Closer Look: Otto Porter

[The Process God]

People didn't really think Barnes was athletic as he is until the combine. Porter isn't a freak athlete, but he might surprise some.

The guy also has a big-ass frame for a small forward. He's definitely going to fill out well.

 

[Just Checkin]

I don't see Porter filling out too much actually, I think he'll follow the Tayshaun role almost to a tee.

Looking at some of his HS clips, you can see some good athleticism. I don't think he'll be posterizing people in the league but he'll surprise some people when he does decide to dunk. I'm REALLY interested in seeing if that mid range pull up of his will translate as well as some solid athleticism. He's got a few months to change his body and try to accommodate too.

 

[Biw]

I don't see Porter filling out too much actually, I think he'll follow the Tayshaun role almost to a tee.

Looking at some of his HS clips, you can see some good athleticism. I don't think he'll be posterizing people in the league but he'll surprise some people when he does decide to dunk. I'm REALLY interested in seeing if that mid range pull up of his will translate as well as some solid athleticism. He's got a few months to change his body and try to accommodate too.

Shooting is one of the few areas that translate pretty well. If you can shoot, you can shoot.

 

[Just Checkin]

Shooting is one of the few areas that translate pretty well. If you can shoot, you can shoot.

It's more about being able to get the shot off rather than just the mere ability to shoot. I'm really interested to see him contend with bigger, faster players on the next level to see how much he can do immediately.

 

[brooks]

His shooting percentages increasing by such large numbers over the course of a season scare me in terms of being able to stretch the floor, but given the amount of people who have already dropped out of the draft, I'm starting to ease up on him as a potential pick. We'll get a good look at him at combines I'm sure.

On a different note, in case anyone hasn't seen it, this video of Porter is pretty awesome:

[video=youtube;ESJUP9ebW4w]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESJUP9ebW4w[/video]

Poor little white kids.

 

[randymoss1881]

Re: Closer Look: Alex Len

ajz, I think you might be discounting Porter's upside some... I think because the way he plays the game and he's not your ridiculous athlete, people are discounting his upside some... Remember, he's only 19 years old and hasn't played basketball outside of HS and at Georgetown.. He has a ton of growing to do and I really think he can peak out at a very good player..

I like Len a lot too and struggle with the positional importance, like you're harping on, but Porter is a very good player with upside in his own right..

its because he isnt flashy and doesnt have elite athletiscm you heard the same thing about kyrie when he came out, about his ceiling not being high cause he doesnt possesse elite speed and vertical. Porter has an elite jump shot and basketball IQ, and thrives without the basketball you cant teach that

 

[MirORich]

Re: Closer Look: Alex Len

Thanks on this info on Porter. Just took 20 minutes after seeing your post to read up more on his pre-Georgetown history. I had no idea until know that he did not play AAU ball because of his fathers belief that it didn't contribute to a team mindset and that it led to bad habits. Also had no idea that his entire family has excelled at basketball. Already high on him as a fit for the Cavs, but this makes it seem so much more a natural fit with the type of players and backgrounds they have with Kyrie, Tristan, Dion, and Zeller.

I understand RRC pounding the drum for our need to get that true center/interior presence as well though. If we go Porter over Len(assuming we don't win the first pick), we'll have to really get aggressive in pursuit of trading back up to grab Len or the best available remaining big or going after Pekovic

ajz, I think you might be discounting Porter's upside some... I think because the way he plays the game and he's not your ridiculous athlete, people are discounting his upside some... Remember, he's only 19 years old and hasn't played basketball outside of HS and at Georgetown.. He has a ton of growing to do and I really think he can peak out at a very good player..

 

[randymoss1881]

porter is has great size he is almost the same size at TT for a SF, 6'8-7.1wingspan TT is .5 taller and we will see hoe porter fills up in the standing reach.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/college-basketball/news/20130313/georgetown-otto-porter/

Georgetown's Otto Porter is a coach's dream: a team-first star who is grounded and puts wins before personal success.
Rich Barnes/USA TODAY Sports
They call him Otto-matic. It's a cheap pun, but the moniker suits Otto Porter beyond simple wordplay, so pre-programmed is the sophomore forward to fulfill his duties. He is at once a player of modern vintage -- a 6-foot-8 wing with position-bending versatility, a 44.0 percent three-point shooter comfortable running a fast break -- and catnip for extollers of the old school, a label Porter's dependable, exceedingly no-frills excellence inspires with such frequency that it borders on trite. "He goes to the glass, makes the extra pass," says LSU assistant Robert Kirby, who recruited and then coached Porter while at Georgetown from 2010 to '12. "He moves. He sees the play developing. He thinks two passes ahead."
And if he is ideally mechanized on the court, he is a p.r. handler's paragon with the press, a naturally benign, shrugging-and-smiling deflector of praise that longtime Hoyas sports communications director Bill Shapland likens to a lion that doesn't roar. The amplifying chorus of praise that accompanied the Hoyas' recent 11-game winning streak, which inspired national player of the year endorsement from no less than Jim Boeheim and prompted John Thompson III's mother to stroll through campus in a T-shirt bearing Porter's nickname? "It's cool, I guess." The media requests that have recently hounded the reserved star and nearly exhausted his parents? "It's not really too much." What about, say, his skills tending the tomatoes and sweet potatoes and beans in the family garden back home in Morley, Mo.? "I'm OK." And so it goes even in private, such as in the moments after a win over Rutgers in early March, when Georgetown sports information director Mex Carey prepped Porter for a TV interview by informing him he'd scored 28 points. How many rebounds? Porter asked. He was told he'd grabbed eight. No, he specified. How many did the team have?

All of which is to say that Porter has a habit of doing the right thing, or at least the thing that he is supposed to do. When the Hoyas' top rebounder and second leading scorer, Greg Whittington, was ruled ineligible in mid-January just as Georgetown slipped from the polls, Porter's to-do list grew accordingly. In that time he has ascended from one of the Big East's best players -- to one of the nation's, helping revive a once-moribund offense and lead the Hoyas from a slip out of the polls to a No. 5 ranking. He has led a comeback late in double overtime by nailing a three-pointer before assisting on another to set up his own game-winning drive (Feb. 27 at UConn); combated an accosting defense by converting 18 free throws into 15 points (March 2 vs. Rutgers); and even turned in a performance so dominant during the Hoyas' Feb. 23 win at Syracuse -- scoring 33 of his team's 57 points on just 19 field goal attempts while adding eight boards and five steals -- that he silenced a Carrier Dome crowd of 35,012 and wrested the game's narrative from a rivalry's impending farewell to his own apotheosis.

Porter's raw-number improvement -- for example, his 12.8 points per game before Whittington's absence versus 19.0 since -- shines even brighter viewed in light of the oft-inverse relationship between increased usage and offensive efficiency. While Porter's role has grown substantially in that same span, from attempting 11.9 field goals and and 2.8 three-pointers per 40 minutes to 13.4 and 4.4, he has upped his effective field-goal percentage from 53.3 to 58.7, thanks in large part to improving his accuracy beyond the arc from 39.3% to 46.0%. As the postseason approaches, a top seed within the Hoyas's reach, it is unlikely any player will prove more singularly essential to his team's tourney hopes than the Big East Player of the Year.

Thompson is fond of saying that Porter came to campus as the most prepared freshman he's ever coached. At times as a rookie Porter needed reminders to be more assertive on offense -- "Even today you've got to poke and prod him a little," Thompson says -- but for the former high school salutatorian/history club president/marching-band alto saxophonist also known as Bubba, a 19-year-old All-America who says he misses the time he spent mowing his family's six acres of land on a tractor, the demands of basketball as a nearly full-time job required little adjustment. "Bubba loves to work," says Kirby, "because that's all he knows."

*****

Porter's basketball initiation began at his grandmother's house in Haywood City, Mo., on the pair of mismatched hoops atop a patch of asphalt off a gravel road that have become two central pillars in his story. It was the same place Otto Sr. discovered the game, dueling with an older sister's boyfriend for hours on end before helping longtime coach Ronnie Cookson build a dynasty at Scott County Central High. The school serves a trio of towns -- Haywood City, Morley and Vanduser -- with a combined population under 1,200 and a landscape dotted with silos and hoops, and the nearly two dozen bright orange championship banners lining its gym walls could serve as a starting point for Bubba's family tree. Otto Sr. won the first, in 1976, with his future wife, Elnora Timmons, winning the school's first three girls' titles in '82, '84 and '85; Melvin Porter and Mayfield Timmons starred on the Braves' championship teams in '79 and '80, before Calvin Porter and Anthony (Moon) Timmons won a title together in '83; in '85 it was Dean Timmons's turn; from '86 to '89, Jerry Porter four-peated.

A second generation of Porter cousins trace their roots to the same makeshift court, starting as young as five and in groups up to a dozen or as small as one-on-one, staying the weekend as games stretched into the night. "It was dirty and grimy," says Otto Jr.'s cousin Bobby Hatchett, now a point guard at Division II Arkansas Tech. "We'd get in trouble if we weren't playing."

When the time came for more formal basketball schooling, Otto Sr. wasn't outsourcing. In the time since his own adolescence, the AAU circuit had swallowed whole the youth basketball scene as shoe companies shoveled money into elite summer tournaments that served as showcases for college coaches. But this path held no allure for the elder Porter, who rebuffed the advances of several AAU coaches. His own game had been forged in high school by the doggedly critical Cookson, a coach who so artfully found flaws in his star pupil's performances that he was once interrupted during a fiery post-game diatribe by an assistant coach pointing out that Porter had finished with 30 points and a triple-double. Cookson assailed the elder Porter all the way to 29.9 points per game and a retired number; in two years at Three Rivers Community College under Gene Bess, junior college's all-time winningest coach, things didn't get much easier. The final product was Porter, with a steady mid-range jumper and understated style, setting still-standing conference scoring records at then-Division II Southeast Missouri. What Otto Sr. knew of AAU ball -- all-star teams led by coaches angling to keep talented players content -- he saw as potential pitfalls of ego-stroking over instruction that could only spoil his talented son. Everybody's gonna tell you you played a good game, Otto Sr. would say. I'm gonna tell you what you really did. The gaggle of cousins instead formed their own grassroots team, coached by Otto Sr.'s brother-in-law Larry Mosely, and took their act on the road -- to St. Louis, to Kentucky, to Illinois -- as the elder Porter made good on his promise, drilling lessons into his son at every turn. During his own Saturday morning YMCA workouts, there was Bubba, dribbling up and down the sideline for hours on end, honing his left hand and going between his legs. By middle school they were playing one-on-one in the backyard for hours, first-hand tutorials augmented by pickup games with his uncles and their friends in the school gym on Wednesday nights and Sunday afternoons. These were full-court tests against grown men as happy to holler about not boxing out or failure to execute a fast break as they were to get physical on defense. "They'd beat you up, no doubt about that," says Otto Sr. "And you weren't expected to cry about it either."

As Bubba neared high school, fate lent Otto Sr. an assist. Cookson had returned to the Scott County Central bench on an interim basis after an 11-year retirement after his replacement, David Heeb, was suspended for a season for attempting to recruit players. When Heeb was let go after his suspension ended, Otto Sr. made a request: That his old coach stay at the school through his incoming son's graduation. Cookson obliged, turning Otto Jr. loose in that same frenetic fast-breaking style he and his brother Carroll had learned at Puxico High in the 1950s, riding a new crop of Porter and Timmons cousins to three more state titles, the second two as an assistant. Perhaps he had softened with age, but aside from the occasional chiding to get back on defense, Cookson found little to criticize in Bubba. "He'd come to take care of business," says the coach, now retired again. "I didn't have to teach him to play basketball."

*****

They packed the Verizon Center last Saturday, a mostly gray sea of nearly 21,000. They came to see the Hoyas clinch one last Big East crown and to do it at the expense of ACC-bound Syracuse for whom, as one fan group's oversized banner declared, their hatred is eternal. They also brought with them homemade signs of affection touting the OTTOMAN EMPIRE and PORTER FOR POPE, and when they arrived they were greeted by glossy placards on their seats reading PLAYER OF THE YEAR OTTO PORTER JR. It was a groundswell of acclaim reaching its apex, though an afterthought to Porter himself. "He doesn't care about any of it," Thompson had said of the hype a day earlier, "which is great."

Attention was supposed to be the greatest casualty of Otto Sr.'s AAU opt-out, the trump card prospective coaches fruitlessly tried to play in luring his son to their teams. But secrets don't keep well in basketball recruiting circles, especially not when they're 6-6 gym rats with the ability to lead a fast break. Word reached Georgetown just before Porter's senior year of high school when Bess, Otto Sr.'s juco coach, saw enough from Bubba in one week of his camp against Division I signees to call another of his former charges, Kirby, and recommend he check out Otto's kid. Halfway through the first workout he saw, Kirby phoned Thompson. When the coach showed up to observe a workout of his own, Porter didn't even hit a jumper. But Thompson was enamored nonetheless, deciding then and there to extend a scholarship offer Porter would accept five months later. "He had a work ethic that you could tell immediately was uncommon for college kids," says Thompson. "And he had a skill set where he was comfortable everywhere on the court."
On Saturday against Syracuse it was in the high post, though for the much of the first half his role was subtle. Porter was held to just two shots in the first half and none in the game's first 12 minutes, so he passed as the Orange's zone collapsed on him, finding teammate D'Vauntes Smith-Rivera for three-first half treys, letting the scoring load be handled by Smith-Rivera and Markel Starks. In the second half he got some breathing room and began to bury jumpers, burying the Orange in the process, and by the game's end he had a turnover-less 10 points, eight rebounds and seven assists as the Hoyas won 61-39. Thompson was asked in the press conference if he would have preferred Porter got those looks earlier in the game, to get his offense going sooner, and Thompson let out a brief laugh. No, Porter had not put on the show he had two weeks earlier. His point total in the rematch was not going to make headlines. But Georgetown had won by 22, taken home the Big East trophy, and Porter had done what he was supposed to do.

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[Adam]

Porter is a guy that the cavs will love. If it is a given that Noel is 1, then porter has to be 1b on the cavs radar. He just has the right mix of advanced stats and attitude. We've seen with TT how that attitude pays dividends over time. He reminds me a bit of grant hill in that way, always within the flow of the offense, even when dominating the ball

 

[Shack]

The problem with Porter is he's not a guaranteed 3pt shooter. Single year NCAA 3pt is shaky, because of sample size. Porter's 42.2% from 3 came on 43 for 102. 33 for 102 would've been 32%. So the line between great 3pt shooter and poor 3pt shooter for a college player, is well within variability. 77.7% from the FT line is OK, not great. More worrisome is that as a freshman Porter went 22.6% from 3 and 70.2% from FT. I would call Porter a high risk player, because without 3pt range he would have just about no offensive game

Really depends on how much someone likes the draft. If people are happy with a player resembling Prince and Parsons with a top 3/5 pick if he pans out... that speaks measures about how little they like everyone else. No disrespect to those 2 guys, but I'd bet there's a handful of all-stars in this draft personally

 

[DionWaters]

I'm trying to like Porter because we're probably gonna draft him and I want I prep myself for it, but damn, dude just doesn't get my dick hard (no homo) Just seems like an all around average player. I'd rather have someone who has an area he's great at

 

[rosebowl89]

The problem with Porter is he's not a guaranteed 3pt shooter. Single year NCAA 3pt is shaky, because of sample size. Porter's 42.2% from 3 came on 43 for 102. 33 for 102 would've been 32%. So the line between great 3pt shooter and poor 3pt shooter for a college player, is well within variability. 77.7% from the FT line is OK, not great. More worrisome is that as a freshman Porter went 22.6% from 3 and 70.2% from FT. I would call Porter a high risk player, because without 3pt range he would have just about no offensive game

Really depends on how much someone likes the draft. If people are happy with a player resembling Prince and Parsons with a top 3/5 pick if he pans out... that speaks measures about how little they like everyone else. No disrespect to those 2 guys, but I'd bet there's a handful of all-stars in this draft personally

His freshmen numbers mean practically nothing. Even if they did mean something, it would be "look at how much this guy can improve in a year" more than "he cant shoot because his freshmen numbers were bad'"

 

[Kouki]

On a different note, in case anyone hasn't seen it, this video of Porter is pretty awesome:



Poor little white kids.

Surprising the score was as close as it was, our poor little white team had to go up against McKinley back when they had Raymar Morgan and friends, we didn't fare as well.

But the only thing I could think of what that those poor little white kids had better ball rotation than the Cavs last season...

But I digress...

 

[Shack]

His freshmen numbers mean practically nothing. Even if they did mean something, it would be "look at how much this guy can improve in a year" more than "he cant shoot because his freshmen numbers were bad'"

I wouldn't say his freshman numbers indicate he can't shoot. It's just context that his sophomore season 3pt numbers aren't the most trustworthy stat in addition to the other factors like the small sample size and his FT shooting

To give you recent examples, two of the worst top 5 picks recently in Wes Johnson and Adam Morrison, happened because of overrating how reliable their shooting was. Wes Johnson was considered one of the safest picks in the draft, as a guaranteed 3 and D player, in part because he hit 41%+ from 3. However if one looked closer, they'd see two red flags. One is his FT was always mid-high 70s and the other, in his previous years in college he wasn't known as a 3pt shooter. Considering Wes went 51 for 123 his final Syracuse season, which is 10 more 3 point makes with those attempts than 33%, it's well within reason that Wes didn't really improve as a shooter, as much as he just got lucky over a small sample size. As for Ammo I actually think people misdiagnose why he failed. While a poor athlete, I would argue just as big a reason is how overrated a shooter he is/was. Ammo's shooting career is actually nearly identical to Wes Johnson's. He was a poor 3pt shooter his first few years in college and always had a FT in the 70s, but in his draft year he went for 40%+ from 3 which may have come down to getting hot over a small sample size instead of improvement, because in the pros his jumpshot went to crap and I'd argue that's why he bombed even more-so than his lack of athleticism. Ammo because of his physical tools wasn't going to be a star, but I bet if he shot the ball like Mike Dunleavy Jr. he could've had a similar career

I like Porter more than both those guys, but I would say hitting 40% in college is not near the type of evidence needed to ensure he's this bomber in the NBA. I'd bet on Prince and Deng like shooting talent as the most likely scenario, which would still make him a good player, but the question is how good. In regards to the Prince comparison, I wonder how we'd feel about his career if he had been drafted by a crappy team. Did Prince just become a less appealing player as soon as the other great Pistons left, or did his situation become less appealing? I think Chandler Parsons right now might be better than Tay has ever been

 

[Stark]

Otto Porter is the perfect fit for this team. Anybody else, except for maybe Len, will leave me dissapointed.