Who said that?
People here are claiming Fultz isa scoring guard in a manner that would make you believe he can't be a facilitator.
People who are criticizing Ball, are doing so because he is not a scorer.
Steve Nash was a scorer, Chris Paul is a scorer, Kevin Johnson was a scorer.
They all could score. And nobody would call Kevin Johnson a so called "pass first" PG.
Actually, many people would consider Kevin Johnson a "pass-first" point guard. One of them was Sam Cassell, the future All-Star who played with Johnson in Phoenix in November-December 1996 and also played against K.J. in thirteen Western Conference Semifinals playoff games in 1994 and 1995. (The Suns and Rockets played a total of fourteen playoff games during those two years, but Cassell missed Game One in 1994 due to a suspension.) Here is what Cassell told Scoop Jackson of
SLAM magazine in the April 2000 edition, page 84:
I'm not a point guard. I'm not a point guard.
Gary Payton is not a point guard. Timmy Hardaway is not one. Stephon [Marbury], Allen [Iverson], the list goes on and on. To me, we are lead guards, we all have scoring mentalities. A point guard's main responsibility should be distribution first. Jason's [Kidd] greatest asset is his creativity with passing the ball and Stockton is the same. Point guards are not supposed to draw attention to themselves by scoring. Oscar Robertson, to me, was not a point guard. He was a guard, a guard that could do it all. Nate Archibald, a point guard. Kevin Johnson, a point guard. Isiah Thomas, lead guard. Make sense?
Likewise, there was a
Sporting News article from November 1996 (titled, I believe, "Three-Part Disharmony") discussing the Suns' struggles to implement the triangle offense under head coach Cotton Fitzsimmons. (With K.J. missing the first eleven games of the season following double-hernia surgery, and center John "Hot Rod" Williams missing the first twelve games, Phoenix ultimately started the season 0-13. Fitzsimmons resigned following the eighth of those thirteen losses, and new head coach Danny Ainge quickly abandoned the triangle.) Cassell noted that he was looking forward to Johnson's return, for while he and K.J. both constituted point guards, "We still play the position differently," meaning that Johnson's passing skills and tendencies would better fit the triangle and hopefully alleviate the Suns' offensive struggles with the new system—and perhaps that K.J. could set up Cassell for some easier shots or free him up to concentrate on scoring.
And Cassell was indeed a "score-first" point guard; he understood the difference between himself and Johnson.
Kenny Gattison, a teammate of Johnson's early in his career in Phoenix and later a Suns' assistant coach, offered a similar perspective in this 2014 interview:
On Kevin Johnson, the player and person…
You saw it athletically at first. KJ was real quiet. He wasn’t a real vocal leader. You could see the explosiveness, his athleticism. Just physically. I think KJ was one of those type guys where he didn’t try to take over the game like some of these new-fangled point guards. They try to take over the game from the start to the finish. He did it in his own little subtle way. Even in practice. He would take over and there was nothing nobody could do about it.
http://www.nba.com/suns/suns-throwback-kenny-gattison/
And in 2001, Tom Chambers stated during an online chat with fans that he would rather receive the ball from Kevin Johnson than John Stockton. (After his playing stint in Phoenix ended, Chambers spent the next two seasons playing with Stockton in Utah.) Granted, as Chambers indicated, part of the reason for his choice was that Stockton's primary target was Karl Malone, and Chambers almost always came off the bench for the Jazz. But as he also stated, K.J. "was always looking for me and I was his number-one priority."
http://www.nba.com/suns/interactive/chambers_transcript_010306.html
After the Suns defeated the Celtics in Boston on January 24, 1992, Phoenix forward Tim Perry—who scored 20 points on 10-16 field goal shooting to compensate for a poor performance by Chambers—made the following statement:
K.J. gets people the ball and gets guys shots. He's a lot like Magic Johnson in that he knows where everyone is.
(I do not have a link to the quotation, but here is a link to the box score:
http://web.archive.org/web/20100204.../teams/boxscore.htm?yr=1991&b=19920124&tm=BOS.)
Indeed, K.J.'s career average of assists per game started (assists per start), at 10.0, ranks third in NBA history behind only Magic Johnson and John Stockton. (Chris Paul is fourth at 9.9.) Additionally, K.J.'s highest seasonal average of field goals attempted per game (15.7 in '89-'90, which also represented his only year averaging at least 15.0) is less than the highest seasonal FGA averages of Magic Johnson, Jason Kidd, Chris Paul, Deron Williams, John Wall, Isiah Thomas, Tim Hardaway, Gary Payton, Terrell Brandon, Tony Parker, Sam Cassell, and Stephon Marbury, among others.
In fact, over his nine-season prime from 1989-1997 (his second year through his tenth year), Kevin Johnson averaged 13.7 field goal attempts per game. Over a similar nine-season stretch from 1996-2004, Jason Kidd—also from his second year through his tenth year—averaged 13.5 field goal attempts per game. (The difference is that whereas K.J. shot .497 from the field and .508 on two-point field goal attempts during that span, Kidd shot .404 from the field and .431 on two-point field goal attempts. Incidentally, K.J. also averaged more assists, fewer turnovers, and obviously a lot more points.)
And in fact, in each of his last three years of that prime stretch, 1995-1997, K.J. averaged fewer field goal attempts per game than Steve Nash in 2006 (Nash's second MVP season) and 2007 (Nash's best season, even though he did not receive the MVP Award).
Now, like Magic Johnson, K.J. did average a ton of free throw attempts—in 1997, for instance, he averaged more free throw attempts per game than Michael Jordan and Allen Iverson (while also averaging more assists than Jason Kidd—even while Kidd's teammate that season—and Rod Strickland and posting a higher three-point field goal percentage than Joe Dumars, Mitch Richmond, Reggie Miller, and Dell Curry, each of whom shot 43 percent on threes that year, rounded off), and there are a variety of reasons for why he averaged so many free throw attempts (all of which, incidentally, are great, as shooting high volumes of free throws at high efficiency rates arguably represents the most valuable tendency in basketball). But again, there was almost no difference in the average number of field goal attempts posted by Kevin Johnson and Jason Kidd over nearly decade-long prime stretches of their careers, hence speaking to Cassell's soliloquy regarding "point guards" such as K.J. and Kidd versus "lead guards" like himself.
Kevin Johnson's explosiveness as a scorer misled many media members (the NBA media is largely populated by dolts) and fans into misreading his actual tendencies as a player. As former teammate Danny Manning stated in 2014, "KJ was a talented scoring point guard that did a good job distributing the ball."
http://www.nba.com/suns/history/suns-throwback-danny-manning/
K.J. indeed looked to distribute the basketball and involve teammates, but most of all, he read the defense and applied his skills and athletic talent based on his readings of defensive coverage. So he would score more, or less, depending upon the flow and stage of the game and the decisions of the defense. He forced very little and he rarely prejudged plays, which is a key to excellence for a point guard. In truth, no point guard should truly be "pass-first" or "score-first," because in that case he would be prejudging the play and not necessarily responding to the defense—or to how the defense adjusts to his initial catalytic actions. A major reason for the offensive brilliance of both Kevin Johnson and Steve Nash is that they rarely prejudged plays—they excelled at allowing plays to unfold and making decisions in the moment rather than predetermining anything. K.J. constituted somewhat more of a scorer than Nash primarily because his athletic ability enabled him to engage in more straight line-drives to the basket, and that athletic ability, along with his savvy and feel for the matter, allowed him to attempt way more free throws. But beyond anything else, Kevin Johnson was an extremely cerebral, disciplined player, and those qualities allowed him to combine explosiveness with efficiency better than any small guard in NBA history. As Phil Taylor, one of the best NBA reporters of the time, wrote in a
Sports Illustrated feature in February 1997, "There are the older, craftier types, who rely as much on the quickness of their minds as of their bodies, such as Stockton, 34, and the Phoenix Suns' Kevin Johnson, 30."
https://www.si.com/vault/1997/02/10...uding-a-changing-of-the-guard-at-the-very-top
(That feature used a ridiculous rating system to proclaim Terrell Brandon the best point guard in the NBA and place him on the magazine's cover, but Taylor provided some genuine insight, even if he made the typical mistake of applying team pace factors to individual performance.)
Yet even at twenty-two, Kevin Johnson was a very cerebral point guard who relied on his mental ability to read defenses and make decisions as much as his physical quickness. And after all, even in 1997 K.J. possessed extreme quickness—again, in his tenth NBA season, he averaged more free throw attempts per game than both Michael Jordan and Allen Iverson. But he filtered that quickness through a much broader aperture in terms of viewing the game and studying the court—the kind of thing that Iverson, for instance, proved more or less incapable of doing and that almost no one did as well as K.J.
Anyway, the point is rather moot in terms of future judgments, because true point guards—including true point guards with explosive scoring ability such as Kevin Johnson—have become an endangered species in the NBA. Contrary to media mythology from a few years ago, Steve Nash did not usher in a rebirth of "pure," "pass-first" point guards whose primary interests were altruistic. Rather than a harbinger of the future, Nash proved to be more of an outlier and an anachronism. Even John Wall, widely regarded as the best playmaker in today's NBA and one of the few true point guards left among starters, is something of a "volume shooter" whose undisciplined shooting tendencies can be reminiscent of Kobe Bryant as much as anything else. So dithering over the "purity" of point guards these days is basically a feckless exercise—and was always misleading regardless. Scoring from a point guard was never necessarily a bad thing, and Cotton Fitzsimmons understood that idea long before more of the rest of the NBA had caught up. The question is whether that scoring is done with discipline and efficiency—and perhaps virtuosity.
