Top 20 players who make their teammate's shots easier (2021-22)

[LAL1947]

Luka Doncic is leading the pack of players who make their teammate's shots easier.

Of the 4 leading MVP candidates, only Giannis doesn't make this list.

Thoughts? Have they got it right? Does the ranking match the eye test? Is there anyone you're surprised is missing?

Came across this infographic on the web btw. They also have a section on which players hamper opponent's shots the most and an overall ranking that combines the two things. You can read more at the source.

[Texas Chuck]

no idea you are taking shots at Dirk when he was dominant in this regard in his prime....

Nor why would expect Giannis to measure as well at this stat as Jokic or guards?

Seems like a post just to take shots at two players you are on record as not liking than it is to recognize the players creating great shots for teammates. Which sucks because these players deserve recognition.

[LAL1947]

no idea you are taking shots at Dirk when he was dominant in this regard in his prime...

That was a joke! I'll remove the Luka "better than Dirk" Doncic bit if it's not coming across funny. You're gonna have to deal with those conversations at some point between Dallas fans.

Nor why would expect Giannis to measure as well at this stat as Jokic or guards?

Embiid is on the list too, at #12 no less... and even KAT.

We've had a good MVP competition between Jokic, Embiid, Giannis and Luka so I mentioned that Giannis the only one from the four leading candidates who isn't on there. It's one of the things that stands out to me, since he's credited with having a lot of "gravity" and has a high usage %.

Seems like a post just to take shots at two players you are on record as not liking than it is to recognize the players creating great shots for teammates. Which sucks because these players deserve recognition.

Not at all. I like Dirk, who could dislike the big, affable German? I'm neutral on Giannis the person. On the court, I dislike how he gets away with more carries, travels and charges than I've ever seen the refs let 1 player get away with before. Feels like the referees are lowering standards too much by not calling him on these things more often... because now anyone can have "exceptional skills". Know what I mean? For example, Luka's footwork and handling are exceptional. If the rules are being applied correctly appropriately, his skills should allow him to do more things than someone who doesn't have them on the same level. By not applying the rules, they're taking away from him an advantage he should have.

Anyway, I posted it here because I thought it was a cool infographic and I'm hoping to hear all your thoughts on it. Another thing that's surprising to see is CP3 not on the list. Also surprising to see Lamelo as high as he is already.

[70sFan]

How is the shot quality measured here? By the league average efficiency from given spots?

[LAL1947]

How is the shot quality measured here? By the league average efficiency from given spots?

I don't rightly know. I've included the source for the article in the OP, where they start off by saying, "we're using Synergy’s new Shot Quality metric". So it looks like this is something they've come up with on their own but I've not read the article. TBH, it's another reason why I made this thread. If anyone finds the time to read the article for their pleasure, hoping they will post their thoughts about how this is being measured and whether it's a good metric.

[Doctor MJ]

Thoughts? Have they got it right? Does the ranking match the eye test? Is there anyone you're surprised is missing?

Good stuff!

My immediate thought is that people should really pay attention to where Chris Paul is on the list. Probably not what people would expect.

Beyond that, I would urge the standard caution about not getting too worked up over precise rankings as there's always going to more to a player's ability to affect shot quality than what a metric like this can be expected to account for, and that there's certainly going to be noise involved (see the defensive end for that in particular).

[tsherkin]

Have seen this floating around. It's worth digging into. I am interested in seeing how the metric is built, for sure.

[Texas Chuck]

Doc getting in his shot at Chris Paul... OTOH has to be killing him that Luka, Harden and Lebron are all at the top of the list since he absolutely hates how they play.

[tsherkin]

more explanation here.

[tsherkin]

Doc getting in his shot at Chris Paul... OTOH has to be killing him that Luka, Harden and Lebron are all at the top of the list since he absolutely hates how they play.

Hehehe.

Well, Paul grades out well in potential assists and points created and other stuff Synergy does, so this js kind of intriguing.

[falcolombardi]

luka/lebron ahead of curry seems to go against everythingh that we thought to know about curry gravity vs on-ball creation

the theory behind it was that curry created easier shots inside with his gravity while helio players created worse shots in the perimeter with kickouts

[Doctor MJ]

Doc getting in his shot at Chris Paul... OTOH has to be killing him that Luka, Harden and Lebron are all at the top of the list since he absolutely hates how they play.

So first, I'm sorry to become known as such a grouch. I'll try to be more positive.

To address the insights you bring up on an analytical level:

1. I am indeed reinforcing a point I've made for years about Paul. That point is not that Paul doesn't have massive offensive impact, but that it doesn't come in the form most think. It doesn't come because he's so, so good at passing/facilitating/playmaking for others. It comes because he's good at milking what he can in a particular possession by minimizing his team's mistakes and manufacturing opponent mistakes, along with him being an excellent shooter.

When I bring this up I feel like a lot of people say, "Who cares? Even if I grant the premise, impact is impact." I think it's important even if it doesn't change how you rate his overall playing value, but regardless, I'd guess that most fans would expect Paul to rank higher on this list over the past couple years where people have been gushing about Paul making things easier for his teammates. It's good they see how far their baseline is off.

2. I have been pretty up front about my philosophy here that feeds into my aesthetic, and in general that's been pretty anti-helio lately, but I do want to be clear both that a) I understand the value of the heliocentric approach and b) that I think it can be done in a way that doesn't offend my aesthetic.

Heliocentrism has a lot going for it because it taps directly into gravitational impact. The idea is that you have someone so dangerous with the ball that defenders have to gravitate toward him to mitigate his threat. Once you do that, teammates get more open and it actually becomes easier to pass effectively, so you don't even need to be that good at court awareness to pull it off if your team practices a certain way all the time.

And this is what guys like Magic Johnson & Steve Nash were always doing, and those guys created basketball that I thought felt pretty dang optimal, and yes, also beautiful. (Note I say "felt optimal" because shifts in stuff like the calculus of team 3-point shooting makes historical statements a bit tricky, but in terms of the approach and improvisation, it often felt next-level smart.)

3. Let's note that Curry's on this list fairly high despite not being anyone's idea of an optimal passer. How's he doing it? Gravity.

Also, this data is over the past two years. I'd expect Curry has had a number of years better than last year by this metric, where the team spent much of the year with guys who didn't understand how to resonate with the waves of opportunity Curry's wake allows.

4. We should expect that this stat has a bias in favor of players who take shots they shouldn't.

Remember, this is about teammates' shots, not team shots. That means that if I'm more likely to just call my own number if it's at all unclear whether you or I have the best shot, then (in theory) I'm taking away your worse shooting attempts, and thus raising the quality of your average shooting attempt. And this is true even if you actually did have the better shot.

5. We should recognize that this is a rate stat, based not on possessions where the player in question is on the court, but on possessions where the player is on the court AND a teammate shoots.

As such, if you're someone - like Chris Paul actually - who shoots less, and thus has teammates shoot more and contribute more impact that way - you're going to get underrated by this aspect of the stat.

[Doctor MJ]

luka/lebron ahead of curry seems to go against everythingh that we thought to know about curry gravity vs on-ball creation

the theory behind it was that curry created easier shots inside with his gravity while helio players created worse shots in the perimeter with kickouts

I like that you're thinking about this, but I'd interpret things a bit differently.

First thing I'd say is that helio's don't create fundamentally inferior shots because of the existence of the 3-point line. By sucking defenses to the interior, you have the possibility of direct strikes to possibly 4 open 3-point shooters each of whom is in exactly the same position most of the time so you don't even have to improvise your passing that much.

If that seems pretty dang optimal to you, well, that's because it can be depending on the type of talent you have on your roster. If you have one do-it-all guy and 4 guys who can't do much but shoot 3's from a particular spot they practice on constantly, it's clearly going to be your best strategy.

The tricky part comes when you have multiple players with distinct talents and you want to try to harvest from those talents to reach the ceiling of your team is fully capable of.

Second thing, please read my other post. I think there are specific things to note in the details of the study that people should keep in mind as they try to take the data and map it into basketball meaning.

[falcolombardi]

luka/lebron ahead of curry seems to go against everythingh that we thought to know about curry gravity vs on-ball creation

the theory behind it was that curry created easier shots inside with his gravity while helio players created worse shots in the perimeter with kickouts

I like that you're thinking about this, but I'd interpret things a bit differently.

First thing I'd say is that helio's don't create fundamentally inferior shots because of the existence of the 3-point line. By sucking defenses to the interior, you have the possibility of direct strikes to possibly 4 open 3-point shooters each of whom is in exactly the same position most of the time so you don't even have to improvise your passing that much.

If that seems pretty dang optimal to you, well, that's because it can be depending on the type of talent you have on your roster. If you have one do-it-all guy and 4 guys who can't do much but shoot 3's from a particular spot they practice on constantly, it's clearly going to be your best strategy.

The tricky part comes when you have multiple players with distinct talents and you want to try to harvest from those talents to reach the ceiling of your team is fully capable of.

Second thing, please read my other post. I think there are specific things to note in the details of the study that people should keep in mind as they try to take the data and map it into basketball meaning.

reas your post to texaschuck, i agree in general with your points and thanks for extending them to paul in this case

but i always have a question when you talk of using everyone talents to reach a higher ceiling: do you mean improving teammatea stats/performance or improving team overall performance?

it may seem like the same thingh cause it goea hand in hand but is not exactly the same

imagine a version of the warriors where curry spams pick and roll or isolation with harden/luka esque levels of heliocentrism

curry numbers explode as he goes to average 35 points or whatever

in this scenario curry numbers suddendly look a lot better without him necesarrily doing mpre for the team, i totally get that

on the other hand all his teammates who become more "static" and get the ball less now look worse in their offensive numbers, in a sense curry is makong them all "worse" offensively stats and eye test wise

yet the offense of the warriors is not any worse even though it looks a lot uglier, the flash is gome but the results are the same

is curry making his teammates "worse" by making himself "better"? tecnically yeah

is he making the team worse at all? not really

i get the impression that sometimes criticisms of helicoentric players dont come from them mskimg their offense ceilings worse, so many of the greatest offense dinasties were led by heliocentric players after all.

but from the aesthetics frustation of them making their teammates do less "cool" things like iso or passing and more "boring" thinghs like cstch and shoot even if the results are arguably better

i remember a convo with you where you mentioned lebron heliocentrism made kyrie a worse player, in actuallity kyrie barely had the ball less or shot less (actually he shot more than lebron) and got to be a part of one of the greatest offenses ever that won a ring and made 3 finals

is lebron making kyrie (or love) raw stats a bit worse (with better efficiency) ans getting them from leading a loterry team to being a key part of a ring really making them "worse"?

is the goal of a superstar make the -team- as good as possible or make his -teammates- stats/play as "good" as possible?

sometines it feels like people think the latter, otherwise i cannot for the life of me understand how magic and nash can create the best offensive dinasties in the league history and still be criticized cause their heliocentrism limits a team ceiling (ben taylor common argument) or what makes curry a higher ceiling offensive star thsn nash whose offenses were better thsn even curry/durant warriors?

or how lebron can lead some of the best playoffs offenses ever with -kyrie- that were comparable to curry with -durant- and still be called a ceiling limiter in comparision?

i dont think i have ever had a good explanation how it makes sense lebron is less of a offense ceiling raiser thsn curry when the 16-17 cavs had roughly equal offensive results than the 17-18 warriors (arguably better at that)

[Doctor MJ]

luka/lebron ahead of curry seems to go against everythingh that we thought to know about curry gravity vs on-ball creation

the theory behind it was that curry created easier shots inside with his gravity while helio players created worse shots in the perimeter with kickouts

I like that you're thinking about this, but I'd interpret things a bit differently.

First thing I'd say is that helio's don't create fundamentally inferior shots because of the existence of the 3-point line. By sucking defenses to the interior, you have the possibility of direct strikes to possibly 4 open 3-point shooters each of whom is in exactly the same position most of the time so you don't even have to improvise your passing that much.

If that seems pretty dang optimal to you, well, that's because it can be depending on the type of talent you have on your roster. If you have one do-it-all guy and 4 guys who can't do much but shoot 3's from a particular spot they practice on constantly, it's clearly going to be your best strategy.

The tricky part comes when you have multiple players with distinct talents and you want to try to harvest from those talents to reach the ceiling of your team is fully capable of.

Second thing, please read my other post. I think there are specific things to note in the details of the study that people should keep in mind as they try to take the data and map it into basketball meaning.

reas your post to texaschuck, i agree in general with your points and thanks for extending them to paul in this case

but i always have a question when you talk of using everyone talents to reach a higher ceiling: do you mean improving teammatea stats/performance or improving team overall performance?

it may seem like the same thingh cause it goea hand in hand but is not exactly the same

imagine a version of the warriors where curry spams pick and roll or isolation with harden/luka esque levels of heliocentrism

curry numbers explode as he goes to average 35 points or whatever

in this scenario curry numbers suddendly look a lot better without him necesarrily doing mpre for the team, i totally get that

on the other hand all his teammates who become more "static" and get the ball less now look worse in their offensive numbers, in a sense curry is makong them all "worse" offensively stats and eye test wise

yet the offense of the warriors is not any worse even though it looks a lot uglier, the flash is gome but the results are the same

is curry making his teammates "worse" by making himself "better"? tecnically yeah

is he making the team worse at all? not really

i get the impression that sometimes criticisms of helicoentric players dont come from them mskimg their offense ceilings worse, so many of the greatest offense dinasties were led by heliocentric players after all.

but from the aesthetics frustation of them making their teammates do less "cool" things like iso or passing and more "boring" thinghs like cstch and shoot even if the results are arguably better

i remember a convo with you where you mentioned lebron heliocentrism made kyrie a worse player, in actuallity kyrie barely had the ball less or shot less (actually he shot more than lebron) and got to be a part of one of the greatest offenses ever that won a ring and made 3 finals

is lebron making kyrie (or love) raw stats a bit worse (with better efficiency) ans getting them from leading a loterry team to being a key part of a ring really making them "worse"?

is the goal of a superstar make the -team- as good as possible or make his -teammates- stats/play as "good" as possible?

sometines it feels like people think the latter, otherwise i cannot for the life of me understand how magic and nash can create the best offensive dinasties in the league history and still be criticized cause their heliocentrism limits a team ceiling (ben taylor common argument) or what makes curry a higher ceiling offensive star thsn nash whose offenses were better thsn even curry/durant warriors?

or how lebron can lead some of the best playoffs offenses ever with -kyrie- that were comparable to curry with -durant- and still be called a ceiling limiter in comparision?

i dont think i have ever had a good explanation how it makes sense lebron is less of a offense ceiling raiser thsn curry when the 16-17 cavs had roughly equal offensive results than the 17-18 warriors (arguably better at that)

Wow, a lot there, but I think it ties into a cohesive whole.

I do want to say up front I don't remember the LeBron-Kyrie statement. I'll take your word for it, but off the top of my head I have to acknowledge that saying Kyrie was worse playing with LeBron doesn't seem like a correct statement, so, I wonder what I was thinking.

To answer your big question:

1. The goal is always to optimize team, rather than teammate. No doubt about that.

2. There's absolutely no reason to assume that the optimal approach is the approach that distributes all tasks symmetrically. And in fact I'll note, this is something that Nat Holman talked about back in the 1930s looking back on the evolution of his team (Original Celtics) in the wake of their development around Dutch Dehnert's "pivot" position which was developed around 1926. Prior to that they had beat all comers with an approach that today we'd basically call position-less motion-oriented basketball (with a bizarre avoidance of dribbling or long-distance shooting), they called "scientific basketball" and made the players "symmetrical" to each other. Dehnert taking on a role you specifically only wanted one guy to play at a time broke the symmetry, and the game has probably never been as balanced again.

I don't say that with lament as there's no way I know of to watch actual basketball games from that era, and what I know about it suggests it would be frustrating to watch. But it's a funny thing to consider.

Basically from that point onward, the question wasn't whether everyone should be generalists who are symmetric to each other, but how much you should ask your players to specialize.

3. And so what I'd say is that it's not that I'd suggest all the players should be symmetric out there, but that if you have a player with quality Q that you want to be able to make use of, you have to figure out how to make that happen, and "heliocentrism" is something that can be pretty limiting on that front, particularly if you're a team who is just drafting talent and hoping for the best.

4. On the other hand, once it's crystal clear how to build around a particular franchise player, you ought to be able to scout, acquire, and develop talent to keep a good thing going a long time, or hop to a new franchise with the blueprint in hand for what needs to be done and do great things quickly.

And so if it's straight forward to build around an outlier helio, and you have said helio, that's fantastic. Go for it!

But it's not the only way to ride the horse, and in terms of what approaches lend themselves to more sustainable cultures, well, that's something I expect we'll see more of going forward.

[falcolombardi]

I like that you're thinking about this, but I'd interpret things a bit differently.

First thing I'd say is that helio's don't create fundamentally inferior shots because of the existence of the 3-point line. By sucking defenses to the interior, you have the possibility of direct strikes to possibly 4 open 3-point shooters each of whom is in exactly the same position most of the time so you don't even have to improvise your passing that much.

If that seems pretty dang optimal to you, well, that's because it can be depending on the type of talent you have on your roster. If you have one do-it-all guy and 4 guys who can't do much but shoot 3's from a particular spot they practice on constantly, it's clearly going to be your best strategy.

The tricky part comes when you have multiple players with distinct talents and you want to try to harvest from those talents to reach the ceiling of your team is fully capable of.

Second thing, please read my other post. I think there are specific things to note in the details of the study that people should keep in mind as they try to take the data and map it into basketball meaning.

reas your post to texaschuck, i agree in general with your points and thanks for extending them to paul in this case

but i always have a question when you talk of using everyone talents to reach a higher ceiling: do you mean improving teammatea stats/performance or improving team overall performance?

it may seem like the same thingh cause it goea hand in hand but is not exactly the same

imagine a version of the warriors where curry spams pick and roll or isolation with harden/luka esque levels of heliocentrism

curry numbers explode as he goes to average 35 points or whatever

in this scenario curry numbers suddendly look a lot better without him necesarrily doing mpre for the team, i totally get that

on the other hand all his teammates who become more "static" and get the ball less now look worse in their offensive numbers, in a sense curry is makong them all "worse" offensively stats and eye test wise

yet the offense of the warriors is not any worse even though it looks a lot uglier, the flash is gome but the results are the same

is curry making his teammates "worse" by making himself "better"? tecnically yeah

is he making the team worse at all? not really

i get the impression that sometimes criticisms of helicoentric players dont come from them mskimg their offense ceilings worse, so many of the greatest offense dinasties were led by heliocentric players after all.

but from the aesthetics frustation of them making their teammates do less "cool" things like iso or passing and more "boring" thinghs like cstch and shoot even if the results are arguably better

i remember a convo with you where you mentioned lebron heliocentrism made kyrie a worse player, in actuallity kyrie barely had the ball less or shot less (actually he shot more than lebron) and got to be a part of one of the greatest offenses ever that won a ring and made 3 finals

is lebron making kyrie (or love) raw stats a bit worse (with better efficiency) ans getting them from leading a loterry team to being a key part of a ring really making them "worse"?

is the goal of a superstar make the -team- as good as possible or make his -teammates- stats/play as "good" as possible?

sometines it feels like people think the latter, otherwise i cannot for the life of me understand how magic and nash can create the best offensive dinasties in the league history and still be criticized cause their heliocentrism limits a team ceiling (ben taylor common argument) or what makes curry a higher ceiling offensive star thsn nash whose offenses were better thsn even curry/durant warriors?

or how lebron can lead some of the best playoffs offenses ever with -kyrie- that were comparable to curry with -durant- and still be called a ceiling limiter in comparision?

i dont think i have ever had a good explanation how it makes sense lebron is less of a offense ceiling raiser thsn curry when the 16-17 cavs had roughly equal offensive results than the 17-18 warriors (arguably better at that)

Wow, a lot there, but I think it ties into a cohesive whole.

I do want to say up front I don't remember the LeBron-Kyrie statement. I'll take your word for it, but off the top of my head I have to acknowledge that saying Kyrie was worse playing with LeBron doesn't seem like a correct statement, so, I wonder what I was thinking.

To answer your big question:

1. The goal is always to optimize team, rather than teammate. No doubt about that.

2. There's absolutely no reason to assume that the optimal approach is the approach that distributes all tasks symmetrically. And in fact I'll note, this is something that Nat Holman talked about back in the 1930s looking back on the evolution of his team (Original Celtics) in the wake of their development around Dutch Dehnert's "pivot" position which was developed around 1926. Prior to that they had beat all comers with an approach that today we'd basically call position-less motion-oriented basketball (with a bizarre avoidance of dribbling or long-distance shooting), they called "scientific basketball" and made the players "symmetrical" to each other. Dehnert taking on a role you specifically only wanted one guy to play at a time broke the symmetry, and the game has probably never been as balanced again.

I don't say that with lament as there's no way I know of to watch actual basketball games from that era, and what I know about it suggests it would be frustrating to watch. But it's a funny thing to consider.

Basically from that point onward, the question wasn't whether everyone should be generalists who are symmetric to each other, but how much you should ask your players to specialize.

3. And so what I'd say is that it's not that I'd suggest all the players should be symmetric out there, but that if you have a player with quality Q that you want to be able to make use of, you have to figure out how to make that happen, and "heliocentrism" is something that can be pretty limiting on that front, particularly if you're a team who is just drafting talent and hoping for the best.

4. On the other hand, once it's crystal clear how to build around a particular franchise player, you ought to be able to scout, acquire, and develop talent to keep a good thing going a long time, or hop to a new franchise with the blueprint in hand for what needs to be done and do great things quickly.

And so if it's straight forward to build around an outlier helio, and you have said helio, that's fantastic. Go for it!

But it's not the only way to ride the horse, and in terms of what approaches lend themselves to more sustainable cultures, well, that's something I expect we'll see more of going forward.

the kyrie thingh was about kyrie being better with the ball than without it so playing with another heavy ball handler in lebron limited his value by having the ball less

i hope i dont come across as saying every team should builf around an helio or that it is necesarrily the best way to play

i just feel like at times it seems like people go the other extreme and assume that heliocmetrism or on ball players like magic or lebron have inherently a worse "ceiling" than more off ball players like bird or curry even if results say otherwise

[Doctor MJ]

the kyrie thingh was about kyrie being better with the ball than without it so playing with another heavy ball handler in lebron limited his value by having the ball less

i hope i dont come across as saying every team should builf around an helio or that it is necesarrily the best way to play

i just feel like at times it seems like people go the other extreme and assume that heliocmetrism or on ball players like magic or lebron have inherently a worse "ceiling" than more off ball players like bird or curry even if results say otherwise

Ah, well certainly when Kyrie is off-ball, he's not as valuable as he is on-ball.

I'm glad you context it in terms of guys like Magic & Bird because it sounds like you might think that I think Bird's offense peaked higher than Magic's. In reality, I think that Magic playing helio allowed him to have more sustained impact than Bird did with his wondrous off-ball play.

I think Bird was more portable in the sense that I think you could plant him on other teams and he'd figure out how to fit well with whatever the team is trying to do, but if you want to reach the highest ceiling with an outlier decision maker, you probably want him to play on-ball. So sadly, you might say that it would be wiser for Bird to play more like Magic in the end.

With LeBron vs Curry we're talking about a cleaner split between all-arounder and outlier-specialist. While Curry has played as more of an all-around in his pre-Kerr years, at a certain point the focal point of his team offense came to focus on his shooting as impact device separate from playmaking.

In terms of "which is/was better?", I'd emphasize that I'm not saying "X has to be better than Y!" so much as pointing out that X is different than Y with different weaknesses yes, but also different strengths, that make it hard for us to calibrate properly what we're seeing with our eyes if we're used to viewing success through proxies that turn out not to hold like they used to.

With that said, I do think folks have underrated the offensive impact Curry has had in the context he's in basically always, and this is why I keep harping on the subject.

Last note: One of the things about Bird is that his abilities as both a shooter & playmaker were such outliers that it's hard not to daydream about how much more he could have accomplished.