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JonHeist wrote:azcatz11 wrote:Spoiler:
Because they ran the entire offense thru him...
is that supposed to be a knock on him?
he put up 66%TS and led them to the title game
they ran the whole offense through him because he was so good at scoring that you'd have to be insane not to
azcatz11 wrote:JonHeist wrote:Big J wrote:
Don't fall for the production fallacy with this archetype. Happens all the time with college bigs: Hansborough, Timme, Okafor, Samhan, Bagley, Wiseman, ect.
Wiseman: only played 3 games in college lol
Hansborough's last season: 21/8/1/1/0 on 61% TS .261 WS/40 ??? BPM
Samhan's last season: 21/11/1/0/3 on 59% TS .267 WS/40 ??? BPM
Timme's last season: 21/8/3/1/1 on 63% TS .240 WS/40 9.6 BPM
Okafor's last season: 17/9/1/1/1 on 65% TS .235 WS/40 10.4 BPM
Bagley's last season: 21/11/2/1/1 on 64% TS .248 WS/40 10.8 BPM
Edey's last season: 25/12/2/0/2 on 66% TS .336 WS/40 16.8 BPM
wow it's almost like he's been way more productive than all those guys
Because they ran the entire offense thru him...
Big J wrote:Don't fall for the production fallacy with this archetype. Happens all the time with college bigs: Hansborough, Timme, Okafor, Samhan, Bagley, Wiseman, ect.
Argument: Edey is a prototypical four year college big, another iteration of Garza, Tshiebwe, and Hansborough.
Zach Edey is not Luka Garza. He is not Oscar Tshiebwe. He is not Kofi Cockburn. He is not Frank Kaminsky. He is not Ethan Happ. He is not Jahlil Okafor. He is not Tacko Fall. He is not Drew Timme.
Over the last three years, I’ve seen a bevy of shameless Edey comparisons. People basically compare him to slow, post-up oriented bigs who dominated college and failed in the NBA, and use this availability heuristic to prove that Edey is destined to fail too.
Edey is genuinely not in the same stratosphere as these players. Besides being generationally large (seven foot FIVE!!) with generational production, Edey clears these players in yet another very unique way: interior dominance.
To me, interior dominance is the single most important offensive trait for a big. You need to be able to score inside at a consistent level, against a variety of different coverages. From Sengun (50 dunks in his pre-draft year) to Bam (100 dunks in his pre-draft year), strong interior performance is both sticky and highly undervalued by draftniks.
For instance, perhaps the most ubiquitous Edey negative comparison is Luka Garza. Let me put that comp to rest real quick: Edey had 86 halfcourt dunks in his senior season, and Garza had 8 halfcourt dunks in his senior season. Just a vastly different level of athlete and interior force.
Edey just had the most dominant interior season of the modern era. 109 dunks, 80 FTR, most FTs in a season, 80% at the rim; these are video game numbers. Trust me when I say that no one in at least a few decades comes close to those kinds of numbers. Don’t ignore that ridiculous free throw rate; Edey made the most FTs of the modern era by virtue of his one-of-a-kind controlled physicality. Tshiebwe, Garza, Hansborough, Kaminsky all had some slight issues with their offensive interior dominance, and yet this is Edey’s biggest strength. How quickly we forget, the game is about a bucket.
I could stop here. You can skip ahead to the next refutation if you’d like. I think I’ve done a sufficient job of demonstrating that Edey is nothing like his infamous comparators.
But observers of the game aren’t this dumb. Everything that I just mentioned seems fairly obvious with a cursory film watch: Edey is bigger, stronger, more dominant on both ends, and just far better than any of those names. The impetus for these terrible comps has to be more profound than just similarity bias.
To me, there’s a sort of ad hominem at play, one that stems from contemporary basketball viewers holding a view of modern basketball that is seemingly antithetical to the essence of college basketball. Modern viewers have now grown up on an era of Steph Curry pullups and Rudy Gobert playoff lowlights. The epistemology of the modern college basketball viewer is fundamentally top-down: it starts with these abstracted NBA concepts and then eventually builds down to an abstracted ground truth. We’ve learned to see the world from a POV of pace-and-space, to speak in absolutes of PnR versatility, to internalize its goodness and embrace its principles. This results in the villainization of players that don’t match the physical embodiment of this epistemology. Players like Zach Edey.
I have never, ever seen such extreme levels of vitriol aimed at a player simply for existing. Some players are natural villains; their antics and post-game pressers are meticulous and designed to receive acknowledgement, and the resulting derision is simply compensation. But there is a genuine hatred for Edey, in a way that is truly baffling; and while some of it can be chalked up to sports fans indulging in their need for a villain, this goes beyond mere fun.
It’s more than just a bit; Edey is hated by the consensus despite being a pretty unproblematic, high character guy. And this animosity no doubt colors their assessment of Edey as a prospect. This pervasive bias detracts from the ability of many scouts to provide an objective projection of Edey’s skills, reducing a nuanced evaluation to a series of superficial judgments.
The lack of humanization in the draft space is often alarming – how quickly we forget that these prospects are just barely adults. Unfortunately, it’s not too surprising that the same people that despise Edey are now questioning his NBA upside. Ad hominem for the win, again.
MemphisX wrote:https://theswishtheory.com/2024-nba-draft-articles/2024/06/the-edey-enigma-a-systematic-defense-of-a-generational-talent/Argument: Edey is a prototypical four year college big, another iteration of Garza, Tshiebwe, and Hansborough.
Zach Edey is not Luka Garza. He is not Oscar Tshiebwe. He is not Kofi Cockburn. He is not Frank Kaminsky. He is not Ethan Happ. He is not Jahlil Okafor. He is not Tacko Fall. He is not Drew Timme.
Over the last three years, I’ve seen a bevy of shameless Edey comparisons. People basically compare him to slow, post-up oriented bigs who dominated college and failed in the NBA, and use this availability heuristic to prove that Edey is destined to fail too.
Edey is genuinely not in the same stratosphere as these players. Besides being generationally large (seven foot FIVE!!) with generational production, Edey clears these players in yet another very unique way: interior dominance.
To me, interior dominance is the single most important offensive trait for a big. You need to be able to score inside at a consistent level, against a variety of different coverages. From Sengun (50 dunks in his pre-draft year) to Bam (100 dunks in his pre-draft year), strong interior performance is both sticky and highly undervalued by draftniks.
For instance, perhaps the most ubiquitous Edey negative comparison is Luka Garza. Let me put that comp to rest real quick: Edey had 86 halfcourt dunks in his senior season, and Garza had 8 halfcourt dunks in his senior season. Just a vastly different level of athlete and interior force.
Edey just had the most dominant interior season of the modern era. 109 dunks, 80 FTR, most FTs in a season, 80% at the rim; these are video game numbers. Trust me when I say that no one in at least a few decades comes close to those kinds of numbers. Don’t ignore that ridiculous free throw rate; Edey made the most FTs of the modern era by virtue of his one-of-a-kind controlled physicality. Tshiebwe, Garza, Hansborough, Kaminsky all had some slight issues with their offensive interior dominance, and yet this is Edey’s biggest strength. How quickly we forget, the game is about a bucket.
I could stop here. You can skip ahead to the next refutation if you’d like. I think I’ve done a sufficient job of demonstrating that Edey is nothing like his infamous comparators.
But observers of the game aren’t this dumb. Everything that I just mentioned seems fairly obvious with a cursory film watch: Edey is bigger, stronger, more dominant on both ends, and just far better than any of those names. The impetus for these terrible comps has to be more profound than just similarity bias.
To me, there’s a sort of ad hominem at play, one that stems from contemporary basketball viewers holding a view of modern basketball that is seemingly antithetical to the essence of college basketball. Modern viewers have now grown up on an era of Steph Curry pullups and Rudy Gobert playoff lowlights. The epistemology of the modern college basketball viewer is fundamentally top-down: it starts with these abstracted NBA concepts and then eventually builds down to an abstracted ground truth. We’ve learned to see the world from a POV of pace-and-space, to speak in absolutes of PnR versatility, to internalize its goodness and embrace its principles. This results in the villainization of players that don’t match the physical embodiment of this epistemology. Players like Zach Edey.
I have never, ever seen such extreme levels of vitriol aimed at a player simply for existing. Some players are natural villains; their antics and post-game pressers are meticulous and designed to receive acknowledgement, and the resulting derision is simply compensation. But there is a genuine hatred for Edey, in a way that is truly baffling; and while some of it can be chalked up to sports fans indulging in their need for a villain, this goes beyond mere fun.
It’s more than just a bit; Edey is hated by the consensus despite being a pretty unproblematic, high character guy. And this animosity no doubt colors their assessment of Edey as a prospect. This pervasive bias detracts from the ability of many scouts to provide an objective projection of Edey’s skills, reducing a nuanced evaluation to a series of superficial judgments.
The lack of humanization in the draft space is often alarming – how quickly we forget that these prospects are just barely adults. Unfortunately, it’s not too surprising that the same people that despise Edey are now questioning his NBA upside. Ad hominem for the win, again.
TheSuzerain wrote:azcatz11 wrote:JonHeist wrote:
Wiseman: only played 3 games in college lol
Hansborough's last season: 21/8/1/1/0 on 61% TS .261 WS/40 ??? BPM
Samhan's last season: 21/11/1/0/3 on 59% TS .267 WS/40 ??? BPM
Timme's last season: 21/8/3/1/1 on 63% TS .240 WS/40 9.6 BPM
Okafor's last season: 17/9/1/1/1 on 65% TS .235 WS/40 10.4 BPM
Bagley's last season: 21/11/2/1/1 on 64% TS .248 WS/40 10.8 BPM
Edey's last season: 25/12/2/0/2 on 66% TS .336 WS/40 16.8 BPM
wow it's almost like he's been way more productive than all those guys
Because they ran the entire offense thru him...
KenPom #4 offense (and wouldn't surprise if they had a massive negative on/off split with Edey on the bench).
Purdue also had basically the toughest schedule of any college team in the nation last year as well.
The essence of on/off stats is pretty straightforward: if a team’s net rating drops with the player off the floor, that player is likely important. If a team’s net rating rises without a player, that player is likely somewhat of a detriment. It’s obviously a bit reductive, but modern tools allow us to filter out garbage time and games against mickey mouse opponents. There might be some collinearity, but Purdue guard play is just so terrible that it’s probably not an issue. It’s also useful to use a two season sample, as these samples tend to be a bit noisy if not robustly sized.
So, let’s take a look at Purdue’s on/off stats for its last 3 bigs: Matt Haarms, Trevion Williams, and Zach Edey. And let’s use two year on/off samples. We’ll filter out garbage time and only focus on production vs t200 teams:
Trevion Williams: -4.9 net rating in 2021 (jr), -10.9 net rating in 2022 (sr)
Matt Haarms: 13.6 net rating in 2019 (soph), -8.8 net rating in 2020 (jr)
Zach Edey: 13.1 net rating in 2022(soph) , 24.6 net rating in 2023 (jr) , 32.4 net rating in 2024 (senior)
FYI: Haarms was older as a sophomore than Edey was as a senior.
Aggregate two-year net rating of +57 is NUTS. Unsurprisingly, Edey has the best on/off splits in the NCAA since 2018 (this is the farthest that the database goes). We can use RAPM, or regularized plus minus: Edey has the highest RAPM score since at least 2010.
Just for fun, let’s compare this to Garza. Garza had an aggregate +35 net rating in 2020 and 2021 combined vs t200 opponents, garbage adjusted. Good player, good numbers! But Edey’s on/off swings this year (+32) were nearly as good as Garza in two years combined (+35). Again, Garza was not even remotely as impactful as Edey is.
Let this linger for a bit. If Edey’s on/off swings are so damn violent, what does that say about him as a “system player”, and what does that say about the personnel around Edey?
These plus-minus stats aren’t just your typical box score sourced numbers, and you can’t just grab a bunch of rebounds and dunk a ton to boost your RAPM or on/off score. It’s much harder to fake these numbers, as they’re a regularized look at impact; they are meant to sniff out statpadders. Edey just happens to have the legit best impact by the numbers for the last 15 years at minimum.
Let it be known that these include defense as well! Edey is the anchor of a legit good Purdue team, and even bifurcating into offensive and defensive ratings, the on/off swings on defense are just as violent. But you know that now.
Edey isn’t a system player. He is the system. He is the single most impactful college player that we have seen for a long time.
FrodoBaggins wrote:MemphisX wrote:https://theswishtheory.com/2024-nba-draft-articles/2024/06/the-edey-enigma-a-systematic-defense-of-a-generational-talent/Argument: Edey is a prototypical four year college big, another iteration of Garza, Tshiebwe, and Hansborough.
Zach Edey is not Luka Garza. He is not Oscar Tshiebwe. He is not Kofi Cockburn. He is not Frank Kaminsky. He is not Ethan Happ. He is not Jahlil Okafor. He is not Tacko Fall. He is not Drew Timme.
Over the last three years, I’ve seen a bevy of shameless Edey comparisons. People basically compare him to slow, post-up oriented bigs who dominated college and failed in the NBA, and use this availability heuristic to prove that Edey is destined to fail too.
Edey is genuinely not in the same stratosphere as these players. Besides being generationally large (seven foot FIVE!!) with generational production, Edey clears these players in yet another very unique way: interior dominance.
To me, interior dominance is the single most important offensive trait for a big. You need to be able to score inside at a consistent level, against a variety of different coverages. From Sengun (50 dunks in his pre-draft year) to Bam (100 dunks in his pre-draft year), strong interior performance is both sticky and highly undervalued by draftniks.
For instance, perhaps the most ubiquitous Edey negative comparison is Luka Garza. Let me put that comp to rest real quick: Edey had 86 halfcourt dunks in his senior season, and Garza had 8 halfcourt dunks in his senior season. Just a vastly different level of athlete and interior force.
Edey just had the most dominant interior season of the modern era. 109 dunks, 80 FTR, most FTs in a season, 80% at the rim; these are video game numbers. Trust me when I say that no one in at least a few decades comes close to those kinds of numbers. Don’t ignore that ridiculous free throw rate; Edey made the most FTs of the modern era by virtue of his one-of-a-kind controlled physicality. Tshiebwe, Garza, Hansborough, Kaminsky all had some slight issues with their offensive interior dominance, and yet this is Edey’s biggest strength. How quickly we forget, the game is about a bucket.
I could stop here. You can skip ahead to the next refutation if you’d like. I think I’ve done a sufficient job of demonstrating that Edey is nothing like his infamous comparators.
But observers of the game aren’t this dumb. Everything that I just mentioned seems fairly obvious with a cursory film watch: Edey is bigger, stronger, more dominant on both ends, and just far better than any of those names. The impetus for these terrible comps has to be more profound than just similarity bias.
To me, there’s a sort of ad hominem at play, one that stems from contemporary basketball viewers holding a view of modern basketball that is seemingly antithetical to the essence of college basketball. Modern viewers have now grown up on an era of Steph Curry pullups and Rudy Gobert playoff lowlights. The epistemology of the modern college basketball viewer is fundamentally top-down: it starts with these abstracted NBA concepts and then eventually builds down to an abstracted ground truth. We’ve learned to see the world from a POV of pace-and-space, to speak in absolutes of PnR versatility, to internalize its goodness and embrace its principles. This results in the villainization of players that don’t match the physical embodiment of this epistemology. Players like Zach Edey.
I have never, ever seen such extreme levels of vitriol aimed at a player simply for existing. Some players are natural villains; their antics and post-game pressers are meticulous and designed to receive acknowledgement, and the resulting derision is simply compensation. But there is a genuine hatred for Edey, in a way that is truly baffling; and while some of it can be chalked up to sports fans indulging in their need for a villain, this goes beyond mere fun.
It’s more than just a bit; Edey is hated by the consensus despite being a pretty unproblematic, high character guy. And this animosity no doubt colors their assessment of Edey as a prospect. This pervasive bias detracts from the ability of many scouts to provide an objective projection of Edey’s skills, reducing a nuanced evaluation to a series of superficial judgments.
The lack of humanization in the draft space is often alarming – how quickly we forget that these prospects are just barely adults. Unfortunately, it’s not too surprising that the same people that despise Edey are now questioning his NBA upside. Ad hominem for the win, again.
Great post. A big man being able to finish plays in the paint is just as important as his ability to protect it on defense. But we never hear enough about those offensive shortcomings when they're there. Or when they're an incredible strength, such as in Edey's case. Andre Drummond and Nerlens Noel are both weak finishers yet I never heard enough about that. Even bigs like Kessler avoid contact because they are poor free-throw shooters and don't want to go to the line.
The best, first line of defense is a strong half-court offense.
The point about irrational hatred is spot on too. I've talked about this in this thread; we have numerous posters who fit this bill.
Big J wrote:FrodoBaggins wrote:
Great post. A big man being able to finish plays in the paint is just as important as his ability to protect it on defense. But we never hear enough about those offensive shortcomings when they're there. Or when they're an incredible strength, such as in Edey's case. Andre Drummond and Nerlens Noel are both weak finishers yet I never heard enough about that. Even bigs like Kessler avoid contact because they are poor free-throw shooters and don't want to go to the line.
The best, first line of defense is a strong half-court offense.
The point about irrational hatred is spot on too. I've talked about this in this thread; we have numerous posters who fit this bill.
You call it hatred, I call it a refusal to live in fantasy world where we make believe that we've time traveled back to the big man post up days of the 90s.
GoBobs wrote:Big J wrote:FrodoBaggins wrote:Great post. A big man being able to finish plays in the paint is just as important as his ability to protect it on defense. But we never hear enough about those offensive shortcomings when they're there. Or when they're an incredible strength, such as in Edey's case. Andre Drummond and Nerlens Noel are both weak finishers yet I never heard enough about that. Even bigs like Kessler avoid contact because they are poor free-throw shooters and don't want to go to the line.
The best, first line of defense is a strong half-court offense.
The point about irrational hatred is spot on too. I've talked about this in this thread; we have numerous posters who fit this bill.
You call it hatred, I call it a refusal to live in fantasy world where we make believe that we've time traveled back to the big man post up days of the 90s.
Yet you live in the fantsy world where Bronny is the most interesting pick in the draft despite no evidence of that.
Big J wrote:GoBobs wrote:Big J wrote:
You call it hatred, I call it a refusal to live in fantasy world where we make believe that we've time traveled back to the big man post up days of the 90s.
Yet you live in the fantsy world where Bronny is the most interesting pick in the draft despite no evidence of that.
What other prospect is generating more clicks and sports talk show segments? That is called reality bro.
GoBobs wrote:Big J wrote:GoBobs wrote:
Yet you live in the fantsy world where Bronny is the most interesting pick in the draft despite no evidence of that.
What other prospect is generating more clicks and sports talk show segments? That is called reality bro.
under 5 ppg, 36% from the floor, 27% from 3, 68% from the ft line for a guard, not good enough to start for a college team
nobody cares about Bronny that knows basketball, some casuals watching talk shows doesn't mean he is good
Big J wrote:GoBobs wrote:Big J wrote:
What other prospect is generating more clicks and sports talk show segments? That is called reality bro.
under 5 ppg, 36% from the floor, 27% from 3, 68% from the ft line for a guard, not good enough to start for a college team
nobody cares about Bronny that knows basketball, some casuals watching talk shows doesn't mean he is good
I never said he was good.
GoBobs wrote:Big J wrote:GoBobs wrote:
under 5 ppg, 36% from the floor, 27% from 3, 68% from the ft line for a guard, not good enough to start for a college team
nobody cares about Bronny that knows basketball, some casuals watching talk shows doesn't mean he is good
I never said he was good.
Well there is nothing interesting about a terrible player putting his name in the draft
Big J wrote:GoBobs wrote:Big J wrote:
I never said he was good.
Well there is nothing interesting about a terrible player putting his name in the draft
The ratings say otherwise.
GoBobs wrote:Big J wrote:GoBobs wrote:
Well there is nothing interesting about a terrible player putting his name in the draft
The ratings say otherwise.
That isn't going to last. Maybe you are amused. I promise you most of us could care less about the Bronny sidehow.
Big J wrote:GoBobs wrote:Big J wrote:
The ratings say otherwise.
That isn't going to last. Maybe you are amused. I promise you most of us could care less about the Bronny sidehow.
Then why are people watching?
Big J wrote:FrodoBaggins wrote:
Great post. A big man being able to finish plays in the paint is just as important as his ability to protect it on defense. But we never hear enough about those offensive shortcomings when they're there. Or when they're an incredible strength, such as in Edey's case. Andre Drummond and Nerlens Noel are both weak finishers yet I never heard enough about that. Even bigs like Kessler avoid contact because they are poor free-throw shooters and don't want to go to the line.
The best, first line of defense is a strong half-court offense.
The point about irrational hatred is spot on too. I've talked about this in this thread; we have numerous posters who fit this bill.
You call it hatred, I call it a refusal to live in fantasy world where we make believe that we've time traveled back to the big man post up days of the 90s.
tester551 wrote:Big J wrote:FrodoBaggins wrote:Great post. A big man being able to finish plays in the paint is just as important as his ability to protect it on defense. But we never hear enough about those offensive shortcomings when they're there. Or when they're an incredible strength, such as in Edey's case. Andre Drummond and Nerlens Noel are both weak finishers yet I never heard enough about that. Even bigs like Kessler avoid contact because they are poor free-throw shooters and don't want to go to the line.
The best, first line of defense is a strong half-court offense.
The point about irrational hatred is spot on too. I've talked about this in this thread; we have numerous posters who fit this bill.
You call it hatred, I call it a refusal to live in fantasy world where we make believe that we've time traveled back to the big man post up days of the 90s.
I call it a refusal to see all the other ways he positively affects the game.
Yes, he posted up a lot at Purdue & those opportunities will decrease in the NBA.
But he's even more deadly in the P&R - which he'll have even more opportunities (if he has a good guard)
- 1.72 PnR Roll Man possessions per game @ 1.537 ppp = 3.19 points per game
- 1.23 Cut possessions per game @ 1.854 ppp = 2.28 points per game
2.95 combined possessions per game; 5.47 points per game