Marrrcuss wrote:I never accused anyone of having empty stats but I see it here a lot.
What I dont get is why Steph and Zions stats are not considered empty as their teams reside in 9th and 11th place, respectively.
You're working backwards rather than forwards.
While it's fine to note stuff like this as the start of a query about a player, you shouldn't have any confidence that an observation like this says anything about what a player's impact is.
In the case of Curry this year, you're talking about a situation where his team is 13 points better with him out there than without despite the fact the team has purposefully played most of the year forcing Curry to play with two guys who should be on the bench based on their ability to actually play valuable minutes, but who were getting run based on their potential (Wiseman, Oubre). That's as much proof of impact as you should ever need when looking for evidence that the world's best shooter is having impact.
In the case of Zion, the label of "empty stats" makes more sense, because I do think he's considerably less valuable than his box score would indicate. But still, the question is more about "Why?". On offense, the team legit does pretty dang well when he's on the court so I think it's important to say that while Zion may not be as offensively valuable as his stats indicate, he's still a clear cut positive, and there's good reason to think his impact will keep improving as he masters more little things.
Defense on the other hand is a concern, specifically because Zion's a guy who is naturally slotted into play as the 4 or the 5, and guys in those position generally carry the defense. Zion lacks great defensive instincts, spends more of his energy on offense, and while he can jump high, his relatively short stature means he's still got to *get* up and get back down.
Last note. So far as I'm award, the best all-in-one stat on the market right now is bball-index's LEBRON stat. While no all-in-one stat should be treated as gospel, this is a stat in the +/- family and thus has at least a rational claim as a proxy for impact.
https://www.bball-index.com/2020-21-lebron-data/If we look at the rankings by Wins Added, it's worth noting that Curry ranks 6th and Zion ranks 11th. For Curry this is actually a bit low, though clearly still fantastic. For Zion, it's frankly awesome, and indicates that we are seeing signs that Zion is having significant impact even he still lags behind older, savvier superstars.
