It's appropriate that Rudy Gobert rejects convention.
The Utah Jazz's sky-scraping, shot-swatting interior force burst on the NBA scene last year by batting away everything: floaters, layups, baby hooks—even jump shots. So of course he stymies the typical methods we want to study him with.
That makes it hard to guess what kind of player this 7'2" center might become.
Resistant as he is to historical comparisons, we still have to start answering the question of what Gobert might someday be by looking at what he's been.
Gobert and the Jazz: Escalating Quickly
The Jazz hit the All-Star break last year with a 19-34 record and the fourth-worst defensive rating in the NBA—nothing new, as they'd finished the 2013-14 season as the very worst defense in the league. After the break, some kind of stinginess miracle took hold of the previously generous Jazz, and they compiled a 19-10 mark on the strength of a defensive effort that not only blew their pre-break performance away but also topped the entire league by a significant margin, per NBA.com:
The ...
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Article written by Grant Hughes
The Stifle Tower: Rudy Gobert’s Ascent Is Unlike Any We’ve Seen Before
August 24th, 2015 by Grant Hughes Leave a reply »
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