I am not sure PG vs SG is a real distinction in a Tony Bennett offense, but that depends on what the offense looks like this season. Of course some guys pass more and other guys shoot more, but I see that as being relatively independent of positional label and subject to change as the roster context change, e.g. how London’s role changed from 2015-16 to 2016-17.
Maybe to put it another way, I don’t find PG-C positional labels to be useful on offense but I do find useful offensive role descriptions that are anchored more on what the player does on the court.
Defense is a little different and the role is more strongly connected to size and athleticism, but again, PG-C labels have their limits.
You need guys who are good at (1) creating for themselves, (2) creating for others, and (3) shooting. This is a simple rubric, but it kinda works.
Since the natty, we’ve been playing 2 guys together in the backcourt who are combining like only 2 or maybe 3 of the 6 skills, at best:
Kihei - could shoot okay, could create for others, not for himself (1.5)
Reece - never got to a minimum level of shooting competency, could create for others, and could create for himself (but not terribly efficiently) (1.75)
Casey - for us, none (0)
Tomas - he could shoot (1)
iMac - he can shoot, but what a shot, extra credit (1.5)
Dante - maybe he could create for others (0.5)
Compare to:
Ty/Malc - 3
London - solid 2 (couldn’t create for himself)
Kyle - tbh, he’s hard to grade on this scale. Such a dynamic shooter that my silly scale doesn’t matter
TLDR - it’s not some sort of big friggin mystery why our offense has been so bad…
I think about roles the same way; if you broaden #3 from shooting to “finishing shots created by others” this rubric can apply to every “position” on the court on offense.
London might be a little over a 2, he did more self-creation his senior year and was efficient-ish.
Bliss looks like he won’t be athletic enough to be able to creat for himself (hope I’m wrong), I think best case is he’s like London - create for others and shoot at a high level
Dai dai - resonable best case feels like kihei + Reece. So 2+ (ability to create for others, decently well for himself, Kihei level shooting)
Yeah for sure. “PG” is the easiest way to talk about it but what we’re really saying is if you’re giving up too much shooting and/or size or if you’re creating roster crunch that you don’t really need to.
You gotta do some math, but Torvik has it on the player page under “Play-by-play Stats” and it will only tell you percentage of makes that are assisted, because unassisted/assisted shot attempts don’t make it into any freely available PbP data.
I could be very mistaken, but the times I that I have seen Edwards I didn’t think he was shooting over bigger guards as much as he was using his quickness to create space to shoot. Admittedly, it’s a limited viewing sample, but I suspect it might be reasonable to expect similar things from Mallory.
Creating space to shoot with quickness… and then shooting over bigger guards. It may be before my coffee but I’m not seeing the distinction.
That is what Mallory does as well - but it’d be much harder for him to get it off over a De’Andre Hunter, for example, than it was Edwards was my point.
It’s been a while since I’ve watched them, but my impression was that Edwards was just going up in Clark’s face and shooting, and he wasn’t doing that when Hunter was guarding him. I thought he was using his quickness to separate from Hunter and shooting before Hunter could recover. Among other things, I thought this was why Coach Bennett put Clark back on him. But, as I said, it’s been a while since I watched it so I could be thoroughly mistaken.
You’re completely right. He just pulled up over Kihei a couple of times and got going… he did it to Guy next, and then he was just so insanely hot he was dribbling away from Hunter and pulling up.
The difference with Mallory is there will be fewer guys he can just face check like Carsen could if they’re alert to his shot and range - but he still very much should be able to use a ball screen or use his drive (he’s got a nice step-back from out there too) to get space and fire away.
The reason that I think the Carsen comp is very good is mentality and skill… but I do think it’s an important distinction that the difficulty of those shots and the regularity with which he’ll need to do something more spectacular to get the shot off himself (and how intrusive the contests are) is likely going to be more challenging for Chance than Carsen.
I re-watched the Purdue game recently and was paying specific attention to who Carsen Edwards was scoring on. He did get a couple of threes off early against Kihei, but he mainly got buckets when he was switched onto or got a Kyle/Ty matchup and he was on fire already and was separating against De’Andre. I think Kihei actually did the best job of guarding him out of anyone on UVA
I was surprised to see that he only had 3 of his threes against Kihei (one of which was the banked in three because of a good contest by Kihei).
A couple years ago I tracked the numbers of how Edwards shot against each player who guarded him in that game, don’t remember what it was for Dre and Kyle but against Kihei I’m pretty sure he went 4/11 from the field which was by far his worst percentage.
Granted the caveat to that is a couple of those misses came in OT when Edwards’s legs were probably tired as hell.
Carsen Edwards was like Curry on a heater that day. It was amazing to watch. But he wasn’t normally that effective. He shot under 40% his last season and even against ODU in the first round he was 7 for 23 in a fairly close game. What he was able to do against Kihei and Dre that day was not normal. They played good defense. Mallory doesn’t have to be Edwards-vs-UVA good to have some success against most defenders.
