The now world-famous Chinese American shooting guard graduated from Harvard in 2010 and entered the NBA draft.
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The picture in virtually every professional basketball scout’s mind of Jeremy Lin, for instance. Over and again in the draft you saw these crystal-clear pictures form in the minds of basketball experts which later proved a mirage. “Maybe the mind’s best trick of all was to lead its owner to a feeling of certainty about inherently uncertain things. Here's a great excerpt from Michael Lewis' The Undoing Project: Jeremy Lin, for example, was a tremendous athlete earlier in his career. Speed, quickness, ability to change direction etc. So I find it unlikely KD will be much different.Īthleticism is too often a synonym for muscles. Elgin Baylor, Chauncey Billups, Isiah Thomas, Kobe, Cousins, Rudy Gay, Verejao, Wesley Mathews, Brandon Jennings etc, none of em looked the same after their injuries. It's not like I want KD to fail either btw, I wish he could come back 100%, the man plays beautiful basketball, but there's just not a historic precedent for such optimism I feel. So we'll be getting a 32 year old KD coming off of his 3rd injury. He's previously suffered a Jones fracture, and and an ankle injury. His game relied on positioning and strength, and even when he drived from the perimeter in the half court, he didn't need to get much if any separation from his man and could just use his muscle, unlike KD.įurthermore, people seem to be just forgetting that this isn't his first injury. Quick off the dribble mid range J's weren't exactly Boogies bread and butter like with KD.
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Cousins is a big man, KD is a wing, and whilst he can play a small ball 4 their styles are still different. So saying he's going to be exactly the same after an achilles rupture is just incredibly wishful thinking to me.Įquating him to Cousins also seems inaccurate. His height is still advantageous, but it's not like KD is as good as he was JUST because of his height, he had the guard like quickness and agility to accompany it. In regards to KD, yes he's a 6'11 small forward, but now he's a 6'11 small forward that's going to get less lift, not be able to blow by people as quickly, get less separation with his handle, have trouble accelerating and decelerating etc. It's not like athleticism and skill are used separately when playing, it's a continuum in which every player finds themselves relying on both. So even if post injury he's still athletic relative to the rest of the league, it would still be a big change for him personally.
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If an injury took it down to 38 instantly, he'd still be very athletic, but that's now 6 inches off of his layups, jump shots, fadeaways etc that he has to adjust for in relatively speaking, what is a short amount of time.
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LeBron in his prime had a 44 inch vertical for example.
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People underestimate how important athleticism is in regards to muscle memory. When reading people's projections about the 2020-2021 Nets, I've seen quite a lot of people say that KD's achilles rupture will have little effect on KD, with some people even saying "It will have no effect at all" because his game relies mainly on skill, not athleticism, and that Cousins and KD are similar in height and play style.