Gerald Green: A 22-year Old Former Dunk Champ Seeks Work

Right now, Shavlik Randolph is employed by a team in the NBA.

Gerald Green is not.

Something has to be wrong with this picture.

This past off-season, Green was one of the many players the Celtics sent to Minnesota as part of the Kevin Garnett trade.  He did not spend long in Minnesota, traded to Houston on Feb. 21 for Kirk Snyder and a 2010 second round pick.  His stay in Houston lasted all of six games, with Green playing a grand total of 3:34. 

Then, as The Boston Globe’s Peter May wrote about in his basketball notes column this past Sunday, the Rockets released Green back on March 8.  No team has made an offer to the 2007 Slam Dunk Champ.

I find this almost beyond belief.

The 18th pick in the 2005 NBA draft straight from high school, the 22-year old Green possesses athletic skills like almost no player I have ever watched.  That, combined with his age, would make you believe he is worth signing for some team out of the playoff race. 

The Timberwolves did not take long to conclude that Green was not in their long-term plans, refusing to extend his contract about one month into the season.  This makes Green an unrestricted free agent at the end of this season.

At the time of the trade, however, I never thought Green was a good fit for Minnesota, as they already had Marco Jaric and Rashad McCants, and had recently drafted Corey Brewer. Thus I was not particularly surprised Minnesota did not pick up Green’s option. 

If one reads May’s notebook, there is a lot made of the fact that Green is an amazing dunker, but then both the writer and his former coach Doc Rivers seem to say he isn’t much more. 

This is what I really don’t understand.  He is far from a complete basketball player, and may struggle on defense, but he is much more than a guy who can just dunk.

Green has a very pretty, albeit inconsistent, jump shot.  Looking at his stats from 2007 for the Celtics, Green played in 81 games, averaging 10.4 points per game.  This was at the age of 21, in only his second year in the league.  For comparison, Tracy McGrady, who also went directly to the NBA from high school, averaged 9.3 points in his second year in the league.

A closer look at Green’s 2007 stats reveals that when Doc Rivers let him play, Green produced.  In the 42 games where Green played more than 20 minutes last season, he averaged 15.0 points, scoring 20 or more 14 times.   He scored a career-high 33 in a game versus the Hawks.

There was also the game against Cleveland, a 107-104 loss, where Green scored 21 points in only 19 minutes, including 14 in the second quarter helping Boston to a 54-49 half-time lead. 

His points were not all dunks.  Green shot 36.8% from three, and is a 36.6% career shooter from beyond the arc.  Paul Pierce, granted with a much larger sample size, is a 36.2 career shooter from three. 

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