When I was complaining about the sweetheart deal that Kevin McHale gave to the Celtics, some people were defending it in comments. At the center of any such defense is, necessarily, an overrating of Al Jefferson. Make no mistake, he's a pretty nice player. In particular, he's a very good rebounder. Even here, though, a simple look at 12.1 boards per game -- good for fourth in the league -- is a bit misleading. Look at him in terms of rebounds per 48 minutes or rebound rate and he drops down a bit.
But it's on the scoring front where Jefferson's status as a solid 20-10 guy looks most suspect. His usage rate is sky-high and he plays a lot of minutes per game. That bumps up his points per game despite the fact that, as you can see above, his shooting efficiency is kind of unimpressive for a center. One doesn't want to overstate the case here, he's obviously a nice prospect. But there's reason to think he's not really as nice as he seems -- surrounded by terrible players in Minnesota they're giving him tons of shots and he's scoring some, but other prospects on this list (Biedrens and Bynum come to mind especially) might well be putting up better numbers in Jefferson's situation.
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Heads in the Sand
Matt,
I say this with all due affection: it would go a long way to acknowledge greater understanding of the players involved, and the way half-court basketball is played, when you start throwing around stats like this.
Case in point: players like (for example) Perkins, Haywood and Chandler have a fraction of Jefferson's offensive skill and nothing close to his soft shooting touch. Perkins and Jefferson spent the last three years together in Boston and close to all of New England would have gladly had Perkins taken out and shot if he started taking shots away from Jefferson.
One big difference behind the spread in TS% that you show here is the very different degrees of defensive attention these players have been getting. A much larger percentage of Perkin's, Haywood's and Chandler's FGA have been on uncontested shots off a ball movement after the defense double- or triple-teamed people like Kevin Garnett, Antawn Jamison or Chris Paul.
You're right to point out that Jefferson is surrounded by drek. Which means he has really good NBA defenders going into every game focused on slowing him down as much as possible. Look at the distribution of FGA on the TWolves. The other team starts every possession looking to shut down Jefferson and there's nobody on the court to make them pay for all that attention. It's not strange to see the focal point of a team's half-court offense (like Jefferson) shoot for a less efficient percentage. Put Haywood or Perkins in his place and they'd do well to shoot for half of Jefferson TS%.
Here's a suggestion for further analysis: what is Al Jefferson's TS% compared to talented young big men playing on crappy teams who also led their team in FGA by a large margin? How does Jefferson compare to the likes of (for example) a young Emeka Okafor on those expansion Charlotte teams?
Initial hypothesis: 1) there aren't many big men who have been in Jefferson's position. (e.g. Bosh was third in FGA on those early Vince Carter Raptors teams, players like Barkley and Moses stepped into strong teams as rookies, etc). 2) What Jefferson is doing this season will end up looking good in comparison to the peer group.
Posted by Ben | January 1, 2008 8:59 PM