mdenny wrote:I've become convinced that ppl obsessed with "efficiency" have no idea what they are talking about. The biggest factor in any given player's EFG is the role they play on a specific team. Obviously front cout players will always have higher efficiency because of layups. Obviously backcourt players will have lower because of long range shots.
Obviously catch and shoot players will be higher because of open shots. Obviously creation players will be lower because of contested shots.
It's hilarious to watch ppl talk like this. According to efficiency stats...Norm Powell in 2024 is better than prime Michael Jordan lol.
But this kinda explains why the fantasy league ppl generally hate point guards and ball handlers. Players who stand around and hit open shots on plays made by others are vaulted.
The players who shoot with high efficiency are interchangeable from one season to the next. Their whole steeze depends on who they play with. The players who aren't interchangeable are the ball handlers and creators.
Efficiency is important. In context. As with anything, if you ignore context, you're just being actively disingenuous.
If your primary volume scorer is inefficient, you're setting yourself up for failure. Decades of examples point to this, across all NBA eras. Efficiency isn't the ONLY thing which matters, of course, but within a certain tolerance, it's very important. There is, of course, a reason that efficient volume scoring only went so far with Wilt and Dantley. You need more. You need a team, you need playmaking, you need defense. There are many parts to a proper contending team.
The general consensus isn't that you need to be like a +8% rTS guy, looking like GSW Durant; it's that you can't really expect real contention if your primary scorer is at or below league-average efficiency. And yeah, efficiency does go beyond eFG%. And yes, to your point, complementary players tend to be more efficient than point-of-attack initiators, for the most part. That doesn't actually change anything about the need for efficiency.
In the 3pt era (like, 1979-80 forward, not just the present era), find yourself a title with inefficient lead scorers. Yeah, efficiency goes down in the playoffs, but so does average efficiency. You need someone who is pretty good as a lead scorer.
Short version? Good luck; there are very, very few. There is a fairy significant limit on your offensive impact if you're a weak scorer. As a result, you'll see very, very few titles over the last 4.5 decades where the guy wasn't above league average efficiency. Only happened once in the 80s, and that was for those Pistons in 89. And Isiah was a < 20 ppg scorer in a well-distributed offense with defensive dominance. And Magic was injured. The 1990 Pistons were also the only time it happened in the 90s.
It wouldn't happen again until the 2010 Lakers, although Duncan was only +1.1% rTS in 2005, which illustrates the sliding scale trade-off between dominance on D and the boards versus offense, the balance to be struck. Lebron was +1.2% rTS in 2020, but then elevated in the playoffs, and that's as close as it has come to happening again.
So now we're talking about 3 instances from 79-80 forward, and a couple more at 101 or 102 TS+. Primarily, these guys are deviating by 2, 3% or more above league-average efficiency in volume. This is the heavily-weighted standard. You generally need a top-5 offense and a top-5 defense to win the title. There's variation, of course, but like, efficiency is critical. Particularly since you're going to typically get worse come the playoffs. If you're starting out from a position of struggling to score effectively, then you're shooting yourself in the foot as you go up against progressively more challenging defenses.
And no one sane ever compares Powell to Michael Jordan and says he is better due to efficiency; that's a total strawman.
This isn't 2000; we need to get beyond this caveman-level thinking that "EFFICIENCY BAD," and arguing without acknowledging the utility and importance of context. Yeah, you need a creator. Yeah, POA guys tend to be less efficient because they get fewer assisted baskets and end up with more contested shots. Sure. But there is still value to efficiency, and if your guys can't score above a given threshold, they're never going to reach the level necessary to anchor a contention-level offense.
Now, someone like Barrett? It's functionally clear that he is very, very distant from being a franchise-level player. Which is fine. No one claimed he was that, and it's clear we are pushing him past his skillset at the moment. He has a pretty narrow skillset, but he's young, has some intriguing tools and he does a couple of things well which make for an interesting foundation. And we've been sufficiently injured that we haven't been able to field our best lineup as far as providing him with passing support, so we haven't really given him the chance to show if his partial season with us last year was a total mirage or if it was a sign of something he might do (at least in part) on a more regular basis. Quickley has a UCL tear, Scottie's still out, all he really has to work with is Gradey and Poeltl at the moment. So he's definitely in a non-ideal situation, but he's also clearly not "the guy" to use as a focal scorer on a contending team, because those guys do better even in crap situations. He could be better than he's looked so far, though, which would be good for playoff contention and maybe winning a round or two, which wouldn't be bad.
But railing against efficiency is just... useless.
