MKG

[SleepingHero]

No it isn't. It is not foolish to suggest that he CAN be good on offense and that he HAS been good at fitting in to a team offense. 

Look, I will try one more time.

Basketball is a TEAM game. MKG may not be able to win one-on-one offensive matchups, but if he is really bad at team offense then his team will essentially be playing 4 on 5 and this WILL be reflected in the on/off numbers over the course of 1000s of minutes and hundreds of games. A player WILL have a on/off that is very negative over those sample sizes if they bring nothing to the table offensively and are simply a "liability." You cannot successfully hide for thousands of minutes over the course of years.  

The fact that he has three full seasons in the last five full seasons of being positive in offense from an on/off perspective means that he CAN be a solid to good TEAM offensive player (it is POSSIBLE). Meaning he is capable of taking advantage if a defense tries to ignore him. Meaning he is capable of not getting in the way of a team trying to execute its offense. 

Again, if you take a random dude off the street and stick him on an NBA team for five seasons and thousands of minutes he WILL have an on/off that is negative.

If that is the case, then why does MKG have a negative Offensive BPM for his entire career? BPM is purely a stat that measures how the team performs while MKG is on the floor. So why, if as you say MKG is a good team offensive player, have such a below average OBPM? Here's the definition of BPM. 


"Box Plus/Minus, Version 2.0 (BPM) is a basketball box score-based metric that estimates a basketball player’s contribution to the team when that player is on the court.  It is based only on the information in the traditional basketball box score--no play-by-play data or non-traditional box score data (like dunks or deflections) are included.

BPM uses a player’s box score information, position, and the team’s overall performance to estimate the player’s contribution in points above league average per 100 possessions played.  BPM does not take into account playing time -- it is purely a rate stat!  Playing time is included in Value Over Replacement Player (VORP) which is discussed below. " (hint: he doesn't have a very good VORP either)

MKG's 8 seasons are below, with the last 2 being him this year (split CHA/DAL), -1.6,-2.9, -1.1, 0.2,-1.6, -2.1, -2.3, 0.0, -5.3, -8.8. So by this measure, it shows that MKG is actually a net negative, and a BELOW average player for his team on offense. 

This stat also shows that MKG is a bad team defender, which we know isn't the case from watching the games. Which is exactly why using team based stats to measure individual offensive talent is ridiculous. MKG is a bad offensive player individually, and that will of course affect how his team is defended. It does not matter how his team performs while he's on the court, because these stats don't tell us exactly HOW he himself is affecting the offense, which is why I asked you what is a specific skill or something that we can point to and say that MKG does on the offensive side that indeed helps his team. 

The answer is he doesn't have any one skill, because MKG has no amazing offensive talents. His biggest skill is that he hustles. He creates fast break opportunities based on his defense, and he just generally fights for the ball. Which is totally fine, because that is what this team needs.


If MKG played on a hypothetical dream team with Kareem, Magic, Bird, and Jordan as the other starters with him, but had a bench of Kwame Brown, Anthony Bennett, Cherokee Parks, and 2 dwarfs, and the coach's subs were 5 man platoons, MKG's On/Off AND BPM would be at an all time high, because the 4 other players he plays with score the ball at will, and the bench is well..... not good. So this obviously skews the results for team-based stats.Obviously extremes like this doesn't exist in the NBA, but my point is that if we just looked at MKG's On/Off on that hypothetical team, we'd think he'd be an all-time great, even though we'd have no idea exactly how he affects the offense at all.  

So that's why it doesn't make sense your assertion that MKG is a great team offensive player, because that statement in and of itself is meaningless. Yes basketball is a team based sport, but only 1 person at any 1 time scores during a possession.