Top Scorers of 2025

[tsherkin]

I tried this in the GB, but no one bit on it.

There were 61 players who scored 19+ ppg, 35 who scored 22+ and 13 who scored 25+. I'll mostly be focusing on the 25+ crowd, with a couple of happy and sad shout-outs for outliers in the lower-scoring group.

So, for the top 13 (not worrying about qualifying GP). We're talking about:

Name, PPG, TS%, rTS, Team Offensive Rank, GP, O-EPM, TSAdd

Shai, 32.7, 63.7, +6.1, 3rd, 76, +6.6, 236.4
Giannis, 30.4, 62.5, +4.9, 11th, 67, +5.8, 157.5
Jokic, 29.6, 66.3, +8.7, 4th, 70, +7.4, 270.5
Doncic, 28.2, 58.7, +1.1, 17th w DAL, 12th w LAL (both skewed by GP), 50, +4.9, 26.6
Ant, 27.6, 59.5, +1.9, 8th, 79, +3.6, 67.9
Tatum, 26.8, 58.2, +0.6, 2nd, 72, +3.9, 20.7
KD, 26.6, 64.2, +6.6, 10th, 62, +2.7, 168.7
Maxey, 26.3, 56.2, -1.4, 22nd, 52, +3.6, -34.8
Cade, 26.1, 56.5, -1.1, 16th, 70, +1.7, -36.6
Brunson, 26.0, 60.5, +2.9, 5th, 65, +4.6, 80.0
Banchero, 25.9, 55.1, -2.5, 27th, 46, +1.0, -54.0
Booker, 25.6, 58.9, +1.3, 10th, 75, +4.1, 41.7
LaMelo Ball, 25.2, 53.6, -4.0, 29th, 47, +4.2, -87.9

Honorable mention to Dame at 24.9, 62.1, +4.5, 11th, 58

So, most of these guys did really well. Almost all of them were fairly efficient. The borderline guys were Doncic, Tatum, Booker, as they were all somewhere between +0.5 and +1.3, which is above league-average but not stunning. Tatum least of them all, though if you've been watching the first round, he's making up for lost time, having put 31.3 ppg on 60.7% on the Magic, which is +4.5% rTS over playoff league average. Ant and Brunson were in the middle between the "decent" and the "hyper efficient" crowds.

Maxey, Cade, Banchero and Ball were bad, notably below league average efficiency. Now, three of those guys were injured, and it's worth noting that outside of Cade, they were all laboring in pretty rough offensive environments.

Banchero has been discussed quite extensively in the Orlando post-mortem thread, so I won't belabor that much here. He has a lot of work to put in at learning how to make shots, but he's also in a brutally-spaced environment without a lot of help. Even his running mate Wagner is pretty inefficient, and they don't play a hugely synergistic style of basketball with one another, either.

Cade has a reasonable offensive environment, primarily because he's a good playmaker who has some shooting around him this year. He's been discussed a lot in the Cade is Him thread and all that. The TL;DR is that he finishes poorly inside, isn't an elite 3pt shooter and isn't elite at drawing fouls (although this was his first season with an above-average FTr+, which was nice to see). He is quite a good mid-range shooter, but he's kind of like a cruddier version of Brandon Ingram right now (strictly as a scorer).

Maxey's an interesting one. Injuries are obviously a thing for him. Embiid playing less than 20 games, likewise. He was MIP and an All-Star last year and had been a 21.7 ppg scorer the year prior. Back in 2022, when he was scoring 17.5, he was a 59.4% TS player. In 2023, 60.5%. In 2024, though, as he stepped up his volume, he dropped below league average, down to 57.3% and -0.7% rTS even as he set his career-high in FTr. 2023 forward, he's been bombing 3s on over 40% of his shots. He shot 42.7% in 2022, then 43.4%, then 37.3% in 2024 and 33.7% this year. This year, he's at 56.2% (and there's that -1.4% rTS).

So you can pretty clearly see what's going on. More threes, worse percentage, lower overall efficiency. He's actually been pretty steadily around 22% of his total FGAs inside the RA these past 3 seasons, so that surprisingly didn't change much as he elevated his volume, which is usually what happens. He had another strong year with his elbow/nail shooting, though he didn't use that much. He's been disappointing on his short game the past two seasons as his volume has gone up, and that's 22, 23% of his total volume at under 41% FG (so that's more than 5% worse than league average). He kills it on long twos when he takes them.

But ultimately, we're talking about a guy who isn't elite at getting to the rim, isn't elite at drawing fouls, shoots too many 3s and of course isn't making them anymore. He'd have had to shoot 40.8% from 3 in order to reach league-average efficiency with his shot distribution and draw rate, to put some context on that, which would have meant almost 3 dozen more makes from beyond the arc on the season. So that's troubling for Philly, even assuming he can stay healthy going forward. Worth noting, over his first 3 seasons, he averaged about 18% of his 3s from the corners (almost 20% in 2023), and he's been under 8.5% in each of the past two seasons.

In other words, he isn't getting into the corner and he doesn't have a below-arc game which is sufficient to support the kind of volume that he's being asked to manage at this time. We'll see what happens if he can get healthy again, of course. He's going to be 25 next year, but they're asking him to shoulder the offense, and that is not working out super well. You can see this same phenomenon in the drop-off in how many of his baskets are assisted. And that's sort of expected. Small, point-of-attack guards struggle with volume burden, particularly as their 3pt shooting waxes and wanes so violently.

LaMelo Ball. Charlotte sucks and he's never healthy, so that's always going to be raised as an issue for him. They actually haven't been a positive offense since back in 2022 (worth mentioning, Ball's AS season), nor a positive defense since 2017. They have been struggling.

Ball is a volume 3pt shooter, and has often been pretty bad at it. He's had 2 seasons of league average or better shooting from 3, he's had 4 in a row of 7.5+ 3PA/g and he's shot 9.0 or more per game for 3 years running now, double-digits in two of those. He topped out at 11.2 this year, shooting a pretty trash 33.9% (2.1% worse than league average). It isn't hard to see why he's so inefficient a scorer. Even if you consider the environment and his teammates, as well as the 21.3 FGA/g, he's still just... not a good option at this volume. He's an excellent FT shooter. He generally shoots well on saner volumes from downtown. But he's as bad as Cade at finishing at the rim (when he gets there), his short game is below average, his middie is average and his perimeter two has been bad (although on such low volume that commenting on the specific degree to which that is true doesn't make sense).

He's 6'7, skinny but quick, but he isn't really sufficiently elite at anything to be supporting this volume. He's trying to make up for not being able to do anything else by bombing in volume from 3, and it just doesn't work. And Charlotte has asked him to shoot a lot since he hit the league. Well, at least since his second season. He was a brutal -3.3% rTS as a rookie on 13.2 FGA/g, a season in which he started 31 of 51 GP. He was an All-Star in his only healthy season. Then, he was "only" a -1.2% rTS guy on 16.7 FGA/g. That's back when he was still taking a sane number of 3PA/g (only 7.5) and shooting quite well from beyond the arc. Since then, though, he's been taking around 20 FGA/g, has been at -4.0% rTS twice and his best offering was 2024 in 22 games, when he was "only" at -1.9% rTS.

Ball is clearly not the guy to shoulder that sort of offensive burden, that much is pretty clear. He, like Cade, makes up for some of his scoring inefficacy with his playmaking. And there is something to be said for environment exacerbating the issue. This is a case of a guy being deployed in a pretty sub-optimal manner and environment, no doubt. He would be better if he didn't have to shoot so much, that is clear. Just like Cade, only worse because he doesn't have Cade's short game. Or relative health.

[penbeast0]

Looking purely at scoring, I went to TS Add which gives an equal bonus for efficiency and volume rather than just concentrating on the bombers. The 3 top numbers are well above the next level:

1. Jokic 270.5
-----------------
2. SGA 236.4
3. Jarrett Allen 225.0 (hyper efficient at lower volume)
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4. Zach LaVine 170.1 (tends to get overlooked with all the trade drama)
5. Kevin Durant 168.7

[tsherkin]

Looking purely at scoring, I went to TS Add which gives an equal bonus for efficiency and volume rather than just concentrating on the bombers. The 3 top numbers are well above the next level:

1. Jokic 270.5
-----------------
2. SGA 236.4
3. Jarrett Allen 225.0 (hyper efficient at lower volume)
-----------------
4. Zach LaVine 170.1 (tends to get overlooked with all the trade drama)
5. Kevin Durant 168.7

Yes! TSAdd was going to be my next step. I figured I'd generate some interest in discussion before putting TOO much more effort into it, haha. But yes, it's a very useful thing to look at alongside all this other data.

And yeah, that Jarrett Allen mention is quality.

He was, of course, only scoring 13.5 ppg, but he drew at .433 FTr, shot 71.8% at the line, led the league at 71.2% inside the arc (and 70.6% overall FG), and shot 81.3% inside the RA. He was also assisted on 82.5% of his shots. He was smashing it as a roll man, in transition and on cuts. Just absolutely deadly at hustle-type plays.

[falcolombardi]

Looking purely at scoring, I went to TS Add which gives an equal bonus for efficiency and volume rather than just concentrating on the bombers. The 3 top numbers are well above the next level:

1. Jokic 270.5
-----------------
2. SGA 236.4
3. Jarrett Allen 225.0 (hyper efficient at lower volume)
-----------------
4. Zach LaVine 170.1 (tends to get overlooked with all the trade drama)
5. Kevin Durant 168.7

I am gonna prop up shai a bit as he plays 4 minutes less than jokic at only 34

I wouldbt be surprised if he hit 260 or at least 250 ts add with more minutes

[tsherkin]

Added TSAdd to the chart.