Ice Man wrote:FrodoBaggins wrote:For all the "he's not a point guard talk," he's actually doing really well as the PnR Ball Handler.
Side note, but I haven't seen that P&R ppp statistic before and it puzzles me. It seems that the league average for P&R ppp is about 0.9, yet the league average overall in points per possession is about 1.15. How does that work? I mean, I have not before heard the P&R described as a low-efficiency play.
That number includes all points scored in a game, irrelevant of context. So it includes transition plays, second-chance points from offensive rebounds, and, of course, half-court plays. According to Cleaning the Glass (CTG), the league average is 116.0 ORtg (per 100 possessions). Basketball Reference has it at 115.9 currently.
CTG excludes garbage time, so that's why their number is slightly different, I think.
CTG has the play context league averages as follows:
Transition: 126.6 points/100 plays (15.8% frequency)
Half-court: 97.8 points/100 plays (78.4% frequency)
Putbacks: 112.6 points/100 plays (5.8% frequency? It's not stated, but I assume it's the unaccounted-for percentage. Can occur following both transition and half-court plays)
So, the distinction between
play and
possession is important:
CTG distinguishes between possessions and plays, and this distinction is important when diving into context information. A possession starts when a team gets the ball and ends when they lose it. A play ends when the team attempts a shot, goes to the foul line, or turns the ball over. If a team gets an offensive rebound, that results in a continuation of a possession but a new play. So a possession can have multiple plays.
Play contexts are per-play, not per-possession. For example, a team might come down in transition and miss a shot, get the offensive rebound, kick it out, and run a halfcourt set. Then might miss that shot but get a tip in to score and end the possession. That was all one possession, but three different plays and three different contexts: the first shot was in transition, the second in the halfcourt, and the third was a putback. So the context stats shown in this table are per play.
Synergy play type stats are best compared to CTG per-play stats. Where it gets confusing is that Synergy uses
points per possession, and they define a possession occurring if it ends with either a shot attempt (FGA), turnover (TO), or shooting foul (FTs). At least, that's how it's defined in the publically available NBA.com stats. But the salient point being, CTG calls it a play, whereas Synergy calls it a possession.
Also, the publicly available Synergy play type stats from NBA.com don't include the points generated from passes, but
do count bad pass turnovers. So, they're inherently flawed because they're supposed to measure only scoring, but include TOs from passing.
The Synergy pick-and-roll ball-handler turnover data can be misleading, as we saw with Lonzo Ball. The turnovers from trying to score and trying to pass will count against their pick-and-roll scoring data and not account for their passing possessions. To get a true turnover percentage for pick-and-roll players, you’ll need to take: PnR BH TOs / (PnR BH Possessions + PnR BH Passing Possessions). Those passing possessions are listed on Synergy, but not in the public data on NBA.com.
And they don't tell you the offensive rebounding rate of missed shots, which is more latent offensive value missed in the public stats. But the private stats with passing are more apt at reflecting the offensive value derived. For example, with passes added, 2021-22 Chris Paul went from
0.99 ppp as a PnR Ball Handler to 1.108 ppp.
Suddenly, 1.108 ppp looks pretty damn good compared to the average half-court points per play, which was 0.956 that season (2021-22). Top-ranked Atlanta was 1.011 points per play. The true value of PnR Ball Handler plays is the passing because PnR Roll Man, Cuts, and Spot-up plays that come as a result of it are more efficient. But you obviously need to be a great enough scoring threat to get the defense to break.
When it comes to the flawed public Synergy stats, I just try to compare players, league averages, and ppp & volume percentiles.
