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2023 NBA Draft Megathread

One of the rabbit holes I've been looking in to is how to normalize production for low usage players. Specifically as most know I'm a Cason Wallace fan, and his production per minute is low, but mostly because he never touches the ball. OKCs offense runs through SGA and Jalen Williams and Wallace ranks as one of the lowest touches per minute rookies that gets playing time. There is a points per touch metric on NBA.com, but there isn't an assists per touch stat, so I had to create one. Basically I just took the assists/minute and touches/minute to figure out assists/touch. Here are the leaders from the 2023 class:

- Sasser
- Podz
- Porter Jr.
- Andre Jackson Jr
- Scoot
- Keyonte

From here I created a "production per touch" statistic that is calculated as pts + 2.4ast per touch. (2.4 is the average pts per assist). Here are the leaders from the 2023 class:

- Cam Whitmore
- Grady Dick
- Wemby
- Cason Wallace
- Jalen Wilson
- Jordan Hawkins

Lead guards, or guys who take the ball up the floor should probably be put in to a different category for this stat, since they will be penalized for touching the ball during parts of the offense where they shouldn't be expected to produce. On the other hand the counting stats sometimes are swayed in their favor since they have more opportunities to be part of the offense.

Thoughts?

OK, forgive me as I continue to refine this metric. I believe that touches refers to any time someone touches the ball, so I subtracted defensive rebounds, blocks, and steals from the metric. Here are the leaders for production per offensive touch:

- Cam Whitmore
- Wemby
- Dick
- Wallace
- Hendricks
- Ausar

The bottom 3 (of guys who have gotten rotation minutes) are Anthony Black, Ben Sheppard, and Camara.
 
Here is the stat for Jazz Players. Stay tuned though because I just read the glossary definition of "touches" which I thought only referred to offensive touches, but it appears it could mean any touches. I'm going to have to figure out how to factor in stocks and rebounds.

View attachment 16115

OK, Here's the revised numbers after taking out defensive rebounds and stocks from the touches. Doesn't change the order much:

1710184436620.png
 
OK, I'm back at it. I'm looking at production/front court touches now. I'm questioning the data a little bit because front court touches are only 53% of all touches on average. I would have assumed that players touch the ball way more in the front court than the back court.

Anyway the data does come out interesting. Here are the top producing players per touch in the front court:

- Sasser
- Whitmore
- Keyonte
- Scoot
- Porter Jr.
- Amen

Some teams pass more than others, and so I tried to adjust the numbers based on team touches/possession and here are the results:

- Porter Jr
- Keyonte
- Whitmore
- Sasser
- Scoot
- Jaime

Front court vs back court touches are based on where you get the ball (I'm fairly certain) and so it appears that now we have the opposite problem as before. When a guy brings the ball up the floor and makes a pass that leads to an assist or when a guy brings the ball up the court and scores then that would count as production without even touching the ball in the front court. So guys who do this more often are going to rate higher in this metric than others.

Basically what I've come to determine is that production/touches isn't a great tool unless you are comparing players in similar roles. I wish the tracking data would count front court/back court touches for when you release the ball, not when you first touch the ball, then we could get more interesting information.
 
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GG Jackson is becoming a very reliable scorer for the Grizzlies. His last 5 games he has scored, 22, 19, 26, 19, and 30 points. That's an average of 23.2pts on 48/36/85 shooting splits.
The scary part is that he is only 19. I think he would firmly be in conversation for number 1 pick in this draft if he hadn't reclassified.
 
Jarace Walker had 8pts 4reb and 7ast last night.

He's only gotten 10 or more minutes in 12 games so far, but when he's gotten minutes he's been good. In those games he is averaging almost 8pts, 4 reb, 3ast, and 2 stocks on 48/46/100 shooting splits in 20 minutes.
 
Jarace Walker had 8pts 4reb and 7ast last night.

He's only gotten 10 or more minutes in 12 games so far, but when he's gotten minutes he's been good. In those games he is averaging almost 8pts, 4 reb, 3ast, and 2 stocks on 48/46/100 shooting splits in 20 minutes.

Jarace is a guy who could have a real impact if he's used the right way.
 
Jaime Jaques Jr has had a little bit of a tail of two halves of the season.

From the start of the season up until his injury in January he was averaging about 16pts a game on around 50/35/85 shooting.

Since coming back from his injury up until now he is averaging about 11pts a game on around 45/25/75 shooting splits.

His rebounds, assists, and stocks haven't changed much. He just isn't hitting his 3s.
 
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