Smiles and Cries

Two years ago, during the lockout, I wrote a piece entitled "The Importance of Andre Drummond and Anthony Davis" for a now-defunct NBA website. The first paragraph concluded with "...together they could be saviors of the low post for both the college and pro game."

I say this not to toot my own horn, but because, on a day when Drummond recorded his best game as a pro to date and tragedy struck Davis in the form of a broken hand, it seems relevant.

To be perfectly honest, when I wrote it I'm not sure I truly believed it, but it seemed like a reasonable narrative. I went on to remark on the overwhelming percentage of highly drafted big men to flame out of the league in the past decade and a half and presented my reasons these two would be exceptions to that trend, namely unreal size and athleticism.

Neither has done much to prove me wrong. Good news first.

Sunday, Drummond recorded a stat line not seen since Hakeem Olajuwon in 1990, 31 points, 19 rebounds and six steals. Throw in a couple blocks for good measure, and some casual Sportscenter watchers will be taking notice of the Pistons big man tomorrow morning for more than his typical thunderous alley oops. Although, the performance wasn't lacking in those either.

Surely, First Take or some other joke of a sports media outlet will dwell on the facts that Drummond made just seven of 18 free-throw attempts and that those numbers actually bolstered the season percentage of one of the worst foul shooters in league history. He now sits at 32.1 percent.

As long as his woes from the charity stripe continue, he will be a late-game casualty and one of the more prominent members of the Dwight Howard Players Who Force an Opposing Coach to Make the Game Unwatchable by Repeatedly Fouling Because Even Though Everyone Hates It the Numbers are Undeniable club. I will not point out that he is on pace to join a very exclusive club of players who have attempted 50 or more free throws in a season and shot twice as high from the field than from the line. Instead, to counter those who will focus on the negative numbers, I must present the positive.

Through 17 games, Drummond is averaging 12 points and 11.8 rebounds, as well as 3.2 stocks (a Bill Simmons-coined combination of steals and blocks) per game on 65 percent from the field, tops in the league among qualifying players by a significant margin (LeBron is second. How insane is that?). At the moment, he's the perfect catcher of Brandon Jennings' lobs, but it's impossible not to see that with a little hard work on his most glaring weakness and some minor defensive tutelage, the guy will be posting even gaudier stat lines in the near future.

If Drummond could hit a couple more throws a game he would suddenly be approaching the numbers of the man the NBA world shed a tear for last night. Anthony Davis was one of the most pleasant surprises of this young season. After a very raw offensive and very overeager defensive rookie campaign, the 2012 No. 1 pick was on pace to be the first player since Shaq in 1999-2000 to average 19 points, nine boards and three blocks per.

Last week, a friend and fellow NBA nut posed the question "Is Davis the best big man in the league right now?" After a dismissive chuckle, the thought permeated my brain, and I found myself half-heartedly responding "Kevin Love...."

After a number of days to think on it, I will still contend that Love is a slightly better player (honorable mention: Boogie, I see you), but it is much easier to see Davis as the second-best player on a championship team sooner than Love or any other post player in the league, sans Roy Hibbert and Dwight Howard's narrow chances in their respective situations. Which made it all the more disheartening to hear of the fractured hand that will sideline The Brow indefinitely.

Davis and his incredible 28.4 PER were almost little secrets that us in the NBA Twitterverse and blogosphere (Twitogospherse?) were hiding down in Pierre's cage. Everyone knows the lanky arm of the law, but I bet even many of you reading this were unaware of just how impressive the numbers were that he was posting.

All things considered, the news is as encouraging as it could be. It's his non-shooting hand. It's a non-displaced fracture (meaning the bone didn't break all the way through). It's, obviously, completely unrelated to the MCL sprain that cost him 18 games last season. But we're a selfish bunch. We don't like losing one of our crown jewels for a day, a week or a month. And we really don't like seeing a potential Hall of Fame talent showing any signs of being injury prone at such an early stage of his career.

Two years ago, I took a wild guess that Andre Drummond and Anthony Davis would be the future of the NBA low-post game. I can't call that prediction safe yet, as both face very different forms of adversity, but the stats and, more importantly, the eyes of any League Pass subscriber can attest that they're on the right path.

SportVU is Here to Stay

There’s a stat for everything.

Want to know LeBron’s record on Tuesday nights at home in the second game of a doubleheader when he’s wearing black socks? You can probably find it. It’s probably very good. And it’s definitely meaningless. Maybe the last thing we need is more statistics for ESPN to throw at us on Numbers Never* Lie!

Well, here are the SportVU cameras, providing readily available quantitative analysis that you didn’t even know existed. Except, instead of being meaningless, these stats are amazing.

SportVU is a system of six cameras located in the catwalks of every NBA arena that track the motions of every player on the court at every second of every game. Before this season, only about half of the teams had them installed and the numbers weren’t ripe for the taking like they are now.

I’m sure I will be revisiting these statistics intermittently throughout the year (most likely every day), but here are a few interesting takeaways from the young season, because small sample sizes are the best.

• -          Goran Dragic is currently first in distance traveled per game (3.1 miles). Fast point guard, playing a lot of minutes, makes sense. But first place in distance traveled per 48 minutes is Gigi Datome, naturally. The Pistons forward only played about 20 seconds in the opening game but tallied an average speed of 5.7 miles per hour (also first) for a whopping 4.5 miles per 48. The curious thing is wondering exactly how that happened. Did they make a line change mid-fast break? Did he check in and begin sprinting around aimlessly in an effort to impress coaches? Was he simply making sure he high fived EVERYONE while the clock ticked out at the end of the game? I am not going to investigate the answer because it is undoubtedly better in my imagination.

• -          As you’d expect, individual time of possession is dominated by various point guards, but the highest non-point guard on the list? Well, LeBron obviously. But second highest? Oh…James Harden. This is boring. Let’s move on. WAIT!! Hawks rookie Dennis Schroder ranks 34^th on the list with 4.3 minutes of possession. Pretty mundane until you notice that he only played 18.6 minutes in his debut. Double his playing time to around starters’ minutes and he’d be at 8.6, 0.6 more than leader Damian Lillard.

• -          Dwight Howard had a HUGE first game as a Rocket right? He tallied 26 rebounds Wednesday night, but let’s take note that 21 of those boards were uncontested, leaving his contested rebound percentage at just 19.2 percent. Comparatively, Kevin Love wrangled in “just” 17 rebounds, but 47.1 percent were contested. Again, one game each, but this is one I feel could emerge into a long-term trend.

• -          Roy Hibbert has 12 blocks in his first two contests. No doubt, impressive, but more surprisingly impressive, Brook Lopez allowed the Cavs to convert just one of 11 shots that he contested at the rim. In contrast, Marcin Gortat was abused by the Pistons, as they finished every single attempt (eight) against him at the hoop.

• -         John Wall tallied four secondary assists (passes that led to an assist) in the Wizards opener. Among the players who had three such passes in their only game are Will Bynum, John Lucas III and Jon Leuer. So that’s weird. Those numbers may not seem all that high, but keep in mind that in 2010-11, Rajon Rondo averaged just 1.3 secondary assists in 32 SportVU-tracked games. He led the league with more than 12 assists per game that season.

I’ll stop here before I find myself all the way down the rabbit hole, but I’ll definitely be analyzing these things way more than I should for the next 81 games or so. So will Daryl Morey.

Prince George

It might be bad karma to kick the season off with a negative post, but with LeBron and the Heat coming off of two consecutive Finals victories and a nearly guaranteed third (and fourth, and fifth, and sixth) on the way, there’s just too much positivity going on in my basketball life. I need to get back to an even keel. The Extra Pass is back. And Paul George is overrated.

It’s a notion I find myself coming back to time and time again. Yes, Paul George performed admirably in the playoffs, holding his own in head-to-head matchups with the league’s leading scorer and the greatest player in the world in consecutive series. Yes, he is one of the more promising two-way wings the league has to offer. In fact, each time I watch him play I find myself enjoying his game more and more; a smooth, artistic freelancer on an otherwise offensively inelegant squad. But there is no legitimate rhyme or reason for the unabashed superstar status he has been so prematurely anointed with.

ESPN’s #NBArank, which is devised from an expert panel’s predictions for the upcoming season’s performance, recently placed George as the 13^th best player in the league, just ahead of Blake Griffin (14^th) and Carmelo Anthony (15^th) and 18 spots higher than Andre Iguodala, a player whose relevance to this debate will become evident shortly. This after a season in which the Pacers guard averaged 17.4 points, 7.6 rebounds and 4.1 assists on a shade below 42 percent shooting, for a PER of 16.84.

Let’s focus on the comparison with Anthony first, a player still very much in his prime, who averaged 28.7, 6.9 and 2.6 on nearly 45 percent shooting, with a 24.83 PER last season. The natural line of argument here is that while Anthony is by all accounts a minus defender, George is universally recognized as one of the top five defensive wings in the league, a distinction largely based on the eye test and dozens of advanced analytical measures that I could rattle off, but none of us would fully comprehend.

I will not refute George’s defensive prowess by any means. His combination of length, speed and athleticism make him the rarest breed, capable of at least slowing down the Melos, LeBrons and Durants of the world. I will point out that he has the luxury of operating in an Indiana system where he is given the confidence and free reign to provide unwavering ball pressure, knowing that funneling his counterpart toward the rim and a roaming Roy Hibbert is by no means a bad option. But yes, he is one of the handful of best perimeter defenders around, and in a league where offense continues to be weighted disproportionately over defense, it’s refreshing to see a player get so much love for his work on the dirty end.

The question becomes, is that elite defense worth more than the 11 points and gaps in efficiency he gives up to Anthony on the offensive end? The answer is a pretty clear no.

In their six-game conference semifinals matchup last season, Melo scored more than 28 points per game on 43 percent shooting while being defended primarily by George, numbers nearly identical to his season averages, despite also facing that suffocating, pack-the-paint help provided by the rest of the Pacers. Small sample size notwithstanding, if George had held Anthony to 20 per on below 40 percent then this would be an argument.

As stated earlier, #NBArank is a predictive list, so the next rational argument would be that George is expected to make an offensive leap this season, narrowing the void between him and a player like Anthony. This argument would logically be based on the offensive “coming out party” we saw from George in last year’s playoffs, showing glimpses of a more refined scorer who shined in the biggest moments. Are we sure that happened?

George’s scoring average increased less than two points in the playoffs, to go along with a one assist per game jump and an identical effective field goal percentage. His PER actually dropped by two tenths due to a nearly four-minute increase in minutes per game. I won’t continue to rattle off numbers, but rest assured that if you compare his regular season and playoff statistics per 36 minutes there are no substantial differences.

But he’s a big-time player! He matched LeBron shot for shot, play for play! He played best when the lights were brightest! Did he?

He canned a ridiculous three to send Game 1 into overtime and followed it up with three cold-blooded free throws to take a one-point lead with two seconds left in the extra period. Of course, we all know what happened in those two seconds, but have we given George enough blame for that final defensive breakdown? He was attempting to stop the most unstoppable force in the league without his 7-foot rim protector in the game, but to concede an uncontested layup in that situation is inexcusable. George knew just as well as anyone that Frank Vogel had decided to leave Hibbert on the bench, likely because he didn’t expect any of his guards to get absolutely torched to the rim with just two seconds on the clock. Someone didn’t hold up his end of that bargain.

Even if we heap on the credit to George for keeping the Pacers in that contest, to claim that he stepped up to the moment throughout that series is to ignore the 3-10, 13 points, two rebounds and five turnovers he put up in a blowout loss in Game 3 (one of five games in that series in which he had five or more TOs), as well as a 2-9, seven-point performance he dropped while fouling out of Game 7.

One of my criteria for superstar status is scoring more than seven points when you have a chance to advance to the Finals. Call me old fashioned.

The issue at hand is that many see George as a unique entity. The league’s traditional defensive stoppers are guys like Tony Allen and Avery Bradley, hard-working but somewhat unassuming players who often struggle on the offensive end. In George we see elite athleticism, and there are times when he makes scoring look simple. Just not often enough.

The truth is that George isn’t unique. Unbelievably athletic wing stopper who’s something of a Swiss army knife on offense? Andre Iguodala would like to speak with you.

I’m not totally insane. I do not think that Iguodala will have a better season than George, but the distance between them is not that great, surely not the distance between the 13^th and 31^st best players in the league.

George’s raw offensive numbers were distinctly better than Iggy’s last season, but it should be noted that his PER was just a point higher despite a significantly higher usage rate (23.5 to 18.8), which will surely decrease with the return of Danny Granger to the Indy lineup. Additionally, you simply are not going to convince me that George is a better wing defender than the subject of this CBS article.

Iguodala will turn 30 in January. He is likely hitting the downslope of his career. But no one was clamoring to call him the next big thing six years ago when he was posting seasons inarguably better than George at just a year older than the Pacers guard is now. The guy didn’t even make an All-Star team until 2012.

George may very well end up having a better career than Iguodala. In fact, I hope he does. But the likelihood that he’ll be top five in 2016 doesn’t make him top 15 right now. The only thing such lofty expectations can lead to is disappointment. Hows about we let things play out a little.

We all see the potential. You’d have to be blind not to. But Paul George is not the 13^th-best player in the league. He is not better than Carmelo Anthony. He is not a superstar. Not yet.