Jalen Green’s frustration clear in the building - Iko

Suns were sleepwalking. I think they were happy about the win in the first game so they was just coasting last night and overlooked us because they thought they'd get another easy win.

 

I don’t think much has changed until he can at least play well 70% of the time. I don’t think there is doubt that if we had an above average to good sg all season we would have been contenders for no less than the playin. I hope he turns a corner, but I would trade him and all the nets picks for the much hated booker, of course might not have enough matching salaries other than to use FVV.

 

fclown0311 once a month: GrEeN hAtErs

fclown0311 the remaining 99% of the month: crickets

 

This team is still very young and raw and has unfortunately had quite a bit of games lost to injury- your goal for a playin berth this year is a poor reason to trade a player because what is in the org’s best interest long term is not to panic and go into win now mode the moment one of your players shows any amount of promise….in fact that is the way to ensure you are a mediocre team for a long time.

SMH…

 

I was always a move him to the bench guy not a trade him guy. Im not gonna blame anyone for wanting to trade him. His season has been bad. The fact that last night was his first truly great game of the season says all you need to know. I think they need to find ways to motivate him because he goes off on certain teams and its because he seems more motivated against them. If he can play like last night the rest of the season no need to do either at some point he'll have to consistently show that he can do what he did last night on a regular basis in order to be worth his contract.

 

The Suns arent that good

 

I agree, and I was having this discussion with a coworker the other day. They are so jumpshot oriented that they are clearly going nowhere. I guess that Beale was the only all in move available to them but it is just a terrible terrible move. if you couple that with what they traded for Durant and how hopeless it looks for them over the next season or two I just don’t see them having a super great outlook for the future.

 

Yeah, this has always been the issue with Green. I took a look at ranking his games based on "GameScore" over on basketballreference, and while it's obviously not perfect, I think it paints the right picture of the issue. Gamescore goes from about 0 to 50 - these aren't hard limits, you can have a negative gamescore, and something like Hardens 60 point triple double got a 56.6 score, but that's the general scale. I'd say anything below 10 is "really bad", 10-15 is "mediocre", 15-20 is "above average", 20-25 is "good", 25-30 is "great", and then 30+ is "superstar" level performance. These are just breakpoints and numbers I've made up, again it's not perfect, but I think it still makes the right point.

Jalen has played 60 games so far this season. His breakdown is as follows
<10 (really bad): 29 games
10-15 (mediocre): 11 games
15-20 (above average): 11 games
20-25 (good): 3 games
25-30 (great): 4 games
30+ (superstar level): 2 games

And this has really been his problem since year 1. It is very nice that he's able to have those games in the 25-30 range, or the 30+ range, a lot of players can't do that. A lot of players never do that. Jalen has an ability to take over games and look like a superstar, but it is just so infrequent. And his "really bad" games are almost the norm. 29 out of 60 games are just terrible. He needs to find a way to eliminate those games. He even has a couple games where his gamescore is actually negative, which is something I hadn't even seen before I looked at Jalen. The low end of his performance is just so unbelievably low, and it is so common. He cannot kill our team in 50% of the games. The number one thing he needs to do if he wants to improve is to figure out how to bump all these "really bad" games up into the "mediocre" or even "above average" tier. It would have such a huge impact on the team, and we would win so many more games. It is nearly impossible for this team to win when Jalen is at his worst.

And just for some more context, if you want to look at Mr. Consistency and MVP candidate Shai Gilgeous Alexander, he's got a grand total of 1 single game in the "really bad" category (score below 10). And he's only got 6 games below 20. That's 51 games that are 20+. He's also got 21 games that are 30+. Again, not to compare Jalen to Shai, but just to give some context as far as what MVP candidates "game scores" look like since this is a fairly unknown and made up metric that I'm using here.

 

Nice post!

 

While I agree with you, I just wanted to point out that many of his games that you have as mediocre and above are much worse than just raw the score indicates if he missed ton of shots like he normally does. If we could have the Jalen we had yesterday, in most games, we would be in playoff contention, Sadly bad Jalen is the norm and games like this are anomalies.

 

Yeah I know, like I said, it’s not perfect. But even if you dug in really deep and individually graded each game, I think you’d arrive at the same conclusion. His game distribution will be in that same ballpark, and his top priority has to be eliminating those bottom tier games. They can’t make up half his games.

 

Great post. The issue isn’t that he’s not having enough of these “superstar-level” games. The issue is that he has been atrociously terrible in most of the other games.

People are saying Jalen would be fine if he played like this in 90% of the games. No, Jalen would be fine if he played like this in 5% of the team’s games, if only he could play 70% of this level in most of the other games.

 

That pretty much sums up the reality of Jalen's 3rd year as a starter.