Quote:
Originally posted by <b>ArtestFan</b>!
A player like Stephon Marbury is a loser not because he's never won a ring, but because he dominates the ball too much to integrate himself into a championship team, and he's not good enough to carry a team to a championship if he has the ball in his hands most of the time.
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Stephon Marbury dominates the ball too much because of the teams he plays/has played for. As a 20 year old with a KG who was not even half the player he is today and almost no one else(Gugliotta injured) the Wolves took one of the Sonics finals teams to the absolute limit in the first round.
You put Stephon Marbury in a lineup whose best players (Van Horn missed half the season) are a rookie Kenyon Martin and Johnnie Newman, and what do you expect? Who is he taking the ball away from? Same goes for Phoenix, where he's playing with a rookie "deer in the headlights" 19 year old Joe Johnson, Marion - a great roleplayer, but not someone who you can have operate with the ball in his hands, with a starting frontcourt of Tom Gugliotta and Jake Tsakalidis and how could you expect more than 36 wins? Again, who does he give the ball to in this situation? Then next season, playing with a supporting cast that doesn't really cater to his strengths (Marbs played very well with Marion, that's it) and doesn't HAVE any strengths outside of a rookie beast and Shawn Marion, he leads them to the playoffs and gives the world champs their toughest series of the playoffs.
Send him to New York, he starts to turn them around, then you trade Keith Van Horn for Tim Thomas (why? why why why?), Houston goes back to the injured list and they start dropping off again. Wow Steph, how could you underperform so when your starting running mates after game one in the playoffs are Shandon Anderson, Penny Hardaway, Kurt Thomas and Nazr Mohammed? For shame.
In the immortal words of our departed friend Mattsanity: "Face the facts, face reality." Stephon Marbury has been put in a sequence of ****ty situations, and in the only situations that have been even remotely favorable, he has performed more than admirably.
His recent brilliant play with Team USA is more indicative of the kind of player Stephon is than his performances with his horrible supporting casts in the NBA.
Kobe put on numerous displays last year where he constantly overdribbled and completely ignored his teammates. That gets masked by the Lakers
team success and his penchant for the dramatic and the spectacular. You put Kobe in the situations Stephon Marbury has been in, and he's probably known as a spectacular talent with great stats who chooses to hot dog and ball-hog instead of do the things he needs to do to help his team win.