Season-In-Review: Gerald Green

Gerald, we hope the Pacers and their fans like your dunking ability, because us Nets fans certainly miss it

This post, along with the other posts I will do in the Season-In-Review series, will take a deeper look at how all the Nets did last season on the court and possibly off of it. We continue with the upstart Gerald Green. I covered Gerald Wallace last.

Gerald Green was rescued from the NBA D-League’s Los Angeles D-Fenders by the Nets on February 27th, 2012, and the swing-man never looked back. Originally, the Nets, an injury-depleted mess of a team, were just looking for any small forward who could go into games and simply not be terrible. With a low-risk, 10-day contract, the Nets signed Green to fill that role and oh boy did the Nets get some return for their investment.

After his first 10-day contract with the team, Gerald signed another 10-day and then eventually signed on with New Jersey for the rest of the season after showing the coaching staff that he was one of, if not the best, healthy Nets players on the court at some points in the condensed 2011-12 campaign.Green is most notable around the NBA for winning the 2007 Slum Dunk Contest while a member of the Celtics, in his first go-around of the NBA.

Gerald has absurd athleticism and hops, which is what the Nets were assuredly lacking of last year and is what he brought to the team last season, capped off by a crazy, alley-hoop windmill jam he threw down against the Rockets in March. However, the former 1st-round pick of Boston brought much more to New Jersey after the All-Star break than just his dunking ability, he displayed an incredibly well-rounded repertoire in his game that simply wasn’t present in the five seasons he was in the NBA before heading overseas and to the D-League.

Anything Avery Johnson wanted Gerald to do on the floor, he simply did it. He hit shots (48% FG, 39% 3PT), played solid defense (.9 steals per game, .5 blocks per game; pretty good for a small forward), and even helped out on the boards (DRB% of 14.2, ahead of other good rebounders like Luol Deng, Rudy Gay, and even Tyler Hansbrough).

Unfortunately, his stellar play in the 2nd-half of the season got the attention of the rest of the NBA and as free agency progressed, it became clear that Gerald would demand much more on the open market than the Nets were willing to afford, and frankly, even have room for under the salary cap since they didn’t have Green’s Bird rights. Then, on July 11th, he signed a deal with the Indiana Pacers, which reportedly was a 3-yr, $10 million agreement.

We here at Brooklyn Balling (Yep, just me) wish Gerald the best of luck with the Pacers but are still bitter we only got him and his very underrated talents for just 31 games in a lost rebuilding year that also happened to be severely truncated.  He probably won’t be starting in Indy with Paul George (AKA Net-killer) and Danny Granger in his way on the depth chart but he’ll still be very productive and hopefully will have a few more ESPN-worthy dunks, like his ridiculous one against the Rockets in March.