At the Hive Approval Ratings: Greivis Vasquez

Welcome to the first in the At the Hive Approval Ratings series where we'll be going over every Hornet player and how they performed this season. This'll be part one of the series -- purely about player performance. The next half will be purely financial (and whether a player should stay or go).

Most importantly, make sure you vote in the poll at the end. Like we did back in 2008, we'll go through and catalog our site "approval rating" for each player. We'll start with Greivis Vasquez today:

Positives: Turned a tenuous grasp on a bench point guard role two years ago into a strong starting role, improved three point stroke to 34% from 29% as a rookie, led the NBA with 704 assists and his 45% assist rate also ranked with the league's best, developed floater into a reliable weapon (excluding the times it wasn't) and maintained 58% and 46% conversion rates at the rim and from 3 to 9 feet despite getting few assisted looks in both zones, showed good off-guard abilities in the late season, 13.3% defensive rebound rate from point guard allowed the team to post solid numbers overall despite missing rebounding productions from, ahem, other positions.

Negatives: Turnover prone, tended to make the flashy pass over the correct one on occasion and in especially dangerous situations, flat footed on defense and was consistently hidden by Monty Williams in most schemes (often entirely unsuccessfully), consistently decimated by opposing guards

My Grade (1 to 5): 4, Explanation: It's flat out just rare to find this level of improvement from a 27 year old, even if we consider that it was his third season in the league. The only thing that stops me handing out the 5 here is the defense; it wasn't a lack of effort in most cases, but between his upright stance and lack of foot speed, Vasquez was a serious hindrance on defense. Nonetheless, he played his role -- primary distributor on a team largely lacking creative weapons at the vast majority of positions -- admirably. The fact that he stepped up as a scorer on top of all that is doubly impressive.