Thats because the way "drives" is calculated. It includes a lot of terrible floater range shots (jalen is awful here) and mid range pull ups (again terrible). The idea he should "drive" more is about getting to and taking shots at the rim, where he is elite. The problem isnt hes not good enough at driving. The problem is this offense doesnt allow enough quality driving oppurtunities. A good amount of drives are stifled before he(or fred) gets anywhere while a good amount results in a bad shot from the key just outside because the paint is clogged. This is why Jalen plays much better with Amen. They run and attack in transition more and he has easier drives in to the paint. Numbers are great, and they tell a part of the story. You just cant solely rely on them. If you could Harden, Morey and D'Antoni would be champions.
There haven't been many numbers in sports history that you could rely on more than foster vs harden/cp3 in the playoffs.
Jalen is 70% FG in shots 0-3 ft from the rim. Not sure how those drives are calculated but when you are 70% 0-3 ft from the basket you should be driving almost every opportunity. That is actually the main issue with JG he is unstoppable while driving but once he gets hot he starts doing higher and higher difficulty shots like those step back 3s or contested jumpers and mid range floaters etc and those shots are what tanks his efficiency in the end.
It's very simple: 1) It's not a coincidence that both those guys run a system where their C is out of the paint or running high post and can shoot well. Sabonis can't be ignored anymore on perimeter and their offense makes people chase Fox around screens while he has the ability to drive baseline or down the middle. Ja has JJJ so immediately never a rim protector in the paint. I don't know what else you would expect. I would expect on equal spacing Fox and Ja would be roughly similar while Jalen with less experience would be a little behind. Now if you give the best two the best spacing and the 3rd ranked one by far the worst spacing what will happen to that gap? Sengun is the only starting C who spends this much time in the paint and is simultaneously bad at 3's. 2) Jalen has already eclipsed this mark as a lesser player on a worse team than he is now. Yet he is a better player now and trying harder. When Sengun went down, his numbers improved both in volume and efficiency despite playing equal- calibre teams (I.e. we were a 40-win team without its best player going against 30-win teams). This is not proof but it's unignorable evidence. It's a small sample but the only evidence at the moment. We debated this question specifically because someone stupidly said: he is what he is as though this seasons numbers are the end all be all of Jalen. It's obviously not, Silas has gotten more out of a lesser Jalen. 3) Less than 5 feet from the basket including shots where defenses are not set or catching up or on the break, Jalen has the highest volume and the second highest efficiency among our purported stars. I'm not judging in isolation (drives on set plays with paint packed). I'm judging how the entire offense changes. There literally are more transition points (easy finishes) when Sengun is not in the paint. He doesn't outlet, can't outrun his man and doesn't have the stamina to keep up with Amen/Green at high pace. I love him but we are still developing his 3 and his effectiveness off ball in general. You have to lose the tunnel vision. It's not a given we will play this way. We are excited by these samples and hypothesizing a totally changed floor in the way it did the day after Mike Brown or Kenny Atkinson arrived and barely changed the roster. Same exact parts, Fox scores way better than before. I get it, the way you look at data won't support it. It sounded impossible to Kings fans too until it happened. 4) If we take it these numbers are a reflection of the reality on the ground, I would have to believe Udoka is an idiot for continuing to start Jalen or has such a weak voice in the organization the he has to start Green even if he sucks for 2 years and even after his contract is secure. It cannot just be the defense, he's just an average defender. This is a much harder sell than the logical possibility: the team with the worst spacing has wings who's efficiency is impacted more than usual - I.e. worst spacing = highest negative impact on spacing. 5) Ime is flat out a poor offensive coach it's clear by now to opposing fans and media analysts alike. Everyone knows it's about grabbing our own misses. In my 25 years watching the NBA it has been a very reliable assumption that whatever offense is being run by such a coach, pretty much any average offensive coach will come run a better offense with the same parts. I love Ime when I say his offense sucks, I feel as disappointed in him as I am when Jalen struggles. I know he can develop. But it is highly likely this offense is far from optimized. Every serious injury we have our offense improves and defense barely changes, it's getting embarrassing to see almost anything would work better at least according to small sample sizes. If you can't agree about that much, honestly we won't be able to exchange information that is heard and received by both sides so we should avoid running into a wall here. Let's just be frank about the core assumptions at the top here.
I think you're underestimating how much time Sabonis is in the paint. Both Sengun and Sabonis spend time on the perimeter, Sabonis just takes more 3's from out there than Sengun. Sengun gets 5.1 Elbow touches per game and Sabonis gets 7.4 elbow touches per game. Alpi is a little more efficient ( .606) than Sabonis ( .593) on those elbow touches. Sengun gets 6.6 paint touches per game while Sabonis gets 11.5 per game. Sabonis ( .92) is much more efficient than Sengun ( .766) on those paint touches. The difference is the double teams. Fox is the 5th most double teamed player in the league this season. Jalen had been top 20 most double teamed the last two years, but this year he's sitting around 25th as Sengun is now around 20th most double teamed. Last year Fox was the 8th most double teamed and Sabonis was #15. This year, teams are sending more double teams at Fox. To give you an idea of the amount of double teams on Fox, we all have seen that Sengun is getting doubled more this year, he's been doubled 666 times. In comparison, Fox has been doubled 820 times. So Fox is getting doubled a whole lot, his team has been a poor outside shooting team and his center is in the paint a good amount of the time, yet Fox is still driving 16.8 times per game (3rd in the league) , shoots 57.6% on those drives and scores 12.2 pts/game (2nd in the league) on drives. In comparison, Green is driving 9.2 times per game, shoots 46.9% on his drives and scores 6pts/game on drives. Apparently, it's difficult to keep Fox from driving and he's very good at it. SGA is the drive king of the NBA but Fox isn't far behind.
why is everyone not on board with the Spring Green nickname... it's right there! I've been shilling for 2+ years no momentum. smh.
I understand, but I think you're missing the core premise here. Sabonis inside is not like Sengun inside because we run a totally different system. Just like Draymond inside is not like any of these two. You can't really compare them. If you want to understand the part of our offense that's affecting us, it will be several things like Sengun spends 40% more time in the post. It will be like Sengun's man will drop more often than Sabonis' man. I don't buy the Fox narrative tbh because that didn't matter or work successfully the day before Mike Brown arrived. Their new offense is nothing like ours. Their old offense is exactly like ours. Apparently, you can make Fox better at driving overnight even though he can't shoot. Let's copy that regardless of whether it will be proportionally less effective for our guys. It clearly creates more drives for them. Whatever it is that - without a shooting form improvement - took Fox from 55% TS% to 60%. Whatever it is Adelman and Kerr and Malone are/were doing. Let's just do it and stop saying it won't make a difference when it made a difference for every single passing C they had. Even if they weren't better than the best. It improved them. Since w2e need offense, let's do it. It can't get worse than what we are, the rebounding will exist anyway and the TS% is garbage anyhow. In the big picture, are you really willing to say running a more Princeton-ish offense has no benefit for a passing C and its guards? Because I just got through one year of arguing with people that spacing benefits athletic players, and they had plenty of statistical tests to say there's no reason it would help anyone because they are just not good and they will stay not good. If you don't agree at the core that such an offensive system can create different opportunities we've never measured, I'm genuinely not sure what we're going to discuss that the other will consider. I can't move you on that in any way if after this many years of basketball we can't even agree that such an offense benefits passing C's and creates more easy cuts/drives for guards. I've never even seen it fail except with Yao and Adelman, who had to shelve much of it because Yao wasn't quite the passer it needed and T-Mac was always going to dribble the ball to death anyway. I'll grant everyone: we're not going to install a complex new offense mid season, but I'm disagreeing that it would not elevate the same parts at all. We've all seen it happen whether we were paying attention or not.
Where do you find the most doubled players? I googled it and I can't find it, and I don't see it on nba.com. The only thing I can find is statmuse which is unreliable AI garbage that makes up numbers.
Ime is not a good offensive coach and is not great in his rotations. It is a very small sample size, but one little tweak to get FVV off the ball in the half-court has had a dramatic effect on our offense. I'm just praying he makes this shift permanent and doesn't panic if we have a high turnover game or two and revert to the FVV/Sengun centric offense. If he does we should either start looking for his replacement or at the very least an assistant head coach for offense. My biggest fear is that we waste a couple more years with FVV as our starting PG.
I think if we let Ime run the ship, he's excessively risk averse and it will cost us time. Ultimately though, he seems to come through. My only gripe with him is each season it takes him about 40 games. I always call him the Jalen Green of Head Coaches. One-way coach until mid season. 3 seasons in the league, and every single season so far the awareness has come mid season. It's uncanny. I predicted it blindly and it just happened down to the injury forcing his hand. I've been begging for an assistant forever but our old heads tell me "we simply can't shoot, and nothing else will move the needle". Ime is more traditional so I worry he believes that too, very much like JBB believed it last season for the Cavs. Not like the Cavs didn't work their ass off under Bickerstaff. Just gets old always asking your players to cover your ass with rebounds and loose balls more than any other coach in the league. He's one of my fav coaches I'd be devastated if he doesn't improve or hire an assistant, because he won't last long that way. He saved this roster, but this roster won't wait for him, it's too good to be held back. Another Kenny Atkinson or Mazzulla will be licking his chops for this job.
It's not like Fox just started being successful on drives after the coaching change. He was great before, when the team was disfunctional. If you're saying run a princeton offense through Sengun, I don't see the Rockets doing that. Sengun is a good passer for a center but he's not Jokic. He's a 5 assist guy. I expect the Rockets to primarily run their offense through the pg with Sengun as a secondary distributor. Also, Sengun passes much better from down low with his back to the basket than he does from out top. That minimizes many opportunities to cut. Sengun has the ball 2.7 minutes each game and Sabonis 2.6. Neither guy is dominating the ball more than the other. What is "the Fox Narrative". All I presented were facts Bottom line is that Fox gets doubled way more than anyone on our roster, his roster is also a very poor 3 point shooting team and his center is in the paint a similar amount as Sengun. Despite those things, Fox still drives a lot and he's really successful at it. Similar story for SGA. Just because your team is below average from behind the arc, it doesn't mean that you can't drive often or well.
Before Mike Brown 55%. The next day 60%. You can all it dysfunction if you like, I call it bad systems, but you're not going to find many takers for the idea that Mike Brown's offense had nothing to do with it. Surely you can respect that's at least as valid as your opinion. Flat out don't agree with this subjective assessment of Sengun. No one is Jokic. That doesn't mean everyone else is a 5-assist guy. I don't believe Sengun's limit is the number of assists he's getting with poor shooters and a widely-agreed clunky offensive system. The Fox narrative I was pointing to was the idea that he's this player regardless of the system. There's no evidence of that whatsoever. There's only evidence that he changed when the system changed. Mike Brown is not more organized than his predecessor, the players did not like the way he organized the team off the court and in practice and they were frustrated after the honeymoon period wore off. I get it, no causation so we can project anything. I'm just stating my belief that it's the system because from what we know now, that's literally the only thing Mike Brown did well. There's no other logical reason they would improve. I'm going to bow out of this one chief. It's obvious if we don't agree at the core that such an offense can improve things, we're just going to be banging heads for no reason.
Fox is stronger though which helps him create a ton of space. Ja and Fox also plays a great push shot/floater game whenever they touch the paint, where as Jalen always tries to get to 0-3 feet.
Once again, would you mind sharing where you got the double team numbers? I'm 99% sure the numbers you are posting are fake.
Not all drives end up at the rim. That's what sets Ja and Fox apart from Green. Both actually play a great mid paint game with short push shots and floaters. Sometimes Fox will turn his drives into a mini post up and shoot a short jumper in the paint. Green is always hell bent on driving at the rim which isn't a bad thing, but he should add variety into the 3-5 feet area.
it would be good to have the number of at rim shots from drives. Looking at the numbers, it should be small for green but I can’t find actual stats.
i HIGHLY doubt the numbers @aelliott are posting are fake. they are very good analysis numbers and hes one of the best on the board at understanding and expressing points from a statistical point. What he is explaining tho, to me, isnt so much a shade towards Green though, and much more a decleration of how ELITE fox is in this regard. Green isnt in that tier, and no offensive system in place currently is going to change that. A better offensive system would make green better, but fox is special, as is SGA.
I think thats just the next evolution hes gonna have to make. Hes gonna have to continue adding to his bag. Lou Williams actually talked about this specifically in a recent video I saw of him speaking rockets.
I've got no problem with his analysis. And I'm not saying he's doing it on purpose or trying to mislead anyone, what I'm saying is that he's going to a website that tells him Fox is the 5th most doubled player at 820 double teams, and those numbers are fake. No shade towards him at all, but I'm pretty sure his source is wrong. That's why I'm asking him for his source though, otherwise I can't be 100% sure. But I'm about 99% sure.
