(If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS/Atom feed. Thanks for visiting! - Michael)
That is a seriously a cool looking ad- it’s from the current And1.com home page. I suppose it helps that I’m a big Monta and Warriors fan though, maybe if I weren’t, this wouldn’t be a big deal.
The Warriors so far are seriously stinking it up. When Baron signed, I thought, “that’s cool” at first, but now I regret that with each passing day, not just because Baron is great and the Warriors suck, but knowing that Chris Mullin actually wanted to keep Baron, but Robert Rowell refused. Now Baron is with the Clippers, and not quite baron-esque as he once was, I think from both sides, Baron was meant to be a Warrior and now he’s not. Just like J-Rich was meant to be a Warrior, but he’s not.
This puts Monta in the ultimate pressure role. He has to develop into a superstar. That’s basically 25 pts/5 boards/5 assists/1.5 steals per game, on efficient shooting like a mini-Wade/Iverson. How much of his success was from playing with Baron, we’ll see soon enough. If he can’t make the jump, the Warriors are in the same spot they’ve always been- bad, but not bad enough to get a #1 overall pick, but not any good either.
While no one can doubt that the Warriors have a ton of young talent, when in the past 7 years (Larry Hughes, Gilbert Arenas, Mike Dunleavy, Troy Murphy, Antawn Jamison, J-Rich, etc.) has this not been said about every Warrior team? Problem is basically that all of those years, they still sucked (when it mattered), except for one fantastic year (last) and 2 months of kick-ass (the playoff run).
Plus, the Warriors have got all these long contracts after extending Stephen Jackson and getting Jamaal Crawford, so they’re in essentially a get lucky and draft a superstar (not likely) or basically be a 35-42 win team for the next 5 years. Even that’s assuming Nelson sticks around and develops these guys, and that the next coach is decent. If Monta is just a 20 pt scorer who can pass a little and can’t really defend, that’s basically the same skill set whole team has. The irony in that Monta needs to work on his D is that in his rookie year, he was put in for D, and used to pick up the quickest guard on the floor. It was great, so it’s odd to suddenly hear he doesn’t man up anymore.
I’m going to see the Warriors Raptors game after Christmas, and if Monta isn’t back, I’m going to be seriously disappointed, not just from a fan standpoint, but almost in the sense of wanting to give up on this team. I went through nearly 15 years of poor play already, I don’t think I can go through that again.
I don’t know if I can trust the Warriors for that long again.
