During my recent interview, while I remembered that Ron Artest had played very poorly to end the Lakers series last season, even I was surprised to find just how drastically his stats had tailed off. More interesting was the distinct correlation with the drop-off and the injury to center Yao Ming.
As we know, Yao went down at the end of Game 3. Look at the divide in Artest’s numbers between the first 3 games of the series, and the last 4.
I then looked on 82games.com and was not surprised to see that Yao-Artest was the player-pair team leader for the Houston Rockets in 2008-2009.
So while the duo of Ron Artest and Yao Ming led all Houston Rockets duos in production, the Lakers series indicates that much of Artest’s production may have been positively impacted by the presence of Yao Ming.
I already thought it was a no-brainer to let Artest walk. He’s on the wrong side of 30 and too wildly indisciplined for my taste. But some of the numbers seem to confirm that he isn’t the ‘standalone star’ that he has been made out to be.
