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Most of that critique isn't true ... of Bonner. Matt can actually finish pretty well. He can dunk and do layups a lot better than Green. He also manages to get his floaters up pretty accurately. It's just not his place to try to play in the paint. He'll often pass it back out if he gets the ball down in the post, because he doesn't want to take a low-percentage shot. If you have Bonner posting people up, then your gameplan is probably destroyed already. His (and Green's especially) BBIQ is pretty high, actually. He just doesn't really exploit it. He's not Duncan or Diaw, but he's not McGee, either.
In general, I hate that people think Green and Bonner are comparable. The only think similar about them is that they shoot three-pointers. That's it. Green's main value is his ability to fill up a stat sheet; Bonner has a good night if he gets 10 points and four rebounds. Green was an elite defender by some advanced metrics last year; Bonner is an elite offensive players by some advanced metrics. Green freelances on D, which gets him into trouble sometimes, but which has also lead to some victories (OKC last year and Houston this year); Bonner is actually a decent post defender, but he doesn't play good help. Most importantly, Green's production continued through the first two series of the playoffs; Bonner's doesn't even make it to the last month of the regular season.
If this season should have taught us anything it's that Green didn't necessarily choke versus the Thunder. He's had stretches of games this season where he shot just as poorly as he did in that series. It's not so much pressure as it is the law of averages evening things out. Does being the Barry Sanders of three-point shooting make him risky to keep in the rotation? Perhaps, and I am sympathetic to that argument. But a difference between this season and the OKC series is that Green is not letting three-point droughts take away the other parts of his game. There has been games where he's shot poorly from three but was near perfect on twos (including dunks and layups) and games were he's shot terribly from everywhere but still played a key role on defense and/or rebounding. If Green had been able to do that in the WCF, then maybe the Spurs could have overcome his shooting woes. But that's not choking (or at least there's no reason to believe it has to be); that's a young player getting down on himself because he's missing shots.
Even in that series, he had the best defensive points/100 on the team. When was the last time Bonner has been cold from deep, but still managed to have good stats in a series? I just think that Green is trying to do too much. On offense, he's trying to fill the void left by Manu by making more aggressive decisions on offense making riskier passes. That's lead to turnovers for sure, but it's also lead to him making some good drive-and-kick assists. We'll see how he develops, because if he can get his passing down, he'll be much more valuable.
If you think any shot at the rim is "easy" for Green, you haven't been watching him.
