Noam Schiller Breaks Down Andrei Kirilenko Beautifully

Oh, Andrei. Why must you tease us so? You beautiful, enigmatic bastard.

You could probably stop right there and have a full article on Andrei Kirilenko. Noam Schiller (ShamSports) writes what I should have written a long time ago. It's a perfect description of what makes us love AK so much and what drives us crazy. A snippet,

Somehow, in the NBA, this raw tendency has always been obstructed. It may be Carlos Boozer pushing him out of the power forward position, but I don't buy it. Placing Kirilenko in any semblance of a "natural" position is severe miscasting, as Kirilenko is in every way the positional revolution incarnate. Clearly, he isn't a guard, and isn't a center, but he isn't really a forward either - he's an everything, just tall enough to fit between the 2 and the 4, which inevitably ends up being listed as a 3. If anything, the disservice to Andrei is not that the prefix to his "forward" listing is the word "small" instead of "power", but that he's been cast as anything at all.

I've never felt that AK's full potential was realized in Utah. Part of that his his fault and some of the fault lies with the team and coaches. Schiller puts into words everything that I've wanted to say and much more brilliantly.