SQ29 Most Likely Disappointment

This is always a difficult category. The problem is that it should actually be graded on a curve—performance vs. skill/talent level. Unfortunately we fans seldom cut players any slack due to inherent limitations. Rather, is their production what we wanted from them as opposed to what might be reasonably expected. Still, at the end of camp, or perhaps far before camp ends, we will be all warm and fuzzy over some of our warriors, while others will be in the dog house, or gone, or both. So here is my totally biased read.

Prime candidate number one is the summer “acquisition” from the Thunder, Perry Jones III (always with the III, huh, I can't remember any other NBA player who is regularly graced with his lineage score?) I say acquisition because he is on the team now and he wasn't before, but the truth is that OKC paid Danny to take PJ3 off their hands. And this wasn't the trivial “highly protected future second round pick,” this was an unprotected pick. It was far enough in the future so that it did not add to the already log-jammed cluster of draft picks Ainge has in hand for the next two years, and it is a Detroit pick which might be better four years from now since Stan VanGundy appears to have positioned the Pistons for some near term improvement. Stan's blustery act, however, has not aged well in his previous stints as head coach. Feuding with general managers, star players, and operating at a scream most of the time, his history is several years of productive teams followed by an invitation to go away. By 2019 this second round pick might just be from a team in rapid decline. Unfortunately that pick might be the only plus to come out of this summer's move.

A lot of us, and yes I am included, have gotten all excited about this Jones arrival. This, in spite of the fact that many of us, if asked a week earlier who Perry Jones III was, would have guessed “a New England blue-blood busy squandering his inheritance on cars, clothes, and peroxide blonds, all flashy and quickly discarded?” O.K., truthfully many of us did remember PJ-the-numerical from our obsession with the draft in 2012 when Perry was projected as a lottery pick until concerns about his knee(s) saw him drop into the 20's where Ainge had back-to-back picks at 21 and 22. Ainge took the other medical-flag droppee, Jared Sullinger, with the first pick, and to the dismay of most of us, selected Fab(ulous) Melo with the second. Some opined at the time that they preferred Perry Jones at 22, and if my age-addled memory serves, I was one of them. Fab made every effort to confirm that he did not deserve that first round position, or any round for that matter; and served mostly to provide comic relief (the chair, the door frame, his goofy grin, his spastic duck play, oh God I've got to stop this flashback is waaay too painful).

Still, on paper PJ3 looks awesome, in fact just standing on the court he is pretty impressive. Unfortunately basketball isn't played on paper, nor is it played just standing. Now the story is not all bad by any means. Perry has shown that he runs well, just not often enough. He attacks the basket with abandon, only too seldom. After two years pinned mostly to the bench, when Durant was first out, Jones carried the team, for two or three games before fading back into the scenery, getting a severe bone bruise on one of his tender knees, and never emerging again. See a pattern emerging here? In fact this illusion of value is part of why PJ3 is so troubling. He might actually show enough in camp to convince Ainge to make some other move to reduce the roster to fifteen, and then Perry reverts to his shadow self and whatever asset Danny moved was wasted.

Perry Jones is cursed with perhaps the most intractable of all deficits, great tools, but no motor or mental framework to make the tools serviceable. Now the kids brought into the NBA these days are so immature that it often takes several years for them to progress enough to even see what you have got. Sometimes you see one of these mirage guys eventually “get it” and have productive careers (although chances for an emerging star are pretty much off the board). Sometimes it takes dropping out of the league and toiling in faraway places where just ordering food is a struggle for these guys to realize that the talent that allowed them to coast through high school and a year of “cowboys, gym class, and gunboats” courses in college, just won't cut it as a pro. Sometimes these guys develop a work ethic, a healthy lifestyle maximizing the athletic gifts they took for granted, and a realization that working on their weaknesses and developing new skills are the only way to be competitive in this bigger, faster, stronger, more talented fast lane. Sometimes, but, unfortunately, not all that often.

Now for those of you that, having read this far, find yourselves reaching for the bottle, or the antidepressants, or edging up to the precipice and feeling the tug of the long fall, there are some bright ss, some brighter than others. The physical attributes that made Jones so alluring in the first place have not faded. The knees have held up (and anyone can be laid low for months by a severe bone bruise) and the dire warnings of the doctors (that PJ3 and his knees would be out of the sport in three or four years) before the draft seem less threatening. He did drop 36 points on Golden State, so we are not wondering whether he can produce, only why he doesn't do it every night, or at least more often. He can play any front court position (and yes he would be an extremely weak and feather-weight stretch at center, but he wouldn't be looking up the opposition which Celtics “centers” have been doing for several years), and has been recognized for his excellent defense (klaxon horns, sirens, and bells sounding in background). At his best his is athletic, multi-tooled, multi-positioned, prototypical modern NBA player; and those have been in very, very short supply in Waltham for many years.

If Brad Stevens can work the kind of magic that he applied to Evan Turner and Jordan Crawford, this could really be spinning gold thread out of discarded straw. No player on these Celtics has the potential to provide such an enormous boost to the team as a whole, and yes I would even include Smart. Jones may be the easiest cut, or the most improved player; and I actually expect one extreme or the other rather than something in the middle. Lack of motor and aggression are killing deficits, but I'm still kind of hopeful. The other thought that gives me pause is BBIQ. More and more I think that low BBIQ and ME-first players just don't have a place in this new Celtics order. I just haven't been able to find anything on the web that I feel gives me an insight on this BBIQ factor. If you have a url that you feel can fill in this hole, please include it in the comments.

This is still the kid (and he is still several years away from what should be his physical prime) that survived a childhood of hardship, was essentially homeless his senior year in high school, stayed in college for a second year because he recognized he needed to mature, tweeted about his academic(!) achievement, and was recognized in school for mentoring classmates who were fighting to help them resolve their differences in a better way. This is exactly the kind of human that the Celtics organization is trying to build a culture around. Can he make the leap from good-hearted to properly assertive? I don't know but I do know that there is no development for which I will be rooting harder this pre-season. There is an informative read about Jones on ESPN (much as I dislike tooting their horn, but at least it is written, which is often excellent, and not their loud mouthed misguided and misinformed television shills—oops I'm sorry, did my bias and disgust slip through there?) which I highly recommend:

http://espn.go.com/mens-college-basketball/story/_/id/7630611/the-story-baylor-bears-star-perry-jones-iii-men-college-basketball

Only 35 days to camp.

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