Here's why PER (John Hollinger's efficiency tool) gets me sometimes. There's no doubt the contributions that Wes Matthews has made to the team. He gives us an outside shooter, someone that can penetrate the offense, and he's playing pretty good D.
Where a PER rating of 15 is an average NBA player, Wesley scores a 9. Here's a list of similarly ranked guards from this season with at least 9 games.
From what I understand of PER, it looks like his lack of rebounding, assists, and steals. First, he should be rebounding some more and Kevin O'Connor stated on Locke's show that Sloan has said as much. The assists are going to be hard to bring up with his position on the team. He has passed the ball a lot more the past couple of games though. And steals aren't necessarily indicative of good defense.
Are there many from that list above Matthews that you would rather have? If you just take into account the rookies that have played in at least 9 games, Matthews is on the bottom of the list.
But if you watch him each night, I think you would see the value that he brings.
Maynor by the way is at 15.2 and ranked 7th among rookies.
With CJ set to come back on Friday and Korver's return coming soon after that, are we going to see the team get thrown off a bit? Someone's minutes are going to have to go down and it will likely be Matthews. How long is going to take to get them going again? Does Matthews make Korver a trade piece? I don't think he's going to return much by himself, he'd have to be packaged with someone.
Speaking of trades, at this point, I'm firmly in the "They're not going to trade Boozer" this season camp. First, the team is playing so well now and Boozer's one of the biggest reasons for that. He's been unwordly. They're only going to trade him for equal value at this point and they're not going to get that now.
Second, the longer we go without a trade, the likelihood of a trade happening diminishes. The reason is that making changes later in the season decreases the time that a new teammate would have to mesh and gel with the team on the court.
What worries Jazz fans is that we've never had an explanation of what caused the horrendous slide to close out last season. It was the same team that we had that tore it up to close out the 2008 season. And for now, the Jazz are looking like that team. What's in the back of every Jazz fan's mind is is that going to happen again? Because if a slide like that does happen after we could have traded Boozer, we'll have let Boozer walk without getting value in return (other than his money coming off the books) and we'll have lost another year of Deron.
At this point, the Jazz are going to have to be bowled over with an offer to part with Boozer.
If you'd like to win some of Deron's stuff, head to his website for his 25 days of Christmas giveaway. You have to sign up each day.
The Jazz are off until Friday, FRIDAY! Man, it's going to be a long week.