(Nick Wass/Associated Press)
Although we are still weeks away from the start of the NBA regular season, the annual tradition of arguing about ESPN’s NBA player rankings is in full force. The focus of this article is not to list reasons why ESPN’s rankings were stupid, I’m not going to spend that much energy on something that matters so little, I only bring them up because they pushed me to finally write something that I have been thinking about writing for months.
ESPN ranked Bradley Beal at 11, Devin Booker at 15, and Zach LaVine at 33. I am not about to argue that LaVine is better than Beal and Booker, whether he is or isn’t it really doesn’t matter to me, but a 22- and 18-spot gap between him and the others is further proof that LaVine still isn’t getting the respect that he deserves.
Look at the numbers below, comparing LaVine, Beal, and Booker from last season. The three players have very similar numbers, from points, rebounds, and assists per game, to several advanced metrics. The one that stands out the most, though, is Zach LaVine’s efficiency. His EFG% last season was 0.596, compared to 0.532 for Beal and 0.533 for Booker. This is due to LaVine’s incredible combination of three-point shooting (0.419 on 8.2 attempts per game) and fantastic finishing (0.693% at the rim).
Zach LaVine’s efficiency doesn’t just stand out when compared to Devin Booker and Bradley Beal, it also stands out when compared to any season from any player in NBA history. Only eleven times (seven different players) has a player scored at least 27 PPG on an EFG% of 0.590 or higher, which is what LaVine did last season. Below is a chart that shows the other times this has been accomplished throughout NBA history.
As you can see, the only other guard to score as efficiently as LaVine did last season, throughout the entire history of the league, is Steph Curry, who has done it three times because he is insane and most likely an alien. Scoring that many points that efficiently and with that many three point attempts is a crazy feat and shows that LaVine is one of the best pure scorers in the league.
Many people have criticised Zach LaVine for only being a scorer, saying he is a poor playmaker and defender. However, he has improved every season as a playmaker, increasing his assists numbers from 3.0 per game in his first season with the Bulls to 4.9 per game last season. He does need to limit the turnovers, but players who have to carry as large of his team’s offensive load as LaVine will tend to have high turnovers (just look at Booker’s and Beal’s numbers above, the assists and turnovers are very similar).
Defensively is what the majority of LaVine’s critics focus on, and for most of his career, the criticism was more than fair. However, his poor defensive analytics do not tell the full story. If you watch the Bulls play, which as a Bulls fan I have endured, you would see that his on-ball defense has improved dramatically since his arrival. This was evident during the Olympics when he was used as one of Team USA’s go-to perimeter defenders, even picking up ball-handlers full court. I am not saying that Zach LaVine is going to be All-Defensive any time soon, but the narrative that he is one of the league’s worst perimeter defenders doesn’t mirror reality. It is definitely not enough to rank him 15-20 spots lower than Booker and Beal.
The evidence used to rank Booker and Beal so much higher than LaVine is simple, but it has been applied incorrectly to player evaluations by many people for many years: winning. In every sport, people base their opinions about players on team success, assuming that team record will always reflect an individual player’s value. However, that results in an incredibly lazy and incomplete assessment of a player.
The MLB analytics community has already disregarded wins as a viable statistic when evaluating players thanks in part to Jacob DeGrom and Mike Trout being the best pitcher and position player, respectively, in the league while their team struggles to win.
An NBA player definitely has more control over their team’s performance due to their usage — Trout gets, roughly, an equal number of at bats as the rest of his team but LeBron touches the ball every possession that he is on the court — but they do not have enough control for people to base the entirety of their opinion on winning.
This is especially true when their organization is actively trying to lose. How can we blame Zach LaVine for losing 50-60 games a year when his front offices were putting teams together in order to lose 60-70 games a year? LaVine has literally never been on a team that was built with the intention of winning. He was drafted by Minnesota the same summer that they traded their best player, Kevin Love, kickstarting a rebuild. Then he was traded to the Bulls for their best player, Jimmy Butler, joining another brutal rebuild right at the beginning.
The narratives surrounding LaVine are very similar to those that engulfed any discussions about Devin Booker before this season. Ben Golliver, an author and NBA writer for the Washington Post, said the following on his podcast before the 2018-19 season:
“People overrate Devin Booker…With Booker, he is a high volume scorer and he has made real strides in filling out his offensive portfolio, becoming a more efficient scorer, but what we look for in the top 100, especially from lead scorers: does your scoring, individual ability, with the ball in your hands, translate to team success? Phoenix’s offensive rating: dead last. There’s no excuse for that. If you have a legit, top 30 player who is a top 10 scorer in the NBA, and those points are not empty to some degree, there’s no way that team could have the worst offense in the league. Period.
Ask yourself, ‘What position does Devin Booker play in the playoffs for an elite offense?’ We’re talking Houston or Golden State. He’s not starting. He’s in that Eric Gordon role, and frankly he’s not defending as well as Eric Gordon defended in the Western Conference Finals.”
This quote looks pretty stupid now that Booker and the Suns went all the way to the NBA finals this past season. Although Booker was about to turn only 22 years old, this quote shows perfectly how close-minded the “good stats bad team” narrative is. His scoring didn’t result in wins because his front office built the Suns to lose, not because Booker was compiling “empty stats.” The year the Suns organization built a well-rounded, talented team, they went to the Finals. (They also may have made the playoffs last year had Ayton not been suspended, so we should not give all of the credit for the Suns success to Chris Paul).
(Getty Images North America)
Now that Booker has been to the Finals, he is finally getting the respect he has deserved for five years. He is the same player he was during the 2018-19 season when he averaged 26.6 PPG and 6.8 APG on the 19-63 Suns, but ESPN rated him 30th going into the 2019-20 season, questioning whether or not he could “make his teammates better and win.” The difference between a 30th and a 15th ranking for Booker wasn’t anything he could control, it was the attitude and personnel moves of his front office.
I use Devin Booker as a case study into how illogically the media and fans evaluate players and to show how people have predictably used the same senseless methods to disrespect Zach LaVine. Saying he is not a “winner” is nonsensical when the Bulls front office has tried to lose for years, and they would have been more successful in their attempt to tank if LaVine didn’t single handedly win games for the Bulls, causing them to finish with the seventh or eighth worst record in the league instead of bottom three or four.
The LaVine disrespect stems from the media’s and fan’s idea of what a “winning player” is. The few players in the league that can carry a team to the playoffs and role players who do the “little things” on the court — three-and-D wings, rim protectors, floor generals, and other players who don’t put up eye-opening numbers — get the benefit of the doubt at the expense of scorers. However, Zach LaVine’s efficiency, a result of his insane combination of shooting and first-rate finishing, disqualifies him from the “empty stats” or “good stats bad team” group. If you think that averaging 27.4 PPG on 0.596 EFG% doesn’t impact winning, it’s not LaVine who has to improve, it’s you.
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