defense but worse offense.
Artest had major strengths and major weaknesses, and because he was so inconsistent, he has people both overrating him and ripping on him.
I have mixed feelings about him. I feel like he won playoff games and lost playoff games for the team. With Ariza you wouldn't see the occasional great game with 15-20 points and great D on an elite player, but the team played at a high level more consistently because Ariza wouldn't kill the offense when he had a bad game.
The biggest thing for me is the team won 65 games with Ariza and 57 games with Artest. That's a pretty significant difference.
Last edited by Steve007 on Sun Apr 19, 2015 4:26 am; edited 1 time in total
Trevor wouldn't have locked up Paul Pierce for a 7 game series. I'll say that right now.
I've always thought the team would score more points with Ariza which would make up for that. Boston struggled to stop the 2009 Lakers in the regular season, and even lost when they were on a 19 game winning streak. And the 2009 version of the Celtics was probably better than the 2010 version.
The biggest thing for me is the team won 65 games with Ariza and 57 games with Artest. That's a pretty significant difference.
Though I'm not sure how much of that can be credited to Ariza. He only played 24 MPG.
I would attribute that 65-win success more to Pau and Kobe missing one game combined all season versus 26 the following year with Artest.
In fact, that we only lost 8 games despite Kobe and Pau missing 26 games might say a lot about Artest!
Bynum missed 15 more games in 2009 than he did in 2010. Gasol missed 16 more games in 2010 than he missed in 2009. Odom missed 4 more games in 2009 than he missed in 2010. So when when you look at Gasol, Bynum and Odom, they missed more games in 2009. As a result, I think your numbers are misleading.
The only stat that could sway me is Kobe missed 9 more games in 2010, but I wouldn't expect the impact to affect the team record by 8 games! Maybe 2 or 3 games at the most. The team was talented enough to win games without him. They weren't going 0-9 or 2-7 without Kobe, for example.
Moreover, Kobe and Gasol missed zero games in 2011 and they still won 8 fewer games than the 2009 team.
The 2008 team didn't even have Gasol until February, didn't have Bynum and Gasol play a single game together, had no Artest and even had a lot of Luke Walton and Vladimir Radmanovic and won just as many games as the 2010 and 2011 teams with Artest.
Joined: 02 Jun 2009 Posts: 2415 Location: Far from home
Posted: Sun Apr 19, 2015 3:57 pm Post subject:
It's remarkable how many folks in this poll saw the performance of Ron Artest (a guy severely slowed, overweight and with skills degraded so much from mid-career levels) so positively.
The guy had one decent year here, made a clutch shot in the Finals and that apparently erased all the bad stuff. Oh well ...
It's remarkable how many folks in this poll saw the performance of Ron Artest (a guy severely slowed, overweight and with skills degraded so much from mid-career levels) so positively.
The guy had one decent year here, made a clutch shot in the Finals and that apparently erased all the bad stuff. Oh well ...
Part of the reason is people overrate Paul Pierce and his performance in the 2008 Finals. Pierce was not Kobe, but people almost seem to act like he was.
The biggest difference between the 2008 and 2010 Finals is the Laker bigs played much better in 2010. In 2008, Bynum played zero minutes and Gasol looked terrible when he was matched up against Perkins.
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