Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Tyus Jones in 2017-18 is having a Weird and Wonderful Season

If you review this list of player seasons:  http://bkref.com/tiny/o6JKA you will see the seasons by guards/guard-forwards/forward-guards that are the most similar to Tyus Jones' 2017-18 season (so far).  There are not many.


Tyus currently through 555 minutes has the following stats:


Offensive rating - 126
Defensive rating - 109
Net Rating - +17
Usage rate -- only 10.9%
Assist-to-turnover -- 5 to 1
Steal to turnover - 2 to 1
True Shooting Percentage .596


A player who is a pretty normal player who you want to go to offensively is around 20% Usage.  Jones, remarkably, has an Offensive Rating of 126, a good True Shooting Percentage, is shooting 47% from the field, 43% from 3, and 83% from the line and is in the top 10 in the league in assist-to-turnover ratio.  Yet he almost NEVER has the ball!!! 


This is the sort of statistical work you would generally see from a big man on a good team who only sees the ball when he is dunking it (of course, that player generally will not have a 5 to 1 assist to turnover ratio).


So, when you sort things out to get rid of big men, who do you generally see?  You see guys who played on really, really good teams and who virtually never made a mistake while on the court.  They contributed a ton in very limited touches.  Some examples:


Steve Kerr with the Jordan Bulls
John Paxson with the Jordan Bulls
James Jones with the LeBron-Wade Heat
Thabo Sefolosha with the Durant/Westbrook Thunder
Fred Hoiberg with the really good Wolves team of 2003-04 (Garnett/Cassell/Sprewell)
Iguodala for the 2016-17 Warriors


(Side note - MY LORD was Fred Hoiberg a good player for the 03-05 Wolves teams!  In 3100 minutes of play he had 11.3 WS, that is roughly low all-star level of play).


The only guy on the list who played for a losing team was Pablo Prigioni who played for the 2013-14 Knicks (but they had Carmelo a high usage but low performance player - you cannot have a Jordan Usage Rate and not be very good; it kills your team).


Anyway - Tyus Jones's stats are consistent with all of these good contributors to all of these good teams (and Prigioni, who apparently is the exception that proves the rule), but they don't really match up to anyone in particular.


Example - Hoiberg and Iguodala have some similar stats (assist to turnover, steals to turnover), but certainly no one would compare these 6'5" players to the 6'2" Jones from an overall "game strengths"
standpoint.  TR Dunn was a defensive stopper, Ron Harper was used in the same manner, same with Thabo.  And while Kerr and Paxson kind of remind you of how the Wolves currently use Tyus (small guy forced to go stand around and not do much unless the ball falls to him under 6 seconds on the shot clock) and they were high percentage shooters with great assist to turnover ratios, Tyus is on a pace to have 100 steals in far fewer minutes than Kerr had 67 steals and Paxson had 49.  (Prigioni had around a 1-1 steals to turnover ration).


Final side note - how about T.R. Dunn!!!  101 steals to 26 turnovers in 82 games!  How rare is that?  Pretty freaking rare -- http://bkref.com/tiny/ImaNb and http://bkref.com/tiny/hFZ51  It just does not happen.  Guys do not have seasons like that.  How rare is it to play a guard with a shockingly low Usage Rate because he gets steals?  Very, very rare -- http://bkref.com/tiny/NcTDc


So, my point?  Tyus Jones has been great.  He is having a very weird and wonderful season, and since Thibs seems intent on never letting him play 20 mpg (and since Jeff Teague's defensive indifference will almost never put him in foul trouble) it is likely that Tyus will put up a huge bench season that will make him another person on the list of great limited-minutes contributors to great teams.  (Or he could be Pablo Prigioni, but God let's not go there).


HM

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