Pure as the Driven Lane

There is a certain breed of hoops fans that are partial to specific types of players. I’ve got a buddy back in NYC who’s enamored of bruising power forwards in the vein of Charles Oakley (whom he still numbers among his all time faves) The first thing he’d look at every morning when he scanned the box scores were the rebounding numbers posted around the league. This was his benchmark for basketball excellence. I remember one morning when he wrote off the entire career of Knicks’ center Bob McAdoo after noting in the box score that he had played 40 minutes and grabbed one rebound. No matter how many points McAdoo scored for the Knicks from that point on, my friend never forgave him for that transgression.

Me, I like PGs. A well executed pass never fails to bring me to my feet. “Clyde” Frazier was one of my first hoop heroes but I have also thrilled to the exploits of the Big “O”, Magic, Stockton, Nash, and now, Paul. Like my friend with McAdoo, I have scarcely bothered to conceal my disdain for those prolific scorers – like Marbury or Arenas – who are laughingly referred to as point guards. And so, while my friend was poring over the rebounding numbers, I would be religiously checking the box scores for the nightly assist totals.

So it was with great interest that I read Ziller’s ballad of the combo guard, wherein he argues that the infatuation with “pass-first” PGs is somewhat misguided. I’d urge anyone interested in this subject to read the article in its entirety. He makes many excellent points, but the one that resonated the most with me was something that’s been nagging at me for awhile, namely the unreliability of the assist statistic that I had long thought of as gospel:

Quite possibly, no assist is created equal, and our rash cookie-cutter generalizations only cloud the value of the pass, discounting the truly vital (an alley-oop, a backdoor bounce for an easy layup) to the level of the coincidental (the shuffle pass which leads to single-clutch fall-away from 15).

I remember hearing once that in Europe, the official scorers are much more stingy when it comes to recording assists. I’m guessing this means that the player who kicks the ball out to an open man who hits a three does not get credited with an assist, as the act of scoring was more a factor of the shooter’s individual skill than it was of the pass. I’d love to see a similar metric come into vogue over here.

Although the main thrust of Ziller’s essay was to downgrade their importance to a team’s success in the NBA, I nonetheless remain partial to the concept of the “pass-first” PG. That’s why I’d like to see the one statistic that’s long been used to measure their contributions be tightened up to better reflect their truly unique status among NBA players.