Weekly Wrap-Up

Welcome to the Weekly Wrap-Up, your source for all the happenings and tidbits from the previous week in the NBA, all in rambling bullet-point form.

- First we’ve got to hit on the only significant player movement news of the week. The Thunder are reportedly very close to signing Nenad Krstic to a deal that is rumored to be 3 years, $15 mil. The Nets have the option to match that offer since Krstic is technically still a restricted free agent, but given the quantity of young bigs they have and their desire to clear cap space for 2010, it’s extremely unlikely that they will do so. What does this mean for OKC? Well, for this season it means very little, since they’re probably doomed to finishing at or near the bottom of the league whatever they do, but it could end up paying big dividends over the next few years. Krstic is only 25, and was making very promising strides before tearing his ACL two years ago. The Thunder obviously believe that they’ve seen enough in his international play to indicate that he’s recovered and can return to playing at a high level. If so, this could be a huge steal for OKC, especially since they have effectively no post presence at this point. Getting a skilled, young 7-footer typically costs you a lot more than $5 mil a year, so this deal could end up looking all kinds of smart for Sam Presti and the Thunder down the road.

- Now, I am far from John Hollinger’s biggest fan, since I think he depends heavily on some formulas that are quite clearly flawed. However, when he talks about non-PER stuff, he can be pretty good. I really enjoyed a few of the tidbits from his article this week on Shaq approaching the mark of 5000 missed free throws. These two were particularly amusing:

“Shaq’s teammate [Steve] Nash has missed 253 free throws in his 883 NBA games. At that rate, it would take him 17,451 games to miss 5,000. If he played every regular-season game for 200 seasons, he’d still fall short.”

“If Larry Bird were to come out of retirement and miss his next 3,000 free-throw attempts (which would require him to shoot 0 percent for about seven seasons, based on his peak season of 492 free-throw attempts), he’d still have a higher career free-throw percentage than Shaq.”

Now that, my friends, is some epic bricklaying.

- A lot has been made of the fact that the rebirth of the Eastern conference this year, with far more depth and quality than in past years, and a winning record against the West. Looking around the conference, I think a lot of that success can be traced back to the strength of the point guard position around the East. A few years ago, we had Jason Kidd, Chauncey Billups, and a huge gap to the next tier. Now, well there may not be any sure-fire Hall of Famers like Kidd, there are a tremendous amount of solid-to-All Star caliber point guards in the East. Devin Harris, Jose Calderon, Rajon Rondo, Derrick Rose, Mike Bibby, and Jameer Nelson are all having great seasons, and the tier below them isn’t too far behind. Andre Miller, T.J. Ford, Mo Williams, Allen Iverson/Rodney Stuckey and recently D.J. Augustin, even young guys like Chris Duhon and Mario Chalmers are outperforming expectations. Even in Milwaukee, Ramon Sessions is having a sensational sophomore campaign, regardless of whether or not Scott Skiles is willing to see that (sigh). We’ve also got Gilbert Arenas coming back sometime later this year. That’s a pretty impressive crop, and most of them are young enough that they’re going to be around for a while.

- In this week’s edition of “Coaches doing stupid things,” I’d like to bring up that thing about Sessions in Milwaukee again. Now, when Sessions started 7 games at the end of last year and came out of nowhere to dish out a franchise-record 24 assists, you could be skeptical because it was such a small sample size. The thing is, he’s kept it up this year every time he’s gotten the chance to play. In fact, he’s been arguably the Bucks’ best offensive player outside of Michael Redd. However, with Redd and Luke Ridnour both healthy now, Sessions’ minutes have plummeted. Please explain to me why Luke freaking Ridnour is keeping this guy on the bench. Seriously, Sessions is a better floor general, turns the ball over less, gets to the line at a much higher rate, and is actually a threat to score. It’s not like Ridnour is a good defender either, he’s notoriously bad. I don’t understand.

- I’m not sure you can get a better demonstration of the impact that Kevin Garnett has than Wednesday’s game against Atlanta. I’m not even talking about the big plays he made down the stretch, I’m talking about what doesn’t show up in the box score. Atlanta played that game with a playoff intensity, an effort level that isn’t there for the rest of their games. As Rondo said after the game, “If [Atlanta] played everyone else the way they play us they’d be a top five team.” What you realize watching that though is that Boston plays that way ALL THE TIME. That’s what KG does that no one else does, he plays with maniac intensity all the time, whether it’s a random game in December or a game 7 in the playoffs, and not only does he play hard, but he demands his teammates do as well. That’s special, and it’s why KG will always be the Celtics’ MVP, regardless of who they give the ball to in crunch time.

- There are currently two players in the NBA ranked in the top ten in both Usage Rate and Offensive Rating. The first one is just who you’d expect, LeBron is a staggering 2nd and 4th respectively in those categories. The second guy though, take a guess. Go ahead, write it down, see if you get it correct. Who did you put down? Kobe? Wade? Dirk? Nope. The correct answer is Portland’s quiet star Brandon Roy, who after his 52-point outburst the other day ranks 7th in the league in usage rate, and 8th in offensive rating. I consider myself a huge Roy fan, and even I couldn’t have predicted this. While it’s likely that Roy returns to earth a little bit as the season goes on, it’s about time we started mentioning him among the league’s upper-echelon superstars, he’s earned it.

Maestro Award

The Maestro Award is my recognition of the best performance from the previous week

And the award goes to…Brandon Roy, for the aforementioned 52-point game, only the second 50-point game this season and shattering his previous career-high by 14. More impressively, he was extremely efficient in doing so. He made over 50% of his shots, hit 5 out of 7 from deep, went 19-21 at the free throw stripe, and added 6 assists, 5 rebounds and 0 turnovers! Oh yeah, and he drilled the go-ahead three-pointer with a minute left in a dramatic 124-119 victory. If you’d like, he could probably walk on water for you too. Would you put it past him?

Honorable Mention – Josh Smith, for doing this to poor Kendrick Perkins.

xphoenix87 is a contributing writer for BallerBlogger.com. x is a college student who dreams of one day writing about sports for a living. Since that’s not gonna happen, he’ll do this instead.