benhillboy wrote:cupcakesnake wrote:benhillboy wrote:Haha I was reluctant to put Kobe for his unwillingness like you said. He was playing with Smush Parker and Devean George types post Shaq so it’s understandable
. I damn sure forgot Iggy, I’d add Ray Allen at his Sonics peak. I’ll throw Joe Johnson in at his Hawks peak.
I’ll always see Harden as a 2 as I don’t value his post OKC, “point guard” career.
Steph absolutely belongs IMO. His career assist to turn at a hair above 2:1 certainly isn’t pretty for HOF combo guard territory: a trailer load of boneheaded giveaways through the years, granted. But he’s a fully ambidextrous, A+ connective passer who pretty much set the league cadence and style of how and when to get off the ball in the face of halfcourt traps.
With a considerably better off ball scorer than Randle and a far superior offensive talent than Gobert hopefully Ant could enter the conversation when he’s done. The talent and willingness is there, Just needs more experience mapping the floor and better teammates. He makes better reads than the reigning combo guard MVP.
I think we're starting to get awfully far away from Manu's passing level in these comps, as we try to list good shooting guard passers.
Ray Allen and Joe Johnson were good enough passers to run some offense through, but they weren't special. Steph is one of the most skilled/dextrous dudes to ever do it, but his passing bag/vision/creativity is not Manu level. Especially if we're talking about connective passing, Manu is one of the GOATs of that. Steph is a very good- not great- passer. Manu is a passing god.
Ant is definitely a below average passer, though he improves every year. He's really limited to making kick out reads off his drives. He can't throw a lob pass (or almost any kind of interior pass), which is one of the reasons the offense is awkward with him and Rudy. For a guy like Ant, who gets the ball as much as anyone, it's easier to defend the idea he's a bad passer, rather than good. Definitely not at the door step of this conversation.
Manu is one of the only non-point guards (Diaw, Jokic, Bird being others that come to mind) who would throw passes we'd feel we'd never seen before. The kind of passes you have to rewind to figure out what happened. He saw the court in ways almost no one else did, and had the skills to make plays based on what he saw.
I’m a huge Manu guy, obviously no comparison to you lol.
His career 3.8 assists to 2 turnovers is dare I say poor for his talent level. If he were nearly as special as you suggest his ratio would be way higher and he’d have a higher career offensive rating than George Hill had as a Spur, at 112. Basketball Reference has him slotted at PG for a whopping 1% of his career.
You’re probably the only basketball fan who challenges me and I’m willing and interested to oblige.
My first inkling when evaluating a passer is how well are they limiting mistakes and advancing toward a higher quality possession, certainly not how “impressive” or “amazing” their passes seem. Hawks Joe Johnson, despite his notorious moniker, fit that bill. And you’re sorely overlooking all the skills, timing, and reading it takes for Steph to properly select bounce, lobs, or wrap-arounds to beat blitzes and unlock the short roll.
Some good thoughts here.
I think the starting point here is that A/TO ratio came to prominence as a way of looking at pass-first point guards. If your pass first point guard has a ration of less than 2:1, it's a red flag because the expectation is that assists are all he's good for and those turnovers are coming while he's trying to generate an assist. But if his role is different, then it's not a good proxy for passing ability.
I think at this point everyone knows that Jokic is an outlier among outliers as a passer and he does have a very nice A/TO ratio, but I was one of the folks early in Jokic's career saying "No seriously, this guy is as good of a passer as we've ever seen, center, forward, guard, whatever" before either a) he was getting a lot of assists or b) had a quality A/TO rating. It was logical for people at the time to be skeptical based on these box score metrics, but I'd say time has informed us that those early numbers were not a good way to judge his passing ability.
But with that said, it is very possible to overrate a flashy passer who never figures out how to find an optimal level of balance between risk/reward, and I would point to Pete Maravich as an example as someone who many at the time swore by as the greatest passer ever, but who I would suggest was literally too poor of a decision maker to lead an NBA team anywhere.
So with that in mind, it's a pretty reasonable assessment of Ginobili as a passer to be someone whose flash was never matched by his risk minimization... but of course since he wasn't a pass first point guard, that wasn't actually his focus.
Manu's focus was on making stuff happen for the offense, and he's got two really good things going for him to indicate that he was doing it with fantastic optimization:
1. He was flashy as all get out with his passes.
2. His offensive impact was insane despite not scoring a ton or rebounding a ton.
So then the question is, if he wasn't providing major positive impact through passing, how the hell was he doing it?
I ask that with a bit of a rhetorical tone, but it is a sincere question with an answer that truthfully is about considerably more than just passing, but the throughline is the BBIQ.
In a nutshell I'll put it like this: I would say Ginobili's BBIQ serves to be in conversation with basically anyone in basketball history, but he wasn't built around in the NBA like a franchise player for a number of reasons (Duncan, limited international scouting, American coach who didn't have a long career play pro in Italy, durability concerns), and so even though people always raved about him as a "mad genius", I'd say there was an implicit tier-separation in people's minds between whatever BBIQ they attributed to him, and what they attribute to, say, Larry Bird.
People might think it crazy for me to talk about Ginobili with that level of superlative, and that's fine. I'd just ask them to keep in mind that there are very few guys I tend to talk like this about, and when I do, it's typically related to the fact that I concluded that I personally underrated the player by a lot in the past.
I'm not someone who talked like this about Ginobili when I actually watched him play in his prime - though I always enjoyed him, and thought he deserved his all-star status. I will say that I always kinda felt like he maybe *could* have been a truly top tier player if he had his team truly built around him (and he could hold up with the heavy lift), but that's not the same as saying:
I think he actually did have that level of impact, and within the context in which he played as laid out by Pop who had already built everything around Duncan, I'm really not comfortable saying that he had systematically sub-optimal decision making. I, like Pop and everyone else, figured that his chaotic play would cause enough mistakes - on his part, or his teammates - that he'd have been more effective if he toned it down a bit... but that's not what the data ever said.
To be clear, on a granular level a turnover is a turnover right? If you don't make any mistakes you should have zero turnovers, right?
But that doesn't mean the most effective play in any given moment is the thing that minimizes turnover percentage, because if you focus primarily on minimizing turnover percentage, you avoid making plays that if they go wrong, will tend to ding you with a TO, and it just turns out as we've seen lots of data, that the low-TO kings don't necessarily have a greater effect than guys who dominate more in other ways.
Analytically, I guess I'll say traditionally, we talk about Dean Oliver's 4 Factors:
1. Effective Field Goal %
2. TO %
3. Offensive Rebound %
4. Free Throw Rate
Basically, if a player's passing improves his team's other factors enough - with Effective Field Goal % generally being the big thing for playmaker/facilitators - you'll make up for not being quite as effective at preventing team turnovers.
And so basically what I'd say to expect in terms of what Ginobili was actually doing out there, and it's maybe just a question - per this nice conversation I'm crashing, thanks guys! - of what all of that should be included when we ask what counts when we talk about how good of a passer a dude is.
But let me end with this. We now have access to a few great sites for historical RAPM analysis - literally just came about in the last season or two as far as knew - and so the site nbarapm.com has they call 6Factor RAPM, where he's taken Oliver's 4 Factors (which become 8 when you consider defense), but then using True Shooting % instead of separating between Effective FG% and FT rate, which is just a great move, and for our purposes it I think helps clarify things further, because FT rate is the other area where more aggressive passing can pay off.
Without further ado, and without having actually taken the time to look at nbarapm.com for these factors - it's on my list of things to explore, but hadn't risen to salience until just now - my guess is that Ginobili's offensive impact is dominated by the True Shooting factor much more than TO% or Offensive Rebounding.
Note that there are so many choices of what to look at that it's kind of overwhelming, but let me state a specific simple query:
Using a 4-year RAPM which is their default (but they have 2-year all the way up to 6-year!), and just asking, what was Ginobili's peak in each of the 3 offensive factors in a span where he played all 4 years (to exclude small sample size possibilities at the fringes of his career)?
Off TS Val : 5.1
Off TOV Val: 0.5
Off Reb Val: 0.5
(To be clear, this isn't a change to the raw stat, it's - somehow, I don't know the specifics - normalized to roughly let the sum of the 3 factors match up with the overall offensive RAPM.. It's not a process where I'd expect zero-noise, but so long as we see really big differences, I think we can come to fairly confident conclusions.)
And yeah, seems pretty clear where his impact is coming from between those silos.
I now want to do a whole study of this, but I'll leave you with just one more, and that would be the king of TO minimalization, Chris Paul.
Not having seen the data before, I'm sure Paul will be high in Off TS Val, but I'd also expect him to be high in Off TOV Val. Let's see:
Off TS Val : 4.2
Off TOV Val: 2.8
Off Reb Val: 0.3
So yeah, it's not that Ginobili looks better than Paul by this data to be clear, but we can see how are expectations based on how we know players played match with this view on siloed impact. Pretty cool!
EDIT: This is a Manu vs Parker thread, so it makes sense to do this stat for Parker too:
Off TS Val : 2.4
Off TOV Val: 1.3
Off Reb Val: -0.3
