longstrangetrip wrote:Hmm...reading Khans and Shumway's posts, I'm sensing a slight change in sentiment here. Maybe we're moving away from "Sam is a moron" and "how can anyone even consider Zach as a possible point guard" to a more reasoned discussion...like his usage rate is too high or he doesn't make others around him better. That's good...easier to have a discussion when we get away from the eye test in into things we can measure.
Khans, you say the only thing that matters in a PG is what is happening around him. isn't assist percentage a good place to start here? Assists means you are choosing not to score, but instead choosing to pass to someone else so they can score. Zach is still learning his position, and at 20 he should be, and his assist ratio is lower in the pack than some others. But it's clearly improving, and at 21.2 % he is almost exactly the same as Damien Lillard...and substantially ahead of Steph Curry. Are Lillard and Curry not good PG's because their assist ratios aren't as good as a pass-first PG like Rubio. Zach is always going to more of a scoring PG than a pass-first PG, but being in the middle of the pack in assist ratio shows he isn't exactly a disaster in helping his teammates either.
You also state that Zach's usage rate is too high...I believe you are making the case that a good PG can't have such a high usage rate, correct? Zach does rank 8th in usage rate, but he is in very good company...Westbrook, Curry and Lillard all rank in the top 4 on usage rate. Are you going to argue that they are not good PGs because their usage rates are too high?
This is why I like PER, because it recognizes that there are several elements that go into rating a player, and use them all to create a balanced rating. It's no surprise to me that Curry and Westbrook lead the pack in PER, and I feel awfully good that our backup PG ranks 14th. There are different kinds of PGs, and Zach will always be more of a score-first PG, just as Ricky will always be more of a pass-first PG. But PG is such a vital position on a team, I feel pretty good about having 2 young PGs in the top 20 in PER, and in very good company and still improving. When Ricky is healthy, the stats show that there is no team better set at PG than we are. I don't know why we would want to change something that is clearly looking, especially since moving Zach from PG to SG would force Wig to move away from SG where he is clearly succeeding and creating tough matchups.
I think you misinterpreted what I was going for. I'm still firmly in the camp that Lavine is not a PG. I didn't even look at his PER when I brought up that argument, because my point was a guy like CP3 who is a pure PG sacrifices his stats for others. Curry is not a pure PG. Westbrook is not a pure PG. Lilliard is not a pure PG. They are scoring guards who get theirs first and setup teammates second (in Steph's case the system does most of that work). Don't get me wrong, I would take any of them, but to have Lavine in the same sentence as them on any level is wrong. Lavine is not in the range of all-star to best player in the league like those 3. They use their elite scoring abilities to draw the defense and then they get their assists because of the rotations they force. Zach neither forces rotations hardly at all, nor does he run the offense like a Rubio or Paul where they run plays and get guys the ball in their favorite spots. So Zach is failing at both ways of being an effective PG from the standpoint of making those around him better.
Assist rate is a bad advanced statistic in the case of Zach Lavine. He's averaging the same amount of assists as a starting PG than his time off the bench in about 12 more MPG's. If his assist percentage was a useful stat, his assist total should have gone up when he both moved into the starting lineup and got 12 more MPG's. His scoring went up considerably, but he hasn't used that as a means of forcing rotations and dishing the ball for the assist. What good is a percentage based stat that doesn't scale at all to an increased role in this case? His change in numbers from bench to starter make sense for any SG but they do nothing to help his case for being a PG.
Zach is 40/60 starting PG to backup PG this year. That's too high a percentage of starts to keep saying his numbers are good for a backup. His scoring numbers are heavily skewed by his time as a starter and his efficiency also went up from the field and considerably from 3. His numbers are skewed by an advantage he had that most backup PG's don't have at this stage in the season. That's why he shouldn't be compared to backups right now. He has an unfair advantage when compared to his backup PG peers. Right now Zach is in limbo from a PG perspective. He's not a pure PG and he's not a scoring PG who uses his scoring to setup his teammates. He's just a guy who puts the ball in the basket and gets 4 APG's which is great for a SG, but not for a PG, especially a starting PG.
