Milwaukee Bucks: 3 reasons to not re-sign Jabari Parker
By Max Carlin
1. Is Parker good?
Through four years in the NBA, there is little-to-no evidence that Jabari Parker is a useful NBA player.
He’s a fairly one-dimensional player, capable of racking up points, but there’s not much else to his game. He’s a bit of a black hole on offense, and while his volume as a scorer has always impressed, Parker’s never been particularly efficient.
His tendency to break the flow of the offense, to concern himself only with his own points, has translated to middling team offense. Only once in his Bucks career has Milwaukee been a more efficient offense with Parker on the court than off. For an offensive specialist, that’s a problem.
And Parker most certainly is an offensive specialist. Outside of the second half of Game 4 of Milwaukee’s first round playoff series with the Boston Celtics, he’s never strung together consecutive possessions of competent NBA defense.
He’s brutally easy to expose on-ball, painfully unaware off-ball and his effort level is embarrassing.
All this leads to a rather dispiriting statistical profile for Parker, who has never graded out as a positive in Real Plus-Minus or Player Impact Plus-Minus. In the case of RPM, Parker’s graded out as one of the worst power forwards in basketball every year of his career.
If Parker were a supremely talented young player with elite pedigree who had shown an ability to impact winning, gambling on him beating the injury odds might be worthwhile. Alas, he has not.
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There is very little reason to believe Jabari Parker is a good NBA player, and that alone is enough to justify letting another team pay his next contract.