I understand it hasn’t been good. But I believe he can get there if he singularly focuses on improving in that area. Of course I could be wrong and maybe Amen never learns to do anything offensively other than dunk. But I’d bet on him ultimately developing a respectable mid-range jumper. I think he had a lot on his plate this season being thrusted into pg duties. I hope next season they will commit to developing him as a 3/4.
The more i think about his game, the more i dislike him. Things would get infinitely better if we had McDaniels and a random person from the street over Ime.
Do you realise that good mid-range shooting to the point it's valuable is actually rarer in the NBA than good 3 pt shooting? Like we're Rockets fans, we should know better than anybody that if you're not shooting middies the way KD or CP3 shoot them, we shouldn't shoot them at all. Now look at those numbers for Amen. For him to get to the point where the mid-range is a good shot he needs to improve by more than 10% or more in every single mid-range spot on the floor, and even 10% might only get him to around league average, not actually "good" where you'd want him shooting them. We struggle with the numbers game already with one of the greatest shooters of all time shooting too many middies, and you want one of the worst shooters of all time doing it? It's a fantasy, it's not a valid direction to build from. Period.
All fair points. But just to clarify, I don’t think we should be building around Amen. I think he is a valuable player with significant upside. So i would try to hold onto him. I don’t see him as a max player right now. He took a 10% leap in FT%. I get in-game midrange shooting is much harder, but would love to see what he can do in yr 4.
The point is that's actually worthless for him to develop a mid-range shot, because look at the numbers, we'd want around 15-20% improvement every single part of the mid-range for us to actually want him to take that shot. So that leaves 3pt shots, probably from the corners. And yet people in this very thread bang on about how they know so much about the game but don't realise just how far Amen is from even basic competent levels, the stardom pipe dreams are literally just that. He's a defensive specialist role player at BEST.
Sengun needed money for his shopping. He signed too early, but then again…. Did he? Imagine if he had to go thru free agency today.
I think he might just take this deal. It would make him the highest paid player on the team moving forward. And it's very comparable as a percentage of the cap to what Sengun took. Maybe just slightly higher.
Watching these playoff games you realize how little craft Amen has compared to the guards and wings still playing. He's strictly a measurables guy with no bag. It's ironic that he's paired with Sengun, who is all craft but doesn't have the physical tools.
Sengun almost single handedly won game 3 himself until his teammates pissed it away. You can criticize him for his weaknesses but any claim that he’s not a fighter or a winner is pure bollocks.
it's becoming more and more obvious we should trade him and let another team make the mistake of signing him to a big contract. giving him anything more than jabari money would be a critical mistake that could set this franchise back a few years. it's not only his lack of guard skills or "a bag", his mere presence lowers the offensive ceiling of this team by creating spacing and roster construction issues.
Sengun is a front runner. Better than Jalen but worse than Jabari/Amen. He is really bad when teams zero in on him in the playoffs. Like Jalen, he'll have a few good games. He also has that Wemby thing where if he has bad stats he'll try and score garbage points to make them look better. He's a stat hunter. Like KD. They both need to go.
Sometimes I wonder if y'all are even watching the same player I am. Amen improved a lot on his handle, and it's legitimately pretty good now. Not elite, but a lot better than it was as a rookie, and combined with his elite first step, he can beat most players 1-on-1. He's also developed a very soft touch around the rim and can use a variety of angles to finish, it's not just dunks. His short range jump shot has come a long way, and he can get those little fadeaway jumpers anytime he wants inside the FT line/in the painted area; he's very close to turning that into a highly efficient weapon. He displayed all of these things in his 41-point game this season. There is real craft involved in scoring in the paint as efficiently as he does. We've seen what it looks like when a guy is all athleticism and no skill: That's Gerald Green, whose best season was 10 points per game, not 18, and who never got REMOTELY close to Amen's efficiency or scoring volume. (And Green even had a jump shot!) Getting back to shot charts, another name occurred to me in this discussion, and that was Zion Williamson. Here's his shot chart from 2020-2021 where he played in 61 games and scored 27 points per game, and everybody thought he was going to be a superstar, before his injury and personality problems derailed his career: I think there is a real path to being a high-level scorer almost exclusively by attacking the paint. It's just very rare because it requires insane physical attributes and a high level of skill in finishing in that area and also in drawing free throws. Amen obviously does not have Zion's mini-Shaq ability to bulldoze his way through opponents, but he makes up for it somewhat in other areas, especially defense and playmaking. So, if you think Zion could have been a top 10 player if he'd stayed healthy and consistently produced at the level he showed in his second season--that's the path for Amen to do it, just with the sliders moved around a bit.
Zion was a #1 option from day one, and Amen is at best the 3rd option I also don’t think teams have ever just ignored Zion on defense or chosen not to guard him hard for me to view them in a similar light teams don’t guard Amen, and he feasts on all that extra space and inattention from the defense while at the same time hampering countless offensive possessions due to the lack of spacing and a roaming defender blowing up all our actions
To be clear, I don't think he is or will be as good of a scorer as peak Zion. But I think if he continues to improve he can get most of the way there, while being far more valuable than Zion on defense.
I hope so every time Amen’s offense is brought up, it’s always in the back of my mind that everything he’s doing is while being mostly ignored by the defense Dobizzle posted his shot chart showing how below average he is from most spots on the floor, especially from midrange and three, and it’s like damn, it’s that bad and that’s with the vast majority of those shots not even being contested
I think a 5-yr/$180 mil deal is more than fair. Amen needs more of an offensive toolbox (discussed a ton in this thread)
that's too much. 150 mill for 5 years. Nothing guaranteed, can be waived at any time. Must shoot 40% from corner 3s
Yeah, that's why I posted Zion's shot chart from his second year. It shows basically the same thing, but even more rim-centric. Also, Zion is basically the same height as Amen. (Though he does have like 70 pounds on him, which is why he can't stay healthy.) I think Amen has both benefited and suffered from our particular circumstances. He's benefited in that most of the defensive focus is on KD and Sengun, but he's suffered in having to play in such a slow, poorly-spaced, badly-coached offense. I personally think he would at least look closer to a younger Zion if you plugged him in as the #1 option in, I don't know, Atlanta. Any team with a stretch 5 that likes to play fast, basically. But I could be wrong, who knows!
