payitforward wrote:The idea that Kuzma "developed" this year -- that he got better -- is completely ridiculous. It's amazing to me that anyone can think it. In fact, he wasn't good last year, & he got a whole lot worse this year.
Did he improve as a scorer this year? No, he got worse. Per 36 minutes he took 3.1 more shots & .2 more FTAs to produce 3.3 more points. His below average TS% of '21-22 went down. From "bad" he went to "worse." Guys who take a lot of shots at below average efficiency cause their teams to lose.
So the idea behind this, not that i agree with it (because I agree that Kyle Kuzma is a bad basketball player) is that efficiency, all things being equal, scales inversely with volume. So a player taking 3.1 more shots and essentially having the same efficiency as last year constitutes improvement as a basketball player. However, this assumes that those shots can't be replaced at a higher efficiency than .547% TS%. The presumption here is that yes, Kuzma takes a lot of shots at below average efficiency, but the shots that he takes would be replaced with even
worse shots, because the players that would be taking those shots are either taking a ton of shots themselves (Beal and KP), or are even worse at creating shots (most of the rest of the roster). However, the counterfactual is that maybe this is just an assumption, and you would get more mileage out of, say, getting Daniel Gafford more shots (.739% TS), or creating more open 3s for Corey Kispert (.657% TS%), or even forcefeeding Beal and KP more (.593 and .627 TS% respectively), even if it seems that those routes have obvious downsides (Gafford and Kispert being worse at creating their own offense).