Primetime
Active Member
One of the hardest things to do in the NBA is drive to the basket at the kind of calm pace that allows a player to keep all of his options open. A lot of ball handlers turn the corner on a pick-and-roll, stop at the foul line area, and throw a perfectly nice pass to a teammate on the perimeter.
Once that same player gets inside the foul line, he picks up speed and drives into a thicket of bodies with an intent to get to the rim. If those bodies terminate that plan, well, there is no plan B.
Burks is an explosive, ultra-fast athlete, and he made himself more unpredictable off the bounce. He mixed up his use of screens and added some Eurosteppy finishes:
He’s an effective passer on the perimeter, but that hasn’t translated into a drive-and-kick game. Burks also doesn’t shoot enough 3s, especially since he’s nearly a league-average 3-point shooter who looks comfortable from the corners.
Again: The context was not ideal. Burks came off the bench for a bad team, facing clogged lanes and playing with point guards who couldn’t bend opposing defenses.
Burks is a so-so defender but not a damaging vortex of suck. He has happy feet and can juke himself out of plays, and he’ll make the occasional failed gamble that is fatal to any team defense. He’s prone to some wild and often unnecessary rotations that leave good shooters wide open, though the Jazz defense overall was a mess under Ty Corbin. Burks isn’t big enough to defend bulky small forwards, and bruising 2-guards like Wesley Matthews hurt him on the block.
Executives view Burks as a sixth man, the customary pigeonholing for any combo guard, and compare him often to Monta Ellis. But Ellis is on another planet as a drive-and-dish force, and Burks could absolutely grow into a fourth or fifth starter on a good team. He’s a worker, and he’s exactly the kind of secondary ball handler every team needs now.
He hasn’t shown that kind of “starter on a good team” ability yet, and it’s unclear how much the Jazz should pay to find out if he might someday show it. Burks isn’t great at any one thing, and he’s mediocre at most things. But he’ll get minutes this season and draw interest in a league drooling over any available young wing player.
A four-year, $28 million extension might seem an overpay given Burks’s record, but it could turn into the new TV-deal version of those $4 million–level extensions teams gave Thabo Sefolosha, Quincy Pondexter, and Jared Dudley. Those deals weren’t home runs, but they provided good value at most times, and can return actual assets in trades.
https://grantland.com/the-triangle/nba-extensions-2014-tristan-thompson-markieff-morris-brandon-knight-alec-burks-jimmy-butler-nikola-vucevic/
We talked about Alec's extension a lot but it is nice to see Alec getting some recognition from Mr. Lowe. I wouldn't mind 'A four-year, $28 million extension' at all but that ain't gonna happen especially in a market where Jodie Meeks is getting $6 million a year. But it would be a dream scenario and could/should mean that we'll have no problems keeping all our core players for 3 more years. That would buy us some time and we could really see what we have in our players because I doubt we will get all the answers to our questions this season.
