2014 NBA Off-Season; Paul George suffers a double-compund-fracture, likely out for season. Speedy re

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So.... So far this free agency... Frye, parsons, Hayward, Vazquez have all been overpaid. If bosh signs with Houston he'll be overpaid. If melo signs with the Knicks, he'll be overpaid.
 
Re: Hayward/Parsons comparisons (and Leonard and Thompson)...


Before you jump off the Gordon Hayward bandwagon, there are some things you should know.

Particularly if your discomfort at the idea of matching a max or near-max offer sheet1 for the versatile wing has to do with the-devil-you-don’t-know type logic, pull up a chair. I’ve got numbers.

Don’t get me wrong, $60+ million is a lot of money, and if that’s really what Hayward’s offer sheet comes to, the Jazz will wince for about a half a second right before they sign the damn thing and go out for an ice cream cone to celebrate. Why? Because none of the players you think compare to Hayward actually do what he does.

Grass often seems greener elsewhere, the saying goes, so it’s getting more common to hear a response like, “Just let him walk and go get So-and-so instead.” The problem is, in just about every case I’ve heard so far, So-and-so isn’t as complete a player as the Butler product.

For example, Chandler Parsons’ name comes up a lot as a guy who is roughly equivalent to Hayward. It’s easy to see why. The two check all the boxes for the lazy man’s comp: same size, body type, position and complexion. But they also have pretty similar raw numbers. Per 36 minutes, they both averaged almost exactly 16 points on roughly 13 shots. But does that mean their games are comparable?

“Parsons plays in an optimal spread floor system. His stats might be a bit juiced,” ESPN’s Ethan Strauss tweeted while defending a comment that Hayward is better than Parsons. In other words, he’s saying that Parsons raw numbers, while comparable to Hayward’s, have a lot to do with how he’s used and that he plays next to two All-NBA players.

Hayward also gets lumped in statistically and stylistically with players like Warriors guard Klay Thompson, Finals MVP Kawhi Leonard and even teammate Alec Burks, who seems to have surpassed Hayward on some fans’ boards as favorite Jazz wing.

The problem with all these comps: they don’t work. None of those guys do everything that Hayward does. To underscore this point, let’s look at each player’s possession identity to understand their profiles.

Possession usage

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Per Synergy, Hayward had 1406 possessions that he “used” for an attempt, a drawn foul or a turnover, not counting the times when he used a particular play type to generate offense for someone else (more on that in a minute). For starters, the only player in this group who had more possessions allocated to them was Thompson, and that’s largely because he just never surrenders the ball. So already we can see that Hayward more central to what his team is doing than the others.

Hayward used 492 of those possessions as the P&R handler or in isolation, meaning plays where he’s responsible for creating. The only guy who came close to that number was Burks (17 fewer) and the other three were somewhere in the 200-300 range. They’re just not expected to create their own shot in the half court.

Where Leonard, Parsons and Thompson are getting the lion’s share of their offense is on play types where other people are creating for them. For each of those guys, 300-400 of their possessions were spot-ups, meaning go stand on the wing while Tony Parker, James Harden or Steph Curry forces defenses to collapse. Hayward was second-to-last among the group in spot shooting possessions, so he didn’t have the luxury of playing off of other guys. He was also dead-last in possessions used off the cut.

The transition column is interesting, too, specifically as it relates to the validity of the Parsons comp. Playing for the pedal-to-the-medal Rockets, Parsons got about 25% more transition possessions than Hayward. I was surprised to see Burks’ transition number so low relative to this crowd, especially since fan perception is that he’s an athletic, dangerous finisher in open court.

Leonard and Thompson are the only ones on this group that use a significant amount of possessions. This is probably because they’re punishing teams that try to cross-match those guys’ elite offensive teammates or aggressively switch on screens, another tactical advantage Hayward doesn’t benefit from.

Finally, Parsons and Leonard also get a lot of high-efficiency second looks, probably because they’re full-time threes, while the others in this group play interchangeably at the wing positions.

So far we’re painting the picture that the other guys on this list are largely system players who have elite teammates creating many of their opportunities. But this is just on possessions “used”; what about the possessions where they pass the ball?

Facilitation

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Hayward has the ball in his hands a lot more than his peers in this group, and this is reflected on this pair of graphs. He’s touching the ball a great deal more than the others – close to 70 times per game.

Again, Thompson is a funny outlier here. Where the other guys all pass the ball on 80-90% of their touches, 42% of the time Klay touches, he keeps it, per NBA.com’s player tracking data. And he’s not keeping it to hold it, because his time of possession is also the lowest of all these guys despite having the highest usage. Basically, he catches and then quickly “uses” — takes a shot, draws a foul, or loses the ball — the play.

That’s very different from Hayward, who creates 25% more teammate points per game than the next guy in this group, and 2-3 times as much as the others. The 50 passes per game means that not only is he creating more of his own offense than these other supposed comps, but he’s doing far more facilitation for everybody else, too. Keep that in mind before making a casual comp to someone who reminds you of Hayward.
Click to expand...
 
Zach Lowe @ZachLowe_NBA · 37
Actual news: Nets have informed their mascot he will not return next season, may place Brooklyn Knight character on hiatus...or worse

Zach Lowe @ZachLowe_NBA · 36m
To be clear: this is not about the person who plays the mascot. Hearing this is about dissatisfaction with the Knight character.

:smh: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:
 
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Hope the dinner went like this between Bron and Wade.



Bron: "Everybody wants to go back to Cleveland. Thank you for this."

Wade: *sigh* N_a you owe me $40 Million dollars.
 
I swear they should make a parody movie like the Scary Movie series and call it Sports Movie and parody everything that's hilarious about the NBA and everything NT makes fun of.
 
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