The 5 WORST NBA Starters of 2016 - 2017

A new NBA season is exciting. You get expectations for your favorite players, your favorite teams, you hope everything goes well, and then suddenly one of the guys who was supposed to be something on your team just doesn't really show up for you. And Monte Ellis has been pretty bad for the Indiana Pacers this season with the bricks he's throwing up, but I'm not going to talk about him in this video too much because I've spent too much time talking about Monte on my channel, I really don't feel like doing it again. But these are going to be the five worst NBA players this season, guys who are playing actual minutes and had actual expectations. We're going to go to Minnesota first with Ricky Rubio, and I want to be at least a little nice when I do these, so Rubio, he has an ability to grab rebounds, he's still a damn good passer, and defensively he's actually pretty alright. He's had some solid defensive seasons in the past, but other than that with Rubio he's been really a tough spot in the Timberwolves offense. Let me read you his percentages, and you're going to have to prepare yourself for this one. 35% from the field, 27% from three, he's shooting under 40% from inside the paint or very close to it. Rubio just can't buy a shot to save his life, and having the ability to pass is awesome, but when the defense doesn't have to respect you at all when it comes to putting the ball in yourself, I mean look what happens here, you run a pick and roll with Carl Anthony Towns, and the defense just doesn't have to care about you, they're just going to pack up against him so he can't kill him inside, and they're just going to leave off of you, and Rubio just can't really do anything about it, so he's hurting the rest of his team by being such a black hole when it comes to shooting, and it could be one of the reasons why the T-Wolves have blown so many leads this season, and when the ball is not in his hands his value is pretty much nothing, because you can just leave him completely, you can turn into 4 on 5 pretty much, you can see Jordan Clarkson moving away, so some dude that I don't know can shoot a 3 pointer, and then if Rubio wants to dictate his own offense, you don't have to provide too much help defense and he's going to miss, which means the rest of the guys don't have to be that open, if he wants to throw the ball to someone in the post you can just leave him open, I mean what's Towns going to do if he kicks out to Rubio, he's shooting under 30% from 3, like it just makes it really easy to defend a team when someone can't shoot, especially when it's the point guard who has so much influence over what happens offensively, Rubio, you gotta put the ball in the damn basket. Now for Joe Kimno on the Knicks, he is grabbing rebounds, so that's good, he's had a couple of double digit rebound games recently actually, but besides that, number one, he is shooting 52% from at the basket, which is way under league average for big men, in comparison Cody Zeller is shooting nearly 70% at the basket, and then defensively, Noah is just simply not what he once was, the Knicks are 24th in defensive rating, at one time Noah was perhaps the best defensive big man or just player overall in the NBA, now the Knicks paint is pretty much wide open, you go drive in there, you call a pick and roll with your center, Joe Kimno is just not scaring anybody, and when I say it's so easy, or easier to defend the T-Wolves when they have a guy who can't shoot in Rubio, it's easier to score on the Knicks when Noah's just not really intimidating, you know this might be a common theme in this video where perhaps Tom Thibodeau playing some of his guys so many minutes earlier in their careers, they may be paying for it now, cause Noah's not the only one to spoil this video at least a little bit. Now speaking of Eastern Conference players who have dipped down, Rajon Rondo, who was recently taken out of the rotation or at least the starting lineup by the Chicago Bulls in favor of Michael Carter-Williams, can still grab a rebound, he can hit a guy for an open pass, especially in transition, other than that, a lot of the things I said about Ricky Rubio are also true here, Rondo is shooting 37% from the field, which, hey it's better than Rubio so shoutout to that I guess, his three pointers are around 32-33%, his free throws are at like 55%, he also attempts less than one free throw a game so he's not even attacking the defense, putting pressure on them, which means he does the classic Rajon Rondo thing where it's like, he'll drive inside, nothing's really there but he's not gonna pass the ball off cause he has no value and the ball's not in his hand, and it just bogs down the offense, it just slows everything down, you know when he was on the Boston Celtics a few years back he was more decisive, he got to the line about maybe once or twice a game but that was enough with him to be able to really do something, defensively he's also gotten worse as well, at one time he was a damn good defensive point guard, those days are long gone, I remember Rondo once saying himself I haven't played defense in a few years when he was on the Celtics and his idea of defense was just calling help defense for Avery Bradley, now that he's on the Bulls it's not really helping still, and so you have a guy who has no value with the ball, not in his hands, not too valuable when the ball is in his hands because he slows the offense down so much and he really doesn't attack the defense, and he's also not good on defense himself, look occasionally you'll get the odd game where you see flashes of the old Rondo, he'll get a triple double, he'll get a pick and roll, he'll get inside and hit someone with a behind the back pass or just something crazy at some weird angle, but it's very few and far between at this point and Rondo, he just hasn't been good for Chicago. Now Kent 420 Blazemore in Atlanta, it's been ugly man, and this one might be the most drastic or surprising of all these because he was pretty damn good last year when Damari Carroll was gone and he was a 3 and D player as well as an athlete for Atlanta, he's shooting sub 40% from the field, 28% from 3, they are asking him to handle the ball a little bit more in pick and rolls, it's not working out at all, he's not that natural of a player, but even so he's attempting about 3 and a half threes a game, and they're just not going in. Blazemore cannot buy a shot to save his life at the moment, which is probably the first time that an NBA player couldn't buy something, also shout out to that new rule that says you can have a star player for like a decade because you can give them such a ridiculous amount of money, here's an idea for you, if you can't build a decent team around a star player in like 4 years, maybe you don't deserve your star player, which is apparently what I choose to talk about for this Blazemore footage, and the Atlanta Hawks started off the season pretty damn well and they have slid down since to perhaps even a little worse than I thought they were going to ultimately be this season, Blazemore's definitely not helping, because he's asked to dribble the ball a little bit more and he's not that type of a player, but even when he's asked to do his more natural thing, which is play off ball and run up floor, hit jumpers, he made that one, shout out to that, he just hasn't been effective either. Once again it is surprising because he was pretty damn decent for them as the replacement for Damari Carroll a few years ago, well I don't know man. And finally Luau Deng, who the Lakers gave a lot of money to, to be a two-way wing, as well as a veteran and a leader for the Lakers, and I'm sure he's being the leader for them, but in terms of on the floor, he's not hitting threes, he's not hitting anything, 39% from the field, 32% from three, and Luau is another one where I'm starting to ask myself, is Tom Thibodeau hurting his guys by playing them so many minutes to where they pay for it later on in their careers? Like Luau Deng's really been playing poorly, Joakim Noah, I just mentioned, it might be a real thing playing guys 40 minutes a game, I mean didn't Deng consistently lead the league in minutes? I don't know, I'm not a scientist, maybe there's something to it, maybe there isn't. Deng was never a guy who could really get his own shot off consistently on offense, as we see from him getting blocked right there, but he's also not hitting any of his stuff when he's playing off-ball either, so it has not been a Luau this season for Deng. That was a terrible joke, and I do think they partly acquired him to hold the fort at the small forward position while Brandon Ingram gets better, hasn't really been a thing, but now we can also talk about his defense, because Deng was also thought of as one of the best defenders in the NBA, and based on my very intense research, and by that I mean going on twitter and keyword searching Luau Deng defense, it seems that he's not playing much defense based on the replies I saw on twitter, and that's all I need to put him in a video. So the lake show has Luau for a few more seasons, and maybe he can turn it around? Maybe he just wasn't in shape going into this year, I don't know, he did get paid, and that money is guaranteed, so who knows man. So there's Luau, there's also Ricky Rubio, who, I mean, he's been in the league quite a long time and he can't make a basket yet, so this might just be who Rubio is at this point, and Joe Kimnoa was given a lot of money to be the anchor of the New York Knicks defense, he's currently the anchor of the 24th best defense in the NBA, so there's that for you. Rajon Rondo is out of the rotation, and he might not be in Chicago much longer, he's probably a backup at this point, and Ken Bazemore, asked to be a shooter, a defender, as well as have some more ball handling ability, just hasn't been able to do any of that.