ShotCreator wrote:And Chris Paul is flat out not as skilled as Nash or Magic which is why none of my posts involve that line of thinking he’s on that level but certain stuff about conservative play, and pace, and ball pounding just don’t mesh with reality and it really feeds into other narratives trying to explain away why he could beat multiple 8+ SRS teams in a row just to reach the conference finals in his career.
Jokic and the Nuggets have been at a snails pace the past two years and there’s nothing conservative about his style of play at all.
Valid points to address.
Pace gets used as short hand for aggressive vs conservative because higher pace tends to mean more aggressive transition play. Of course, that's not the only type of aggressive play. I would argue that Jokic, Nash & Magic are all more known for aggressive half-court play than Paul, but I don't know how meaningful the correlation would be between half court pace and aggressiveness given that when I think of Jokic's half court aggression, I actually think of it happening after a possession has stagnated.
In terms of transition, I thought I'd look up some numbers from the NBA this year.
Current leaderboard of players with the most transition possessions per game:
1. Giannis A. 6.9
2. Jaylen Brown 5.9
3. Ja Morant 5.1
4. Russell Westbrook 4.9
(tie) Steph Curry 4.9 - higher PPP than those above him
6. LeBron James 4.8 - even higher PPG than Curry
(tie) Anthony Edwards 4.8 - even higher PPG than LeBron.
And other players relevant to what we're discussing:
Devin Booker 4.2
Will Barton 3.9
Nikola Jokic 2.1
Chris Paul 1.8
Now, I don't want to claim I know exactly what their criteria is here - it's entirely possible that outlet passers don't get credited appropriately for the transition play that follows - but what I think is crystal clear about this at the very least is that both Paul & Jokic have teammates who are the ones looking to do more transition running than they are.
It's possible that a more thorough search back into time will show data that points in some other direction of course. Paul is older now, so it would even make sense for him to have been more of a runner in the old days, but my impression from your post was that you were thinking of the current Phoenix Suns as a fast team and therefore saying Paul seemed to be doing just find on a fast team.
But if the question is whether Paul is driving that pace or whether he's the one having his Pace stats driven up by his teammates, I'd suggest the data points to them driving his Pace up. The big transition scorer isn't him and doesn't need him to score in transition, and the team plays faster when Paul is on the bench.
I think this also makes me pose the following question:
Were we ever actually suggesting Paul couldn't play faster? We might have been implying that he couldn't do it as well as other players, but what we were really saying is that Paul, when left to his own devices, generally looks to slow things down, and that can probably be characterized as settling the team down to avoid blown possessions.
By contrast, when we talk about aggressive guys, particularly in transition, we're talking about guys who are specifically looking to attack before the defense can get ready. A strategy, in other words.
What I see when I look at comparisons like this are differences in strategy, and every guy does their thing a little differently. Nash doesn't play that much like Magic, for example, despite the fact that their transition aggressiveness is similar. Paul has things in common with both, but when we focus on the differences, we see some contrast between error-reduction and opportunity-exploitation mindsets.
