[82 Games] Jeremy Lin - Statistical Look

As some of you might know, I'm a sucker for advanced statistics and my favorite source of non-traditional statistics is from 82games.com. Instead of approaching statistics from a single number like PER, 82 games look at various situational aspects and present them in a nice form. I meant to do this kind of analysis for Jeremy for a while, especially with the vitriol that Sigmund spits out, but waited until he was officially a Rocket. So here we go.

To start, let me preface everything by saying that this is based on Lin's entire season in 2011-2012. So there will be no glorifying of the "Linsanity" 2 weeks, it will include all of his warts that came later in the season when he calmed down. It's also worth it to note that this is a stats of for all intents and purposes, a first year PG, the most difficult position for rookies to excel in. Also, throughout this article, I'm going to constantly compare him to Lowry and Dragic, which I'm sure who you guys are most interested in him being compared to. Also, I'm not putting a fcking Lin pun in here and will hate everyone who do so in this thread.

Before we get into the 82 games stuff, let's look at everyone's favorite stat - the PER. PER is useful for me, in that it kind of very generically gives you an idea of where the player's place is in the league. It's a very cleverly weighted single stat that summarizes box score elements into one number. But, this can be dangerous in that, at the end of the day PER comes with every shortcoming any box score statistic comes with. Everything should be seen with context. It kind of makes it chuckle when people make it seem like it's some very advanced magical stat, when all it is is just a summary.

Nevertheless, Lin had a 20.0 PER, good for 10th in the league among PG's. Okay? So what? Does this mean he's the 10th best PG in the league? No, not really, but it certainly puts him in the conversation. Hollinger tells us that this is near All-Star level. To me, it's a meaningless exercise to make a sweeping declaration like that. What's more interesting to me is how this number is broken down.

So let's break it down.

Offense:

Shooting/Scoring

Jeremy Lin's foremost strength on offense is simple - the guy can just flat out SCORE. We have, in the history of the league, have never seen such a scoring display in a players first starts, thus sparking "Linsanity". He scores 19.6 points per 36 minutes. So how does he score?

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<table class="tableizer-table">
<tr class="tableizer-firstrow"><th>Shot</th><th>Att.</th><th>eFG%</th><th>Ast'd</th><th>Blk'd</th><th>Pts</th></tr> <tr><td>Jump</td><td>67%</td><td>0.469</td><td>27%</td><td>4%</td><td>6.9</td></tr> <tr><td>Close</td><td>32%</td><td>0.484</td><td>20%</td><td>11%</td><td>3.4</td></tr> <tr><td>Dunk</td><td>1%</td><td>1</td><td>0%</td><td>0%</td><td>0.2</td></tr> <tr><td>Tips</td><td>0%</td><td>0</td><td>0%</td><td>0%</td><td>0</td></tr> <tr><td>Inside</td><td>33%</td><td>0.496</td><td>10%</td><td>10%</td><td>3.5</td></tr></table>

Exactly 2/3rds of his shots are jumpers and he shoots a very respectable .469 eFG%. So much for being a "terrible shooter". Only 27% of his jumpers are assisted, meaning most of his points come from pull-up jumpers. This is a tell-tale sign for a pure scorer - great scoring guards usually have break downs like this for their jumpers. Dragic's break down of jumpers is 67%/35% Att./Ast'd and Lowry's is 72%/43%.

Now the inside shots. I was under the impression that Lin was a better finisher than he was a jump shooter from highlights but this shows that not to be the case. While .496 eFG% inside is not bad for a PG, he's no Lowry or Dragic when it comes to finishing inside - Dragic shot a whopping .658 eFG% while Lowry shot .559 eFG%.

So Lin is a great scorer off of pull-up jumpers, but not quite the finisher his predecessors were. What does this mean for the Rockets? They sure could use a space-clearing big inside to make it easy for Lin to score inside. Who could we possibly have in mind for that role? Hmm...

Foul Drawing

Now the previous analysis was how he does on the field. However, perhaps most valuable skill in scoring is his ability to draw fouls. Lin draws foul at an awesome 15.5% of his possessionsand hits 79.8% of them. That's 5.6 points per 36, just over a quarter of his points come from fouls. The ability to draw fouls and hit them is a major plus in today's NBA because it puts other teams in the penalty early and it is a very high percentage shot (80% FT is the same as shooting 64% from 2). It's no surprise that Morey, who is known to love players who can draw fouls went after Lin. Dragic draws fouls 10.2%, Lowry 12.8%

Passing Breakdown
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<table class="tableizer-table">
<tr class="tableizer-firstrow"><th>3-Pt</th><th>Jump</th><th>Close</th><th>Dunk</th></tr> <tr><td>23.26%</td><td>27.91%</td><td>29.77%</td><td>19.07%</td></tr></table>

Lin is an all-in-all great passer, who is limited by his turnovers. He assists on a whopping 41% of his teammate's field goals for 8.3 assists per 36 and as you can see from the chart above, gets the ball everywhere .

People like to use assists-to-turnover ratio to rate PG's, which makes no sense because assists have nothing to do with turnovers from ballhandling. Luckily, 82 games keeps in track and distinguishes them. Despite his passing prowess, Lin has an average looking 3.3 to assists to bad passes ratio. Keep in mind that this was a player thrown in for the first time with significant minutes, of course he's going to make the wrong passes a lot. The sudden coaching change in the middle of the season probably didn't help, either. History shows that a rookie PG's bad pass turnovers almost ALWAYS improve, which isn't that hard to fathom. Dragic and Lowry's ratio were 5.2 and 4.3, respectively.

Turnovers
Yes, Jeremy Lin turns the ball over a lot, about a fifth of the time to be exact. But like I explained above, he was a rookie PG who was thrown in the fire to play in two very different systems in the same season. And really, it's not THAT bad. People make it seem like he's some historically bad figure but he wasn't even the worst last year.

It's important to note that, most of the bottom dwellers in turnovers are going to be PG's since they are the primary ball handlers.

Defense:
Jeremy Lin is not a great defender, but he is also not terrible. He gambles a lot, which does let him get in passing lanes and gets a great number of steals, his best defensive attribute, stealing 3% of possessions, 3.7% in his career.

His Defensive rating was 101, meaning he allows 101 points per 100 possessions. Not great, not bad. Honestly individual DRtg is kind of pointless because it's so dependent on teammates. So I don't know why I even bother posting it.

His opponent PER was 16.9, meaning on average, the PG that he is guarding plays better than the average PG. But it also shows that he at least doesn't get torched. Dragic and Lowry's were 12.7 and 15.7. Lowry's is surprising to me, as he fared much better in previous seasons. Perhaps it's because he had to exert more energy on offense this season.

The Knicks actually were 2.1 points better per 48 minutes when Lin was on the floor. To be fair, this is probably because a lot of his minutes were aligned withe DPOY, Tyson Chandler. In fact, according to the Top Five-Man Floor Units that Lin was in, the top 11 of those units involved Tyson Chandler. Now only if there was SOMEONE the Rockets were going for that is a DPOY-type player... Hmm...

All-in-all, Lin is below average on defense but not bad enough to adversely affect a team when paired with a good defensive big man. Again, who could possible fill this role??? I think he has potential to be at least a decent defender as he is big and quick, but that remains to be seen. You can have a great career not being a great defender at the PG position.


Summary/Closing Comments
Jeremy Lin is an elite scorer/passer who plays slightly below average defense, which can be mitigated by who plays behind him. I do not agree with the general consensus that Dragic and Lowry are far and away better than him. They all have their strengths and weaknesses and I believe Lin would be a great fit in the Rockets system especially after we get a real center whether that be Asik, Dwight, or Bynum. I think 8.3 million/year is a very fair price for what he brings on the court. To put it simply, who wouldn't want a 23 year old 6'3" 200lb PG with a 20.0 PER?

 

Hehe, funny how that's the exact opposite summary I came up with. I think Lin is a better scorer, and would be a better playmaker if he didn't turn it over so much than Dragic. All in all, they are actually very similar players, and if Dragic is better than Lin, it's very marginal.

 

What don't you agree about it? What you said is essentially what I said, that they were very close in production. I just don't agree with the consensus that Lowry/Dragic are by far better than him. They're all on the same tier.

 

Oops, haha my bad. All these numbers make me dumb wif werdz