This week, we're talking about Monta Ellis. Everybody is. And that's good and bad.
Monta Ellis is about as good an example as there is of the current problem with how we think about upper-middle class NBA players. Guys in the $8-11 million range are the targets of ire all around the league, because they're paid that much even though they have flaws. No one seems to think about the fact that that's why guys like Monta aren't on max contracts either, and aren't about to get one. It's a fair price, but for a lot of people there are no fair prices between affordable and max, that's just the tenor of front offices these days.
And that's the whole thing about being as good as he is, and not better or worse. People go crazy, on both sides, assessing his value. When he has a bad game, people say, "if only they had a 3-and-D guy instead, so they could build around him," without ever really considering with whom they would build around this hypothetical 3-and-D guy. When he's playing well, obviously, it's a different story.
He's the best scorer and the best crunch time guy on a team that is, by more or less any estimation, a top-10 team in the league. We forget that when he goes 4-of-22, we remember it pretty well when he downs the Spurs with a 38-point game. The guys who have scored 30 against the Spurs this season are guys like Dwight Howard, Damian Lillard, Russell Westbrook, Blake Griffin, Kyle Lowry, Kyrie Irivng, Mike Conley and, weirdly, Arron Afflalo. Monta, in three games against San Antonio this season, is averaging 31. There are not a lot of guys in the league who can do that, and anyone who thinks Monta's replaceable to that degree is flat out wrong.
That doesn't mean the Mavs might not be able to do better, on the holistic level. They may be able to. I'll admit some of the recent talk about his moodiness has me nervous, especially about the fact that the Mavs, on some level, didn't dare asking him to sit when he was injured. By the same token, probably can't tell him to stop taking long jumpers with 20 seconds on the clock in the late minutes of a close game, something they desperately need to be able to do.
But the Mavs have had a lot of experience with what looks like trying to do better than the bird in the hand, and the fact that people are still firm believers in the probability is a testament to some of the better aspects of human nature except, perhaps, our ability to gauge probability and to learn from experience.
There are few guys in the league who give you what Monta gives you. Maybe the Mavs would have beaten the Suns with someone objectively less talented but a little more disciplined and consistent, but they definitely wouldn't have beaten the Spurs, who went on to beat Thunder something like 300-12. It may make sense for them to at least let him test the market this summer, if he really does opt out, but if it were up to me, unless everyone in the locker room hates him, I'd spend a lot of my time thinking about how to keep him in town.
