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Message: [QUOTE="billsin01, post: 4967221, member: 837"] I’ll say this much: I think the criticism he takes here is often outrageous. I absolutely agree that he is not an ideal lead guard from a team perspective. He’s much more score-first than we’d like and his decision-making in general all over the map. His defense and defensive efforts have been inconsistent as well. There have been stretches where he is an absolute menace defensively but far too many occasions where he’s gambling 75’ away from the basket for no reason and then not hustling to get back into the play. His shooting has been underwhelming — really thought he’d come back this year as a solid 35% on 4-5/game type shooter and that has not been the case. But at the same time, I’m not sure how people are saying they wish he left (saw that in this thread) or blaming him for some significant portion of why we are where we are. [B]Consider[/B]: [LIST] [*]If he left we’d be down to essentially 7 scholarship players at the moment (JJ, Taylor, Cuffe, bell, brown, Carey, Copeland). That would be bad. [*]Judah spent a good chunk of the first half of the season playing with the following lineup around him: Taylor, Bell, McLeod, JJ. With JJ struggling, that’s a lineup with two scorers. In the first 10 games he averaged 20 ppg with really good efficiency (22/game if you take Chaminade out). That helped us keep our head above water. Now, since JJ came on and we started seeing more of the Cope/Brown/benny group — I feel like Judah has become a bit more effective as a creator for others. In the past 12 games, he’s been a far less efficient scorer but has averaged 5.5 assists. My point here isn’t that he’s been a terrific PG, but that as we have put more movement around him and seen JJ knock down a few more jumpers, he’s shared the ball significantly better. [*]But I think the part that keeps me from piling on Judah specifically is this: we aren’t running much of an offense to begin with, we have a roster full of pretty limited players, our defensive approach needs off-season tweaking (we have way too many players on an island with no help), we don’t rebound the ball … this is just a team that is significantly flawed from top (that includes Judah and Red) to bottom. [/LIST] So anyway, all of that leads me to the conclusion that while Judah’s season has been disappointing, I’m also firmly of the belief that he may also be the only thing standing between us and an 8 or 9-win kind of season. That doesn’t make Judah and all-American or a first-rounder. It may not even make him one of the best lead guards we’ve had here the past 10-15 years. But if we’re assigning blame for being a middling team again this season, there are many factors I’d rank far above Judah’s play and inconsistency. [/QUOTE]

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