Kswiss wrote:MrDollarBills wrote:Courtney Lee is a better player than Bojan, this is not up for debate. He hits the 3 at a solid clip and defends aggressively.
I admire the spirit, but lets let the Nets play some games first before this kind of talk starts. I think RHJ will be a stud one day but he's not better than Batum now.
Kemba posted a PER of 20 last season. Lin hasn't come close to that other than his 2nd year in NY.
Come on now. be realistic here.
I agree I have Lee as the better player in my original analysis but I wouldn't necessarily say he is a better 3pt shooter. Kemba's PER is so high because he was given the green light, and super high usage so stats followed. I'm sure Lins stats will improve dramatically now as well but I agree let's let the Nets play some games before we have any conclusions. Just saying the 48 win Hornets of last year are actually very comparable to this year's Nets. Not the best team on paper, but could scrap hard for wins and exceed expectations
Lee is better defensively than Bogs certainly, but on the offensive end, he is very limited, even compared to Bogs, who is more versatile. Lee is pretty much just a catch and shoot player. Lee was 40% FG% from catch-and-shoot 3s, but only 8% FG% for dribble pull-up 3s. And his dribble pullup is a very small sample size but that's precisely the point -- that's not part of his game.
By comparison, Bogs shot 39% from catch and shoot 3s (which is basically the same as Lee) and almost equally well from dribble pull up: 35%. And at much higher frequency: 8% of Bogs 3PA were dribble pullup, compared to Lee's 1%.
When Lee tries to be involved in the offense besides cutting and catch-and-shoot, such as driving or trying to work the pick and roll, it's not pretty and should be a last resort.
As for measuring Lin last year in terms of PER, it is well known that PER rewards volume shooting (such as Kemba's game). And more to the point, PER is just a compression of conventional boxscore stats and no PG is going to produce goodbox score stats without the ball in his hands. NylonCalculus.com estimates that Lin played the PG only about 35% of his playing time last year. The rest of the time he was playing out of position at SG, off the ball. Basically most of his minutes were alongside Kemba, who was lead ballhandler and main offensive load guy. And when Kemba was offcourt, Lin often played with Batum, who Clifford entrusted to run the offense. No guard is getting significant pts and assists like that on a per-minute basis. How do you produce pts and assists without the ball in your hands? Especially playing next to a ballstopper like Kemba. Or Harden. How can you produce points and assists in transition when the outlet pass doesn't go to you?
Which is all to say his per-minute production such as PER doesn't say very much. Unless you do complicated splits/cherrypicking of the stats to try to tease out meaningful data, and that kind of discussion usually goes nowhere.
I'm not even trying to start a stat-centered debate. Just saying stats sometimes need context to be useful, or judged as not useful. I can't wait for the season to begin. Then we can have more common ground and common experience to discuss.
