Doctor MJ wrote:hardenASG13 wrote:RB34 wrote:
SGA may have scored 200 more points than Joker but has had 120+ more FGa. Being a PG he has 100+ less assists than Joker.
Edit: he’s also had 98 more FTs than Joker.
Jokic leads the league in passes per game and is second in potential assists per game. He constantly has cutters moving off him or taking handoffs/zoom action from him. It's no surprise he has more assists. He's set up better than really any player in the league to get assists because of how Denver uses him at the top of the key and minimizes their guards/forwards as playmakers.
It's so weird this board criticizes volume scorers all day but seems to love Jokic and say he's having the best season ever just because of his assits on volume passing.
Okay, so I would fundamentally disagree with how you're thinking about "volume passing", because you're clearly seeing as if a high assist-to-pass ratio should be assumed to be a good thing in the same way a make-to-shot ratio would, and I don't think that's a healthy way to look at what's going on.
The critical thing here is that while shots consume team opportunity (except in the minority of cases where there's an offensive rebound), successfully completed passes don't.
Further, a player who passes the ball like Jokic actually hogs the ball less than your typical point guard, so what he does there is like the opposite of "usage" in a way that's not the case for, say, a Harden-type helio.
To be clear: Jokic passing so much more than those helios doesn't mean he's necessarily a better or more valuable passer - that all depends on things like the quality of the passes within the context of possession - but it does speak to a different offensive scheme that has been around far longer than the helio model, and doesn't have anything fundamentally wrong with it.
It also isn't necessarily an improvement, but the way I've characterized in the context of Jokic is:
If someone's the best passer in the world, don't you expect to get more passing-based value from him if he passes the ball more often?
Of course if the guy is a good enough scorer you can argue he shouldn't pass as much, but just from a passing evaluation, you're going to have more value from passing if he passes more so long as he's making good decisions along the way.
And I would argue that Jokic makes better decisions than anyone else around, while also having better passing touch than anyone else and having better passing vision than everyone else. Others can disagree of course, but no, I don't see any kind of significant problem here in general. The closest I could come is in saying that Jokic is slow to give up on his teammates and so in games/series where his teammates never stop missing the shots they're being paid to make, the team would have probably done better if he'd just shot more...but of course "done better" doesn't mean "win the championship" because you need teammates to hit shots for that to happen.
Last thing I'll note: I don't consider assists to be a great measure of passing impact, which I know sounds ridiculous. The thing is that offensive schemes can inflate assist totals relative to playmaking value.
I'd say the definitive example of this is Rajon Rondo on the Celtics where he was allowed to hog the ball and then pass it to guys in the mid-range where they were expected to shoot. When you run your offense that way it's going to let your point guard get a lot of assists, but that doesn't mean his work is generating high value shots.
(The more controversial statement is to say that this was a significant component to Stockton's mega-assist totals in the era before the Jazz better optimized their approach. Stockton was a great player, but he's not getting assist totals like that if the team plays differently.)
I'll just end by reiterating that I have Shai as my MVP. I'm not arguing for Jokic over Shai on the question that this thread is focused on...but yeah, I definitely see him as a better and more valuable passer than Shai.
Out of curiosity why do you have SGA as your MVP?
