lilfishi22 wrote:I like Conley as a player. I like how he runs the team and does all the other things that doesn't show up on the stat sheet and I do think if he played in a faster offense, he'd adjust very well. That said, it's hard to justify his deal. You'd absolutely have to be at least #1 or #2 in your position to be worth that much.
I like how he plays too and I'm not saying that he falls off a cliff on a faster offense, but the Grizzlies offense is great for him to get easy assists and keep the turnover count low given how post-oriented it is. It's not hard to look at his per 100 poss. numbers and think, wow if you put him on an offense that gets 100 possessions a game he'll be a guy that gets 25/10 without turning the ball over much. The reality is that their offense is so slow paced and so much of dumping it into Gasol and ZBo in the post and letting them do their thing that you can't get anywhere near that many possessions for him in that style of play. Of course his ORTG and OBPM are going to be really high when his job is to make simple passes into the post and rack up assists while avoiding turnovers because he's making slow, methodical plays instead of attacking and making quick decisions while reacting to the defense. It's not like he scores at amazingly efficient rates, even Bledsoe has better TS% and eFG% than him, he just plays in an offense where they don't ask him to do much with the ball (career USG% of 20% compared to Knight and Bledsoe each at 26/25% in PHX) so he doesn't even have the opportunity to turn the ball over as much. His game perfectly fits in an offense like Memphis or San Antonio because they won't be asking him to be doing any creating on offense, his job is to take care of the ball and get the ball to the people who can score down low or create for themselves.
I just don't think that he has the skill set to be a guy that's taking guys off the dribble or creating his own shot all the time like guards in fast paced offenses have to. Just look at his %FG assisted stats, he get 82% of his 3 point shots assisted compared to a PG like Bledsoe who's in an fast paced attacking offense that's never had a season as a starter over 60%. If you look at Conley's past 4 years in Memphis, he gets about 27% of his 2pt FGs assisted, compared to Bledsoe getting approximately 17% assisted since he's been in Phoenix. Conley's not super quick or athletic, he's not taking guys off the dribble and getting to the hole as often and benefits a lot from being in an offense where he plays it safe and gets to make simple, smart plays instead of having to read and react to the defense at a much faster pace. There's nothing wrong with that, but it helps his advanced statistics a lot when they play so few possessions per game and he can get an assist in the NBA from dumping the ball to ZBo in the post and letting him take a few seconds to feel out the defense and make his move to score. That's not to take anything away from him, because I'm not sure if someone like Knight would be able to succeed in that role, but you need to look at context when you start spouting out advanced stats like guys like Saint do.
tl;dr: I'm sure he'd do fine, but to assume his production increases linearly in an faster offense doesn't make sense when you look at how he gets it done and how you can't really play that style of basketball at a fast pace.
