It’s no secret that watching Travis Outlaw on offense these past three games has been very, very difficult. While he’s a good player, there’s no doubt that he’s hit some sort of very bad rough patch. Maybe it’s a lack of confidence leading to poor shot selection, but he’s been doing a lot of these things all season – pump-faking when a shot is fine, trying to dribble around his defender to no avail, and throwing up contested shots late in the shot clock.
But don’t take my word for it:
Some of them you can’t blame him for – for instance, Jordan Farmar gets the blame for a bad pass that led to a 35-foot heave as the shot clock buzzer sounded – but most of these fall squarely on the shoulders of our once-starting small forward. I hope he can figure out, but I doubt this is what Billy King, Avery Johnson, and Mikhail Prokhorov had in mind when they invested $35 million in Outlaw.
Also, as an aside: What’s with commentators consistently mixing up Outlaw and Anthony Morrow? Outlaw is 6’9″ with an enormous wingspan and a unique, high-reaching shot, while Morrow is 6’5″ and has a textbook jumper. It makes no sense. They don’t even look that much alike, but I’ve heard that mix-up three or four times this year.
