NBA Players Who No Longer Live Up to Their Reputations
Reputations have a tendency to stick in the NBA world.
Not all of them should.
While some Association identities never seem to change, others are no longer what they used to be. Some labels give way to Father Time. Others arguably weren't deserved in the first place.
For reasons we'll explain, the following five players no longer fit their reputations.
Former Chicago Tribune writer-turned-NBC Sports Chicago insider K.C. Johnson joins The Full 48 with Howard Beck to discuss the Chicago Bulls' playoff picture, Coby White, Derrick Rose, Jimmy Butler and Michael Jordan.
Trevor Ariza: Win-Now Swingman
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For years, Trevor Ariza aided the efforts of playoff hopefuls and championship contenders by blanketing opposing scorers at one end and striping threes at a rapid rate on the other.
While he initially survived with length, athleticism and transition scoring, adding an above-average three-ball gave him essentially universal appeal for win-now shoppers. He dazzled in the three-and-D role every optimistic organization needed to fill, to the point that clubs who simply thought they were close to competitive have targeted him as the missing piece.
The Phoenix Suns gave him $15 million in the 2018 offseason to help them get over the hump. They later shipped him to the Washington Wizards, who sacrificed promising swingman Kelly Oubre Jr. for Ariza to try to shake out of a slow start. This summer, the Sacramento Kings gave him a two-year, $25 million deal in hopes of snapping a 13-year playoff drought.
Teams keep coming back to Ariza for what he once was, but he's not that player anymore.
Shouldn't a three-and-D contributor shoot at least league average from distance? Well, last season's average perimeter conversion rate was 35.5 percent. He topped that number only once in the previous three years. Shouldn't he also lock down the defensive end? Last season, Ariza had the first negative defensive box plus/minus of his career, and his matchups shot 8.8 percentage points higher than they did on average.
The three-point showers have dried up. The defensive dams have broken. He didn't win in Phoenix or Washington, and he's off to a rough start in Sacramento. Pinning your hopes and an eight-figure salary to Ariza is becoming a precarious proposition, at best.
Kentavious Caldwell-Pope: Three-and-D Wing
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Blame the scouting reports.
That's the only way to understand how we've become preconditioned to linking Kentavious Caldwell-Pope with the three-and-D tab. This is his seventh NBA season, and one could argue he was a three-and-D standout in only the 2017-18 campaign. That year, he striped 38.3 percent of his triples and earned a positive assessment in DBPM.
His other seasons come nowhere near that type of two-way impact.
His next-best three-point shooting season was 2016-17, when he converted 35.0 percent of his chances (NBA average was 35.8 that year). He's finished two campaigns with a sub-32.0 accuracy rate, and he started this season so poorly that Lakers fans sarcastically cheered his first point.
At the other end, he's had just one other campaign with a positive DBPM, and that was 2015-16, when his career-best mark of 0.6 placed him 142nd, sandwiched between Tarik Black and Luol Deng. KCP is one of 111 players to log 10,000 minutes since 2013-14, and he's 63rd among them with 12.4 defensive win shares. Last season, he landed 89th at his position and 484th overall in defensive real plus-minus.
Remember, that is supposed to be one of his specialties.
Player efficiency rating has never valued him as a league-average contributor. With numbers like these in his go-to categories, it isn't hard to see why.
DeMar DeRozan: Offensive Star
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DeMar DeRozan is a good scorer. He has even masqueraded as a great one every now and then.
The Toronto Raptors made him their top option, and he helped produce the first three 50-win seasons in franchise history. He rode offensive eruptions to All-NBA selections in 2016-17 (27.3 points on 46.7 percent shooting) and 2017-18 (23.0 points with 5.2 assists per game).
But after failing to escape the Eastern Conference—and only once advancing beyond the second round—the Raptors sensed they reached their ceiling with DeRozan and flipped him in the 2018 blockbuster for Kawhi Leonard.
"We had done the same thing for a long time and we had gotten to a certain stage, and sometimes in sports you have to make that change," Raptors president Masai Ujiri said on Get Up! in February (via Sportsnet's Emily Sadler).
The San Antonio Spurs welcomed DeRozan with open arms and entrusted him with their highest usage rate. While they coaxed career-best efforts out of him in rebounds and assists, he couldn't lead them to more than 48 wins and a first-round exit.
His inability to add an outside shot has always been an issue, and it caps his efficiency. As productive as he is, a lot of his numbers are hollow. Among the 72 players to average 19-plus points per game in the three-point era, he's 57th in true shooting percentage, 60th in PER and 57th in win shares per 48 minutes.
He shouldn't be a featured star. He might work best as a third wheel or nothing greater than a co-star, but even then, he's a tricky fit with an undeveloped outside shot and a preference for isolation attacks. No one should be attempting to build an offense around him in 2019-20.
Mario Hezonja: Intriguing Project
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The idea of Mario Hezonja is interesting.
He has the attitude of a star and maybe the competitiveness to boot. A 2015 predraft B/R article dubbed him "Europe's Kobe Bryant Wannabe" and meant it in a good way. The Orlando Magic nabbed him fifth overall two days after the article dropped. He said his dream All-Star Weekend would involve competing in the skills, three-point and dunk competitions.
Catch him on a good night, and he looks slippery on the move, springy off the bounce and splashy from range.
"Mario is a prodigiously talented player with a high ceiling and a bright future," Portland Trail Blazers president of basketball operations Neil Olshey said in June, per KGW's Jared Cowley. "He will have a chance to contribute immediately while we work to accelerate his development."
Herein lies the problem. Hezonja not only needs more development, but he also needs that process accelerated since he's so far behind.
He's treated like a project, but this is his fifth NBA season, and he'll turn 25 in February. He's played more games than Devin Booker, D'Angelo Russell, Buddy Hield and Tyler Johnson. Hezonja doesn't lack experience; it just seems like he should since he's so unpolished.
His designs on entering the three-point contest? Not happening. He's just a 31.9 percent three-point shooter for his career. Those old dunk contest hopes? Laughable. He dunked just 19 times all of last season. His Kobe-esque confidence? Borderline delusional. Out of the 248 players with 200-plus appearances from 2015-16 to 2018-19, he was 246th in win shares per 48 minutes, 228th in PER and 239th in BPM.
If there were more to Super Mario, we would've seen it by now.
DeAndre Jordan: Interior Anchor
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Need to shore up your defensive interior? DeAndre Jordan's counting categories have long held he's up for the task.
He has a pair of rebounding titles on his resume. He has four top-five finishes in blocks per game. Tack on a field-goal percentage that routinely ranks among the Association's elite, and you're looking at a three-time All-NBA selection with a pair of All-Defensive first-team honors.
But it's been a few seasons since he earned either distinction, and with his 31st birthday behind him, those days are surely over. In fact, the stat sheet says he's done more harm than good in the past couple of campaigns.
In 2017-18, the Los Angeles Clippers fared better without him on defense—and not by an insignificant margin. Their defensive rating spiked from 104.7 when he sat to 110.3 when he played, effectively the difference between being the fifth-best defense and the 26th-ranked unit. Last season, both the Dallas Mavericks and New York Knicks defended better without him—by 1.3 and 10.2 points per 100 possessions.
He wasn't a top-10 center by DRPM last season. He wasn't in the top 20 the year prior.
"His influence at the defensive end has long been overstated," Bleacher Report's Dan Favale and Adam Fromal wrote before the 2018-19 season, "and he's only drifting further away from linchpin mode."
Maybe linking up with superfriends Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant will reengage Jordan's defensive motor, but the declining defender will watch more of Brooklyn's key defensive possessions from the sideline than most would think.
All stats, unless otherwise indicated, courtesy of Basketball Reference, NBA.com or ESPN.com.
Zach Buckley covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter, @ZachBuckleyNBA.
