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Keyonte George’s Star Ascension

Thee Jazz Fan said:
We might be doing a similar thread for Flip next year. I just think he needs to get stronger and more explosive which is very doable. A front court of Kessler Flip and Markkanen could be lethal along with a further progressed Key and a stronger Ace with improved handles. For we know all of our court pieces may be in place just need to build upon other role players.
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I subscribe to the theory of quantity over quality when it comes to draft picks.

Accumulate a bunch, and you can land on enough of them without needing to tank. The list of stars who weren't top 5 picks is bottomless.
 
Qman said:
Interesting. Maxey is crazy fast. I don’t think of key that way.
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That’s what Zach Lowe kind of said. He said he doesn’t think Key is that type of athlete but Michael Pina was wondering if Key could have that type of jump.
 
NAOS_pt2 said:
It should also be said that Donovan was doing that with a heavy offensive burden on a winning team.


I'm loving Key's development, but IMO the context of winning basketball is important to keep in mind. It obviously isn't Key's fault that he's on a rebuilding team; and it was Donovan's good fortune to land on a team that could maximize his skillset as it climbed upward through a team-building process. But, yeah, there are a lot more high-pressure/clutch/important possessions when you're on a team that is obessed with winning, not with rebuilding.
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From my recollection Mitchell was generally awful in the 4th quarter early in his career and even worse about missing shots at the end of games.

Key seems to have ice in his veins this year- not as selfish and makes key shots when he needs to. He reverts to ball hog every now and then but coach Hardy must have a safe word, because those stretches are very short.
 
Thee Jazz Fan said:
From what I recall Mitchell was really good in the fourth quarter till the last few minutes of a close game. Key is more calculated and better at getting to the ft line.
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Key also tends to continue playing within the offense and relies heavily on Markkanen. He has that advantage over Mitchell. Mitchell always went off the offensive script because he didn’t have a Markkanen to play off
 
Thee Jazz Fan said:
From what I recall Mitchell was really good in the fourth quarter till the last few minutes of a close game. Key is more calculated and better at getting to the ft line.
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Yeah that’s what I was getting at with the missed shots thing- he started ignoring teammates and only looking for his own shot and the other team would just lock onto him as he’d force a bad shot. Key isn’t afraid to pass of and not afraid to take the big shot- whatever the right play is. This is a THIS SEASON development though- he was very Mitchell like last year. I think the most important thing, beyond his base physical talents, is how incredibly coachable Key is- after all the pouting last year I wouldn’t have guessed it.
 
I guess you could say Mitchell had JC, but JC a lot of the time was on the bench in crunch time and when they were in at the same time at the end they didn’t play off each other well at all more like my turn your turn to go off script.
 
As usual, people are going overboard with this.

Two things can be equally true:

1) This season's Keyonte is a much improved, very useful offensive player. His increased impact on that side of the ball is particularly evident on the Jazz, as Lauri used to be only one capable of providing consistent volume scoring, night in night out. That isn't the case anymore. Key deserves his flowers for getting stronger and better.

2) Keyonte's awful defense is seriously holding him back. It's not "mid", it's not "meh", it's not "he could be better I guess". He's hurting the team in a major way. Dunksandthrees.com says Key has the 2nd worst defensive impact in the entire NBA. Read that again. He's deep, deep in the red. (As an aside: Collier is almost as bad.) It wouldn't be much of an exaggeration to say that for all intents and purposes, Keyonte doesn't play defense.

The current Key is a true Jekyll-and-Hyde guy. The gap between his offensive impact (much better than average) and defensive impact (bottom of the barrel) is absolutely massive. People like to point to guys like Brunson as similar cases, but while Brunson is a minus defender, his offensive impact is legit superstar level. There's no comparison.

Overall, this season's Keyonte is an average NBA player. Fans like to ignore defense when someone starts putting the ball in the basket, but defense matters. For instance, a widely used catch-all impact metric like EPM ranks him at 203 in the league. Lauri is at 16. It's wild that Key is that low on a team where his offensive impact has been massive this season.

So no, Keyonte isn't even close to being a star. He's such a bad defender that even getting to an average level will be a massive task for him. There's no guarantee he'll ever get there.
 
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