I'M here to tell you Mike Conley sucks

A couple days ago, two thirds of what was formerly the Half Court Press got together to watch the Grizzlies-Spurs game with our friend Haruki, editor-in-chief of Agora Sports blog. Haruki’s a good guy, but he has an intense affinity for a certain inexplicable group of players. And by that, I mean he has a raging hard-on for a few scrubs—one of whom is Memphis Grizzlies’ PG Mike Conley. After a half hour of him orally verbally fellating Conley in the lead-up to the game, I’d had enough.

“Conley fucking sucks,” I said. Loudly, because Haruki had just seen a graphic comparing the head-to-head points, rebounds, and assists statistics of Conley and the Spurs’ All-Star point guard Tony Parker, and I needed to interrupt what looked like his vinegar strokes before the image of that twisted face was permanently burned into my brain.
“You suck,” rebutted Haruki.

Our dialogue whipped back and forth, like Max Pacioretty’s head when Chara hammered it into that stanchion a tetherball.

We cut it off after 20 minutes, when Steve’s eyes acquired the kind of glazed expression usually reserved for zombies or every single student in my Canadian public policy lecture. But not before two things were firmly established: 1) we had completely divergent views on the worth of Conley and 2) we were (however momentarily) ready to beat the living crap out of each other over the issue of whether Conley was a) the 10^th or b) the 20^th best point in the league.

Yesterday, I woke up to see Haruki had posted a new blog entry on his facebook page entitled, “I’m Here to Tell You that Mike Conley Sucks” (his capitalization). Expecting to read an article brimming with contrition, and maybe some glowing praise directed at me for being awesome and right, I was shocked to find that it was all a ruse. The post was ostensibly aimed at anybody who couldn’t appreciate Conley’s baketball genius, but was clearly a direct and pointed personal attack. Though his article had some substance, after wading through the snark there were only a couple of points I would consider really germane to this discussion. These were:

• “Yes, you (Conley)run the Grizzlies offense beautifully, spreading the ball around to all your weapons, finding the hot-hand and rarely making a bad decision or taking a bad shot.”
  
• “Your handle is good, not great. You can shoot ok, but you’re no Ray Allen. Your assists are rarely of the spectacular variety.”
  

Ignoring the sarcasm, I agree with the majority of the two points, but I take some issue with each of them.

To the first, although I strongly disagree with the use of the word ‘beautiful’ in connection with Conley at any time, I agree that he, for the most part, does a good job of running the Grizzlies’ offense. He makes the easy pass and the simple play, and usually gets out of the way so that his more talented teammates can do their thing. These attributes aren’t always seen as so positive though, since you can say the same thing about someone like Jose Calderon (who’s one of the few starting point guards, along with Derek Fisher, who is unequivocally and empirically worse than Conley). Calderon, like Conley, has a low turnover rate and is a willing passer. But Calderon’s shortcoming is his lack of footspeed, which results in an inability to turn the corner on the pick and roll or beat his man off the dribble, which, in turn, leads to him not getting into the paint and breaking down the defense. These negatives, somewhat perversely, are part and parcel of his low turnovers—he doesn’t turn the ball over because he doesn’t get into the high traffic areas that force the defense to collapse on him. So yes, he doesn’t turn the ball over, but he doesn’t manufacture the kind of easy looks that Chris Paul, Derrick Rose, or a bunch of other point guards do.

Why does this matter? Because Conley’s the same type of player—he isn’t slow like Calderon, but because, as Haruki says, his “handle isn’t great” he doesn’t seem comfortable getting into the paint or breaking down the defense with any kind of regularity. His assists, like Calderon’s, are often of the “pass to the guy who’s man is sagging a foot off of him and force him to hit the semi-contested jumper” variety.

As for his shooting, I’m glad that Haruki brought up the Ray Allen comparison because their strokes are so similar sometimes even I get them confused. Honestly, I don’t expect him to be Allen because nobody is. The problem I have with Conley is that the Spurs were able to go under pretty much every Conley pick-and-roll because he wasn’t a threat to shoot off the dribble. This meant that TP was meeting him on the other side of the screen, obstructing his path to the basket and keeping him out of the lane. A couple times in the game he knocked down midrange open jumpers, but it wasn’t enough to make the Spurs want to change their defensive strategy.

Finally, the numbers back me up. Conley’s PER is 15.9, and he has 0.111 Win Shares per 48 minutes. For PER the league average is 15, and for Win Shares the average is 0.100. By both metrics Conley is barely above average, making him subpar for a starting point guard. I could buy the argument that stats don’t tell the whole story for a guy like Conley, but they’re not completely misleading either. He’s no scrub, but he has a long way to go before he’s an above-average starter in this league.

But, even though you now know how wrong he is, let’s not all shit on Haruki at once (an Akron [Only place I can think of that’s shittier than Cleveland] steamer?). His blind love for “Money” Mike has put him in a bad spot. The poor son of a bitch, by defending Conley’s contract, has placed himself squarely in the corner of another Mike … Mike “soulless as a ginger” Heisley. So, regardless of whether or not Haruki is right about Conley (he’s not) he’s damned for all eternity.