Utah Jazz Talk

Perhaps because of the bashing done during the rookie year of Deron Williams and Chris Paul (with the media being critical of Utah picking Deron Williams over Chris Paul), we are destined to repeat this discussion in blogs, radio, and television year after year, but I really think we as Jazz fans need to be satisfied that the picking of Deron Williams was justified and leave it at that.

I constantly see lists of who the ten best point guards in the nation are with media, ex-players, and fans getting into the mix. Nobody seems to really care where Chauncey Billups, Jason Kidd, Tony Parker, and Gilbert Arenas are in these lists. They throw these names in for show — to validate the rankings in some way. What it really comes down to — STILL — is whether the Utah Jazz picked the best point guard in the draft when they picked Deron Williams over Chris Paul.

At the risk of perpetuating this constant revisiting, does it really matter if Deron Williams is the second best point guard or the fifth best point guard in the NBA? Besides looking at stats (which are horribly misleading anyway) and creating some phony algorithm (don’t even get me started on the BCS algorithm), is there really a way of ranking point guards from one to ten?

Everybody seems to put Steve Nash to the top of the list with little argument, but he hasn’t led his team to a championship. San Antonio seems to win often enough with the 6th best point guard in the league (according to some rankings). If a point guard plays within a teams strategy and leads his team to a championship, isn’t that arguably the best point guard in the league? You certainly didn’t lose a series with him at the helm.

If Deron Williams helps Utah to win the majority of their games, does it really matter if he is having a better statistical year than Chris Paul?

I suppose if you have a fantasy team, it does.

Other than that, we probably ought to just let this issue simmer down and stop dragging it up year after year. Utah obviously made a good pick at point guard. Nobody will know who would have run Jerry Sloan’s system better. We don’t have an alternate universe to test it out in.

These lists are useless, but I fear we will continue to see them for the next 15 years, unless we can have another couple of elite players at the same position that we can talk about. (Oden vs Durrant might end up being more of an argument, but with them not playing the same position, they are not likely to end up in the same lists.)

Besides…

Everybody already knows that Deron Williams is much better than Chris Paul anyway.