Let's talk about Evan Turner's performance last night


Everyone has bad games. Hell, LeBron has had two awful ones in the first four games of the season. So I don't want to overreact to one performance out of 82, no matter who the player is.

With that said: good God Evan Turner was terrible last night.

Statistically, it was ugly.

12 minutes played, 5 turnovers, 4 fouls, 2 points, 1 rebound.

In fact, it's just the 11th time in the last 30 seasons that a player has managed to turn the ball over 5+ times, and commit 4+ fouls in 12 minutes or less of playing time. And of those 11 games, Turner had the 5th worst 'game score', a stat designed to measure a player's overall impact on the game during his time on the floor. So yea, it was bad.

But in all honesty -- the stats don't even tell the whole story. Because the stats ignore the defensive end of the floor, where Turner was routinely out of position, and seemed to give up points every other time down.

Again, one bad game does not make a season. But if we're looking at early returns over the first four games..Turner looks like a guy in danger of losing his rotation spot.

Per usual with Turner, the stats themselves don't look that horrible: 6 PPG, 3.5 RPG, 2.5 APG in 19.8 MPG. Nothing special, but he does seem to make an impact on the stat sheet. But he's also turning the ball over on a staggering 27.5% of his early season possessions, a number that brings back memories of early season Gerald Wallace from last year. And those are not memories I'd like to relive.

So far this season, Turner has an 81 offensive rating, meaning the Celtics average 81 points per 100 possessions where the ball runs through Turner. League average is around 104. Turner's defensive rating is 108, meaning he gives up 108 points per 100 possessions on the other end of the floor.

In other words, if every Celtics player was Turner, the Celtics would lose an average game by about 27 points (assuming 100 possessions per team, which is high, but just about the pace the Cs are playing at). That's not good.

If you've read my thoughts on Turner before, you know I'm not particularly high on him (ok, that might be kind. I don't think he's very good at all), but if this kind of play continues we kind of have to see how James Young can do, don't we? Young is younger, has more offensive skill, and can't possibly be any worse on the defensive end than what we've seen from Turner. Four games might not be a big enough sample size for the Celts to pull the trigger, but if we keep seeing performances like last night from Turner, Boston can't afford to keep running him out there. (Unless of course the Turner signing was a sneaky genius move by Danny to improve the Celtics' tanking odds. Then we might be seeing 30 minutes of ET by January.)


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