Beyond Turnover Percentage

I.

Anthony Davis is very good at basketball [citation needed]. One of the major reasons he’s so good — beyond the fact that he’s clearly a basketball-playing alien from the planet Zorblax rather than a human — is his remarkably low turnover rate. He is averaging a very respectable 1.3 turnovers per 36 minutes this season.

You know who else is averaging 1.3 turnovers per 36? DeAndre Jordan. Jordan’s also averaging more rebounds than the Brow, and nearly as many blocks. He’s got a higher true shooting percentage, too. Is Jordan almost as good as Davis? Is he… better?

Of course, I’m deliberately ignoring the biggest difference between Anthony Davis and DeAndre Jordan — the question of usage. Davis takes 17.3 shots from the field and 6.7 from the line per 36; for Jordan, the analogous numbers are 6.6 and 4.1. DeAndre Jordan is a fine player — I’m working on this post while watching Clippers-Rockets, and he’s had some monster dunks — but his offensive role is necessarily limited.

Let’s say that there’s a player — call him, I don’t know, Pendrick Kerkins — who rarely touches the ball on offense, but almost every time he does, he immediately coughs it up. Let’s also make up a player, a ball-dominant point guard named Lamian Dillard, who occasionally loses his dribble or makes a bad pass. It’s clear that Pendrick’s propensity for turnovers hurts his team in a way that Lamian’s averageness doesn’t. But it may be the case that the two players commit very nearly the same number of turnovers per 36 minutes. We need a better statistic.

The trouble with Trevor

[Ed: I started this post before Ariza shot a very respectable 4-6 from 3 versus the Knicks on Thursday night. All numbers and graphs are current as of Tuesday, 1/6; I’ll be lodging a protest with the NBA because I’m not sure games versus the Knicks should count toward official statistics anyway.]

Trevor Ariza is struggling.

Actually, in many ways, mostly on the defensive end, he’s doing fine. His steal percentage is right at his career average, he’s grabbing 5 defensive boards a game, and he’s been a key part of the league’s number 3 defense. The problems are on the other end; Ariza’s been shooting just 31% from downtown, which has contributed to a career low 35.5% field goal percentage. After two years in Washington during which he shot 39.3% from three-point land, this has got to be disappointing for the Rockets.

Of course, this could just be bad luck. Or perhaps the rain gods just smiled on Ariza in Washington. He’s launched 901 shots from downtown since the beginning of his tenure with the Wizards; even in a sample that size, there’s still almost as much noise as signal. Comparing even smaller subsamples is a good way to risk looking foolish. Even so, let’s see if we can find a plausible reason for Trevor Ariza’s long-distance struggles.

Live by the three

“I don’t want us to be coming down, forcing up a bunch of threes. I really want us to attack the basket.” — Byron Scott, 2014

Odds are good you’ve heard by now about Lakers coach Byron Scott’s philosophy regarding three-pointers. Namely, he doesn’t like them.

Smarter writers than I have already taken Scott to task for the serious factual errors underlying this strategy:

I asked Lakers coach Byron Scott about his philosophy on 3-pointers. "I don't believe it wins championships. (It) gets you to the playoffs."

— Baxter Holmes (@BaxterHolmes) October 17, 2014

Seven of the past eight NBA champions led all playoff teams in 3-point attempts and makes.

— Baxter Holmes (@BaxterHolmes) October 17, 2014

But I don’t want to bash Scott. He knows more about the game than I do, certainly, and probably more than many of the Twitterati mercilessly mocking his coaching decisions. Byron Scott is zagging where the rest of the league is zigging, and I want to know: Is there anything to this? Are teams becoming too reliant on treys?