Hakim Warrick – 2018-19 G-League Player Profile
June 20th, 2019
Hakim Warrick PF – 6’9, 219lbs – Born 8th July 1982 Iowa Wolves Warrick left the NBA six years ago, cut by the Magic at the 2013 trade deadline, and is now 36 years old. The G-League has in recent times served increasingly often as a place for multi -year NBA veterans to come and try their hand at getting back into the big dance, with some successes (Damien Wilkins and Emeka Okafor, for example), yet Warrick’s absence from the big league has been a particularly long one. He has been employed in that time, of course; a season in China, a half-season in Turkey, a season split between Australia and Greece; a couple of summers in Puerto Rico; brief stints in the Lebanon and Israel. Yet the NBA has been a long time gone. It is intriguing if a bit harsh on Warrick to reflect on how the NBA has moved on in that time. At his peak, Warrick was an athletic but undersized power forward, stuck with the dreaded ‘tweener’ status. He was never a big time rebounder, and never an impactful defender of any area of the court, but he was extremely athletic. He liked to run, and he liked to dunk, and in an era of stretch bigs, high ball screens and roll men, Warrick could have thrived more than when forced to post up as he so often was, back when such things were considered orthodoxy. Of course, Warrick himself was never an outside shooter, and in the years hence, he still has not shown himself to be one, either. 6-9 shooting from three this season is fun, but not meaningful. Warrick retains much if not all of the athleticism of his youth; the hope is that that plus name recognition makes him […]
….But It’s Zach Randolph?
September 6th, 2008
ESPN: Knicks suggest dealing Randolph to Memphis The Knicks have a trade proposal on the table with the Memphis Grizzlies that would see Darko Milicic and Marko Jaric dealt to New York in exchange for Zach Randolph. OK, I get it. I do. I really do. “Here, take Zach Randolph! Take this extremely talented player who just so happens to play at your weakest position! Nooooooo, we don’t want anything back! You just take him!” I get that. When your job is to improve your team, and you are offered a highly talented basketball player for essentially free, it’s a tough one to turn down. And Zach Randolph really is highly talented. But he’s also Zach Randolph. And therein lies the problem. For all of Zach’s talents, his play has never been efficient, consistently sensible, or highly profitable. Just by playing him, you lose an untold amount on defence, something which Randolph simply does not do. And for all his versatility and skill as an offensive player, Zach has never had the greatest sense or awareness to fit into an offence efficiently – Randolph is a career 46.5% shooter who nowadays is starting his offence from increasingly near the three-point line, and with an intense aversion to passing. Bear in mind, this is a man once berated for selfishness by former teammate, Nick Van Exel. The problem is exacerbated when looking at Memphis’s other big men. Out of Hamed Haddadi, Hakim Warrick, Darrell Arthur, Marc Gasol and Antoine Walker, who represents a good pairing for Zach? Who is the weakside shot-blocker to counteract Zach’s absence in that area? There’s a bit there, mainly coming from Gasol, but there’s not much. Additionally, if Marc Gasol is to start at centre – and it looks like he has to – then how […]
