Vs: Miami Heat 2014-2015 - Achilles ja Riley menos lotteryyn
En yleensä kopioi-liimaa tänne maksullisia ESPN:n Insider -tekstejä, koska se ei ole kosheria. Tällä kertaa teen poikkeuksen, koska Hassan Whiteside on Hassan Upside.
[quote author="http://insider.espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/12252674/where-did-hassan-whiteside-come-next-heat-big-man-nba"]
The making of Hassan Whiteside
Where did Heat's breakout star come from, and can he sustain success?
Heat center Hassan Whiteside has gone from draft castaway to rising star.
Film studios would reject the Hassan Whiteside story for being too preposterous.
We're talking about the most treasured prize in the sport -- an athletic 7-footer who can finish alley-oops, rebound and block shots at an elite level -- slipping through the cracks. No NBA team wanted him.
Labels like "immature" and "low basketball IQ" kept him from being taken seriously. There were rumored D-League fights that tarnished his résumé. Whiteside was forced to do two stints in China. There, he told ESPN Radio, he ate pig lungs thinking it was a ribeye steak. Whiteside went to Lebanon -- not once but twice -- to play professionally and try to get his career back on track. There, he witnessed a car bomb explode.
Now he's an overnight sensation on the level of "Linsanity." On Sunday, Whiteside blocked 12 shots in a rousing triple-double performance in 25 minutes against Chicago. A week earlier, he hung 23 points and 16 rebounds on the Los Angeles Clippers in their building, becoming the only player besides DeMarcus Cousins and Kevin Love to do that in the last five seasons.
After setting a franchise record for blocks Sunday, Whiteside's encore Tuesday was a 16-point, 16-rebound outing against the Milwaukee Bucks. The 25-year-old has shown no signs of slowing down.
Whiteside -- whom Dwyane Wade still calls "rook" despite this technically being Whiteside's third season in the league -- already leads the Heat in dunks (32) and blocks (46). The fact that he's enjoying success now in Miami, of all places, doesn't make much sense, either. Four years ago, he couldn't even finish his first workout with the team.
Everyone wants to know: Who is Hassan Whiteside? And how good is he really? Let's take a look.
Off-the-beaten path
Whiteside's story has humble beginnings. His first Heat workout came in 2010 ahead of the draft that saw John Wall go No. 1 overall. The Heat held an early second-round pick and desperately wanted a big man. At that workout in front of Miami staffers, the 20-year-old from Marshall University was exhausted and decided he had had enough. He abruptly walked out of the gym.
A few days later, the Heat selected Dexter Pittman at No. 32. With the 33rd pick in the draft, Sacramento selected Whiteside. Whiteside thought he'd be a lottery pick.
Things didn't work out in Sacramento. Depending on whose story you believe, Whiteside was either the product of a toxic environment full of immature youngsters or the driver of it. So he sought to reset his career in low-level international leagues.
This time last year, Whiteside was playing in the Lebanon Basketball League. If you load the Synergy Sports Technology program -- an ultra-comprehensive video scouting service that every NBA team uses religiously -- you'll find a total of 40 international leagues listed in the catalog. The one Whiteside played in wasn't one of them. Too obscure.
Fast-forward to mid-November of this season, when Whiteside flew to Miami to work out in front of the Heat staff. No one else would see him. The 7-foot big man who looked like the Lakers' Andrew Bynum wowed the audience, one that was once again desperate for a big man to bolster their frontcourt. Afterward, Erik Spoelstra shook his hand and quickly wrote down the following four words in his notebook:
The Heat planned to sign him the very next day, but another team got to him first. Needing a big body after half its team went down with the flu, Memphis inked Whiteside to an emergency contract after he spent time in Memphis' training camp.
Miami, stunned, thought it had blown it.
Turns out Memphis waived him the next day. He wouldn't have gotten minutes anytime soon anyway, not ahead of Marc Gasol and Kosta Koufos. Grizzlies VP of basketball operations and former ESPN Insider John Hollinger was blindsided just like everyone else.
"We thought maybe if we worked with him in the D-League, he could become a decent backup center," Hollinger said. "But obviously nobody saw this coming."
So Whiteside went back to the D-League, a place he knew well. Two days later, in front of a sparse crowd of barely 3,000 people, Whiteside put up 24 points, 16 rebounds and four blocks against the Sioux Falls SkyForce. The opponent that night just so happened to be the Heat's D-League affiliate.
The Heat, of course, were watching closely. Message received.
"He kicked our ass, and we signed him later that night," one Heat official said.
Now, he's the Heat's starting center. The plan has been accelerated.
Historic rise, comps
Less than one month after his last D-League call-up, Whiteside was putting up numbers that make you reboot your web browser and run an antivirus program to make sure it's working correctly. A triple-double with 12 blocks in a game? In 25 minutes no less? He alone has completed 13 alley-oop dunks, which already is more than 10 entire squads this season.
The numbers keep popping. Whiteside currently owns the sixth-highest PER in the NBA, just behind Stephen Curry and a smidge ahead of LeBron James. If we translate Whiteside's numbers to a per-36-minute basis, he is putting up averages of 17.2 points, 14.2 rebounds and 5.1 blocks this season. Go pull up Basketball-Reference.com and look at the list of players who have played at least 300 minutes and matched those rates in a season. You'll find the list is a very brief one: Whiteside.
That's it. OK, let's loosen it up. How about lowering it to three blocks? Here's the list of those who have averaged 17-14-3 per 36 minutes in a season: Whiteside, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton. So that's Whiteside and two of the best to ever play the game.
Let's lower the bar again. How about 16-14-3? Three more names: Shaquille O'Neal, Hakeem Olajuwon and Robert Parish. Two Hall of Famers and one destined to be one soon.
This is the level of production we're seeing right now from Whiteside. If you don't trust full-season comparisons, that's fair. We can just look at the first 19 games in a season. How many guys, since the NBA StatsCube database started in 1997, can match Whiteside's per-36-minute rates of 17 points, 14 rebounds and five blocks in their first 19 games of a season?
Zero. No one but Whiteside in almost two decades.
If we loosen it up to 16 points, 12 rebounds and three blocks, the following names pop up: O'Neal in 1999-00, the season when he won his only MVP along with his first title; Tim Duncan in 2004-05 when he won a championship and a Finals MVP; Marcus Camby in 2005-06 when he was named first-team all-defense; Dwight Howard in 2008-09 when he won Defensive Player of the Year and went to the Finals; and finally, Whiteside. That's the list.
Actually, I lied. I forgot to mention this one: Shaq's first season in Miami back in 2004-05. About a decade later, Miami found another Shaq -- out of the D-League.
On Monday, ESPN Radio's Dan LeBatard asked Whiteside which NBA player he thinks his game resembles the most.
"I'm going to say probably like David Robinson," Whiteside said live to a national audience. "David Robinson or Alonzo Mourning, something around there."
LeBatard responds incredulously with something that amounts to "really?"
"Yes," Whiteside said matter-of-factly.
This might come off as hubris. And to those organizations that labeled him "immature," this is probably registers as "Exhibit A" for what they were talking about earlier in his career. But these are the same organizations are also kicking themselves for choosing guys like Greg Stiemsma or Jason Maxiell to fill out the roster instead of Whiteside.
Upon hearing the LeBatard interview, I asked our own Kevin Pelton to run his sophisticated SCHOENE database to find a statistical comp for Whiteside. Sure, I looked at points, rebounds and blocks earlier on Basketball-Reference.com, but Pelton's formula would be much more comprehensive, analyzing every box-score statistic and comparing it to every player-season on record.
Which player's statistics did Whiteside objectively resemble the most?
The top four names: David Robinson. Whiteside's backup, Chris Andersen. Hakeem Olajuwon. And you guessed it, Alonzo Mourning.
Oh.
Outlook
This is where we have to pump the brakes. Whiteside is not a lock for the Hall of Fame. However, his production right now is on that level. In some ways, it is statistically off-the-charts.
Remember Jeremy Lin's stretch of Linsanity? He posted a 23.3 PER after 19 games. Whiteside is currently at 27.0. So even if Linsanity seems like the closest thing to what we're witnessing now, Whiteside's performance is decidedly superior from a numbers standpoint. The guy is shooting 65.3 percent and less than half of those are dunks.
Skeptics will call him Jerome James 2.0, nothing more than a flash in the pan. James went on a similar 11-game tear in the 2005 playoffs and the Knicks reflexively gave him a five-year, $30 million contract that will live in infamy among basketball circles. But James was 29 then and wasn't displaying nearly the type of skill set that Whiteside exhibits now. Whiteside is four years younger, in shape and isn't in a contract year.
That's the crazy thing. Whiteside is under a two-year contract that will pay him just $1.1 million next season. He's on track to become the biggest bargain in the league.
There will be rough patches. And it could start Friday against Tyson Chandler. The Heat will be without Dwyane Wade, who has fed more Whiteside buckets than any Miami player (13). And the Heat could be without Wade for weeks, so they'll have to find other ways to get Whiteside the ball. Rest assured, it won't be too difficult; Whiteside has a 9-6 standing reach.
"He's a bigger, younger Tyson Chandler," his teammate Chris Bosh said after Thursday's practice.
Above all, this is a story of NBA serendipity. Right place, right time, right team. "It's the perfect storm" as Spoelstra calls it. Let's see how long the Heat can ride this one out. Shaq, The Admiral, Zo, Chandler -- who knows. The Heat will take it, and after about a dozen stints around the world in five years, so will Whiteside. And if he keeps it up, maybe a screenwriter, too.
Tom Haberstroh
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Hassan Whiteside Full Highlights 2015.02.01 at Celtics - 20 Pts, 9 Rebs, 3 Blks, SMOOTH Moves!
