The point at which an NBA player becomes the best of his team should be a watershed moment, a glorious juncture when potential finally meets production, when all of those scouts can finally stop holding their collective breaths and start to unabashedly gloat. At the same time, being the default best player on an NBA team is a lot like being the prettiest girl in the room. No one appreciates the Ricky Davises and Antoine Walkers and Shareef Abdur-Rahims of the world, tirelessly padding those stats and maybe even sneaking in an All-Star appearance amidst all of the back-breaking, eminently soul-crushing losing that goes on on these teams.
While the Houston Rockets have avoided dealing with quite too much of that mind-numbing defeat stuff (eh… there’s still been plenty of it), the question of who the team’s best player is has been of constant interest since Yao Ming fell down and never got back up in Game 3 of that Conference Finals those 125,000 some odd years ago. Whether it be the two since-traded heroes of those playoffs in Carl Landry and Aaron Brooks, the team’s most reliable (and least athletic and second-poorest defender of a) veteran in Luis Scola, or the high-scoring (and worst defensive player on the team) Kevin Martin, all who have taken that mantle have generally found their heads ill fits for the crown, reasonable considering Yao wore it last. Despite this and after a tragedy of a beginning to the 10-11 season, who should come to the forefront of the pack but the perennially underrated bench point guard, Kyle Lowry, coming intact with a shiny new jumpshot (only new by virtue of actually going in) and downtick in turnovers (outside of the month of March, in which Lowry’s usage rate skyrocketed with matching increases in shot attempts and FTA, he exhibited a beautiful touch for keeping the ball last season, possessing a 10.0 Turnover Ratio last year, the sixth-best among starting point guards). Kyle Lowry, that bulldog”, that kid who’s “all heart”, the one who played good defense. That kid will be the Rockets’ best chance at having an elite player in 2011, and that thought is a terrifying one.
Lowry always seemed to be the team’s best-kept secret, a two-way guy in the truest sense, and routinely brought an absolutely crucial amount of energy when he backed up the shot-happy combo guard in a tiny package that was Brooks; it only seemed natural he’d one day lead a team, but the jaw-dropping change that took place last March in the baby-faced floor general shook up the Rockets’ hierarchy in the best of ways, presenting the no-problem of a new best talent, emerging from the cocoon of youth and the bench to exercise his will after recovering from an early bout of back spasms in 10-11 and having the security of his job as the starter as Brooks was shipped out to the desert. Yes, those (select) months last season truly introduced the world to NBA baller Kyle Lowry, the puppy with big paws.
Um, but what exactly do we know about Kyle Lowry? While advanced statistics have often been friendly to low-usage guys like Lowry who hold on to the ball and don’t take too many bad shots, the trend tends to be that said efficiencies drop with added minutes, and while that may be true in some respects for Lowry, he actually had a remarkably productive finish to last year. This should bode very well for the starting point’s future, but the sample size is so tiny that very little can be gleaned from a year of 37% from the three-point-line and seven full Win Shares (by comparison, Derrick Rose had 13.1 last year, Deron Williams had 7.3 and Jameer Nelson had 6.6), leaving a giant question mark in the middle of the Rockets’ lineup. The Rockets have to be happy at the point guard position, but does the team have the kind of advanced weaponry with which it seems all NBA teams are coming to the point guard arms race?
Kyle Lowry’s a quiet type on the court, not exactly the wizened veteran whose very face implies the kind of maturity a team’s best player is expected to bring daily nor the boisterous sort who brings the band of misfits together with his gregariousness and general basketball talents. No, if Kyle Lowry becomes the Houston Rockets’ best player in 2012, he will likely have to bring the game he showed last year with him. The fate of the Houston Rockets’ progress in this next season likely depends on just that.
