…but if the team is better offensively when Jalen is on the floor then what’s the point…what’s more important REALLY -team stats or individual ones? I don’t love Jalen’s efficiency either but he IS in the top 20 of most doubled players in the NBA currently so teams and coaches are clearly paying attention to him and he has gravity as a result and the team benefits from that gravity. …do you want the team to win or do you just prefer people with good individual counting stats?
I didn’t realize he was top 20 in that category. That is really huge if he can continue to improve his court awareness.
Surprised me too but Steph wasn’t too far ahead of Jalen and most of the top 15 are legit NBA all stars. Sengun despite missing the back half of the season probably would have been in a similar place to Jalen with the benefit of more games played. I guess the one caveat is - is this because these players are that good or is it because the book on Houston is you can live with anyone else on the roster shooting/handling the ball besides Jalen/Sengun.
This is where you have to put on your critical thinking hat and figure out why someone with lower scoring efficiency has more positive impact on offense.
So much impact we didn't even make the playoffs. I don't think it takes a lot of critical thinking to see the top playoff teams didn't have bottom tier 3 PT% shooters as their main shot takers from behind the arc.
No it doesn't take a lot of critical thinking to realize that Jalen is in the 72nd percentile for on/off impact on team points per possession with +2.4 and Jabari is in the 28th percentile with -3.1 points per possession. And we can't use the excuse of one being a starter and one being a bench player. Both starters AND Bari compared to Jalen matched the times FVV was playing on the court more than Jalen because Jalen often is used as the back up primary ball handler when Fred is resting. So Jabari has a significantly worse impact on offense even though he shares the court with Fred more often than Jalen and Fred leads the team in on/off impact on points per possession.
Jalen takes all the shots, so he scored the most. I just want that guy to be a really proficient shooter, and not the highest scoring guy on the team who isn't getting us to playoffs just because he shoots the most to score the most, but does it at a cost.
So as long as someone takes a lot of shots no matter how bad they are will improve their team's offense? Critical thinking skills. Apply them. It seems like there is a cognitive dissonance impass you can't overcome where you can't understand why someone with a lower efficiency in scoring has greater impact on offense than someone with a higher efficiency. It's because you refuse to acknowledge things like offensive gravity, breaking down and collapsing defenses etc. Jabari's shooting is mostly a product of guys like Jalen, Fred and Alpi creating opportunities for Jabari.
I didn't say that. The guy we have taking the most shots period, can't make them at a level other than bottom tier proficiency as a SG. That isn't working! The guy we have taking the most 3's is a terrible 3 PT shooter. Mr. Primadonna on a Pedestal since day 1 is still one of the bottom tier shooters out of all the guards in the league. If he doesn't shoot a lot more proficiently this year I sure hope he's out the door. I get sick of 2-13,14,15,16,17,18 type games from a guy who thinks he's so great. I prefer someone who can actually shoot proficiently that can also make opportunities for our other guys. I don't give a damn if he collapses defenses but throws a ton of bricks. It's not going to beat teams that have better players. It isn't going to make us a Championship team if he keeps shooting bricks so much, but takes the most shots!
Prima Donna? If he was white but had the same exact traits personality wise I really wonder if you would make this claim. Can you explain why the player with lower efficiency can have significantly more positive impact on team offense than a player with higher individual efficiency accounting for both being starters. Like I can get one playing against bench units as a bench player inflating on/off numbers. That isn't the case here. You know two things can be true at once? Jalen Green SHOULD improve his efficiency but he still has some of the best impact on our team offense. You don't care about basketball stuff outside of shooting splits. That's why you don't care. You have a hyper isolated analysis of basketball that only looks at fg% and ts%. The thing is if you were a casual poster who doesn't post often here I could attribute your casualness to having a life where basketball is like numbers 10 in your list of hobbies. But you post here often and for a while. You dedicate time to his hobby to make it seem like you wouldn't have superficial analysis by this point.
Get back to me when Jalen can go 3 months without having horrible streaks every 10 games. Get back to me when he plays so great we are actual playoff contenders. Here's my feeling on him with games. I'm going for happy faces, and you can't stop me.
So why does two staters on the same team have wildly different on/off offensive efficiency numbers where the person with the lower efficiency has more positive impact and by a wide margin?
I believe a top tier shooting guard in the league could have more of a positive impact on our team than Jalen. It's that simple. The "stars" on our team aren't as good as others playing the same positions on Championship level teams.
I missed 3 or 4 Rockets games at max this year. I can't remember the number of times I was like "please make a shot Jalen we need you" and most of the time he didn't make the shots and we lost. Go and take a look at the game threads from January. There are some haters there who will criticize everything he did no matter what, yes, but there are also disappointed people. People who craved for Jalen's success. There were times where I was underwhelmed by Jabari's performance or his lack of physicality, too. However, Jabari is able to play as a side piece. He can contribute by defending, shooting and rebounding even if he is not scoring a lot. Jalen Green can only play as a self creator. That's it. He is mostly useless as an off-ball player. That's why there is no way to compare Jabari and Jalen in the same light. This team badly needs a competent self creator other than Sengun. Jalen is the only other self creator we have (you can kinda count Cam as one too but he is still too raw). His presence is still important because of that, the team won't magically get better if we just remove him. We don't have anyone else who can bring the same stuff to the table. If Jalen doesn't get better at what he's doing we have to bring someone else. I hope Jalen will turn out to be a elite scorer and the team won't experience the headache of filling that spot.
Also I wouldn't say Jalen is useless off ball. It's just off ball team defenses probably pay attention to him more to where they will be more cognizant if Green is about to make a swim move on them on a back cut. He's too "known" to sneak in as much as guys like Amen or Bari. Green is slender, extremely shifty and has these wide receivers type swim moves where he completely loses defenders off ball. The dude isn't like Lula, Westbrook or Harden where they just are completely useless off ball.
This is the thing, there are LOTS of things like that with Jalen. The only people who think he's a bust seem to be Rockets fans. People need to listen to more players and ex players talk, I've only ever heard positives about him. Yes, he's inconsistent. People seem to forget his peaks have produced more huge performances than the entire rest of our core's careers so far. That's why he gets doubles, that's why he has gravity, it's also why it's harder to consistently produce those results: That peak performance is something only a very few people can even do in the first place with the frequency Jalen's done it so far. Sadly, the CF narrative has the echo chamber convinced he's a bust and priority number one is to move literally our asset with the highest chance of becoming a superstar.
His cutting game has much improved, I'll give him that. He is still a bad off-ball player though. Most of his cuts come from give-and-go plays with Sengun. He is not the baseline cutter Bari, Amen and Cam are. His catch and shoot numbers are low. Very regularly waits far from the 3pt line doing nothing during the plays he is not involved in. Those qualities scream bad off-ball player to me. His off-ball game may get better next year. But it was not there this year.
