I'm always leery when I hear how good a guy was in workouts, but in one of those videos Steve Kerr was talking about Lopez's shot. He said that was one of the things that impressed them was that he was much better than they expected at hitting that 10-15 foot shot in his workout.
Joe
I was not terribly high on Lopez prior to the draft, but I hated him a lot less than every other big (full 6''9" or better). I'd go through every profile I of this year's bigs and I'd stop as soon as I'd read phrases like: "doesn't play good defense", "doesn't play hard all the time", "soft", "below average rebounder", "needs to get a lot stronger", etc.
It seems like verybody was screeming for the Suns to play better defense and get tougher, but still want to draft guys who shoot pretty jump shots but won't get down and dirty. My hypothesis is that it is easier to teach skills than toughness. It ie exceptionally hard to teach pick and roll defense and the Suns tested him repeatedly on that part of his game.
The main knock on Robin has been that he's offensively challenged. He averaged 53.4% shooting in an offense where he was rarely passed the ball. Oddly, from the few videos I've seen, he apparently has good hands and is able to finish at the basket on the pick and roll. This is no "hands of stone" Stephen Hunter.
Most GM's insist on big men be either back to the basket guys or Dirk type shooter. But on the Suns, the core of their offense is the pick and roll; and he appears to be well suited for it.
But as Joe stated, the key point is that Robin appears to be much better shooter from the mid range than the Suns expected.
We've been hearing stories that Robin refused to work out for teams listed in the lottery, nor did he did workout at the combine either. The lottery teams had not seen what he could do when NOT deferring to his brother in the Stanford offense.
Why did he do that? He was explicit that he wanted to play for the Suns. He figured out that he had a very good chance of being a rotation player from game one on a very competative team.
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