Count me in. I missed the first summer league game where kanter apparently struggled. I logged on to jazzfanz and people are ripping him up one side and down the other. There was a game thread devoted to him sucking, a thread about re-doing the draft so we could identify who should we have taken, a thread comparing him to drummond, and several other thread devoted to bashing the guy. I was like maybe my eyes deceived me last year so I recorded the rest of the summer league games and just finished watching them last night. After watching all the games except the first all I can say is the Kanter bashers must be on good drugs. There were times in these games where Kanter was the best player on both teams and times where he completely dominated. He played great defense, especially pick and roll defense. He rebounded like a dennis rodman. Put plainly he was awesome.
kanter has a few issues he can improve upon. He needs to get better in the pick and roll on offense, because he doesn't always open up correctly to receive a pass. He needs to develop the Karl Malone jump hook as his go to move when he cuts from left to right across the lane. The up and under should be used only to keep people honest. Finally, he needs to start looking for his 15 foot jump shot. He needs to develop more confidence in that shot. That being said he is young and is only getting better. Those so called jazz fans that rip him for getting blocked or turnovers are judging a very raw product who is only going to get better given time. Judge him on what he does well as in addition to poor. As long as he has an NBA skill (rebounding) he can get better at the rest.
Finally, the thing that bothers me most is that the same people bashing kanter love jeremy evans. For peaks sake people look as the stats over the summer league. Evans and Kanter have almost identical stats. Yet people want to crown evans as the next all star and ship Kanter out on the next bus out of town. Its amazing to me that all people see is the high flying dunks and think that is awesome and yet they don't appreciate a guy who keeps his position, blocks out and goes and gets a rebound. A dunk is only worth 2 points people, not matter how awesome they are.
