Mav fans miss Jason Terry

This is an excerpt from "2 man game", ESPN's Maverick blog. The bolds and underline are mine.

The hardwood floor is a stage on which he must perform, but JET goes through more effort to enhance his act than any other player in the league. He’s a walking, talking — always, always talking — hype machine, equipped to rally fans, jeer opponents and whip an arena of both friends and enemies into a frenzy. Terry simply has no regard for the NBA’s fourth wall. He treats every game as a completely interactive experience, and in that approach, he’s carved out a special place for himself as player turned provocateur.

Terry seems to cherish being loved in Dallas almost as much as he adores being reviled elsewhere, but his showmanship is always balanced carefully with legitimate production. Though it’s doubtful that JET appropriates his chatter relative to his performance, he has the benefit of making exactly the kind of plays that silence his most vocal critics.

He creates effectively for himself off the dribble. He hits pull-up jumpers emblematic of transcendent guards past. He has a well-earned reputation for producing at the end of games. Terry’s efficiency and approach somehow embody both the push toward per-possession maximization and the fetishization of an old school mentality. He’s perfectly in line with the breed of isolation-empowered guards that ruled the previous era of basketball analysis (and still informs the perspective of the casual fan to this very day), but Terry also stands out as one of the most efficient mid-to-high-usage shooters of his era. JET certainly has his nights where he overshoots his welcome, but in total he’s been precisely the kind of shot creator and motivator the Mavericks have needed.

Terry may well be Dallas’ megaphone, but he also acts as the team’s emotional dynamo. The Mavericks’ leadership is operated by committee, and though Nowitzki may lead by example and Jason Kidd by experience, Terry’s brashness has its value within the franchise’s greater restraint.

After all, it took a certain brashness to steal two games at STAPLES Center from the Lakers en route to an eventual sweep, to drop the favored Thunder and keep the title window open, and to topple the Heat in highly improbable fashion.

Even if the other Mavs don’t operate at the same volume as Terry, they willingly embrace the boldness of his personality. They’re so entrenched in that JET-fueled confidence at this point that they use every bit of perceived disrespect to strengthen the bunker they’ve built for themselves.

Each of those crowned Mavericks have worn their golden shoes in one way or another — some as proudly and defiantly as JET and some in ways far more understated but no less telling. That confidence, that arrogance, that audacity — it’s altogether as fundamental to the franchise’s identity as Nowitzki’s unstoppable fadeaway, Donnie Nelson’s quiet machinations, or Rick Carlisle’s persistent tinkering.

It’s the competitive fire that fuels a well-structured machine, and although some might find its frequent manifestations distasteful, Terry has effectively served as a living refrain of all that Dallas has ever hoped to accomplish. He yaps, he shoots, and he spreads his wings, but behind both Terry the showman and Terry the player is a cornerstone of the culture that made the Mavericks champions.


http://www.basketball-reference.com/players/t/terryja01.html


http://www.82games.com/1112/CSORT11.HTM

My Note: The 82games link shows clutch stats, where "clutch" is defined as the last 5 minutes of the game and/or OT and neither team being more than 5 points ahead. Jason Terry is 13th in the league in points scored/48minutes of production in clutch time, right behind Kobe Bryant. That kinda blows my mind, a bit. I mean, for Pete's Sake, he scored almost as many points/48mins as KoMe? I'm not sure how to wrap my mind around that. Is it good that he's not afraid to shoot or should we be afraid he'll shoot us out of games? Probably both. Only 56% of his points were assisted. Is that a good thing, because it means he can create his own shot, or is it a bad thing because it means he's a ME-baller? Well, I'm going to assume that, between Doc calling the plays and Rondo with the ball in his hands, a lot more of his shots will be assisted next year. So, I suppose it's a good thing that he can create his own shot, if the clock runs down and he needs to. Over the past few years we really had one "go to" guy who could create his own shot, Paul Pierce. That allowed defenses to swarm him as the clock ran down. We've seen that happen numerous times. Now, we have two. To find the player he's obstensibly replacing, Ray Allen, you have to scroll down to #54. Heheheheh.


bob


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