After listening to the basketball analysts all season and reading the season postmortems on this board, it seems that the book of conventional wisdom on Paulus has been written and it goes something like this:

1. Paulus commits too many turnovers. He needs to do a better job of taking care of the ball evidenced by his low assist to turnover ratio.
2. Paulus showed some grit on offense in the second half of the season because someone needed to step up and fill the void. However, he really isn’t a high caliber perimeter scoring threat in the traditional Duke mold.
3. Paulus is too slow. He isn’t quick enough to take his man and he has poor lateral quickness on defense and therefore gets beaten by his man.

Now let’s take a closer look at each one of these…

Turnovers
Let’s start with the turnovers. Paulus’ turnovers are actually down this year. During his freshman year he committed 3.3 turnovers per game compared with 3.1 per game this year. Still too many you say? Well, let’s put those turnovers into proper historical perspective. Here are a few season turnover stats from former Duke point guards:

Bobby Hurley (Freshman) 4.3 TO/G
Bobby Hurley (Sophomore) 3.9 TO/G
Bobby Hurley (Junior) 3.5 TO/G
Bobby Hurley (Senior) 3.4 TO/G
Jason Williams (Freshman) 4.1 TO/G
Jason Williams (Sophomore) 3.9 TO/G
Jason Williams (Junior) 3.7 TO/G
Tommy Amaker (Freshman) 3.0 TO/G
Chris Duhon (Junior) 3.0 TO/G

(I should mention that Wojo, never had more than 1.8 TO/G and Amaker and Duhon kept theirs <3 in their other seasons not listed.)

So my point here is that Paulus’ turnover numbers are not really that high relative to other PGs in the Duke system. So the culprit with Paulus’ A/T ratio is the relatively low assist total. That is certainly something Greg will need to work on and improve. However we should remember that the PGs listed above had guys like Dawkins, Laettner, Hill, Boozer, Battier, Shelden and Redick on the other end of those assists. Consider the offensive personnel that Paulus had to work with this year…

Scoring Threat
Now let’s talk about Paulus as a scoring threat. When the season started I, and pretty much everyone else, would have said that Scheyer is the guy that would need to try to step in and fill the void that JJ left on the perimeter. Early in the season, that is pretty much what happened. But over the course of the season, Paulus became more and more dangerous from behind the arc. I knew this was the case but I was shocked when I looked at his final season 3 point shooting percentage. A torrid 45.6%! That is the sixth all-time highest single season percentage at Duke. And the five guys at the top of the list are not named Trajan or JJ. Also, his 68 total 3 pointers made puts him ahead of Jeff Capel’s sophomore season, Hurley’s junior season, Trajan’s freshman season, and Dunleavy’s sophomore season. By comparison, Scheyer (and this is not a criticism of him) shot only 36.5% with a total of 61 made.

Speed
It is true that you can’t coach quickness but a couple of former Dukies have proven that you can work on it. Anyone who remembers Wojo’s first two years at Duke knows that he was a step too slow to be truly effective. JJ got off to a great start at Duke but saw his game plateau in his second year due to his lack of speed. Both Wojo and JJ worked their butts off over the summer and showed remarkable improvements in speed as upperclassman. They also learned over time how to play their man on defense more effectively and keep their man in front of them.

We heard stories at the beginning of this year about how Paulus went “JJ” over the summer and had really got into great shape. Well that was all thrown out the window by his injury. Something tells me that Paulus is not going to sit on the couch eating nachos this summer…

I don’t expect this argument to sway all the Paulus doubters. I am sure they could come up with some lies, damn lies and statistics of their own. However, I think those who think that Duke will not be able to be a contender with Paulus at the point and/or who actually think that Paulus will lose his spot to Nolan Smith at some point next year really need to take a closer look at Greg’s game. Consider what he has done, who has been around to help him, and what he has been up against.

Furthermore, Greg showed more leadership down the stretch than anyone on the team. Personally, I think he should be named as the sole captain for next year’s team.