Paul Pierce has 50 turnovers this year, only 5 fewer than Rajon Rondo who has the ball in his hands almost all of the time. Pierce needs to stop handling the ball. He is an absolute turnover machine and that is killing this team.
Pierce can still go to the hoop and he can still get a lot of shots, but he absolutely should not be handling the ball and trying to dribble by guys outside the arc. I know Pierce is not a point guard, but he has 62 assists and 50 turnovers! Besides Rondo, no one else is in the same stratosphere has Pierce.
Pierce handles the ball a lot because besides Rondo there is no one else who can be trusted with the ball. The fact that he turns over the ball a lot is in part due to him being double- and triple-teamed by opponents. This makes sense as a defensive strategy.
I came to this thread hoping for a little bit deeper statistical dive.
No need to be deeper. Think this clearly shows that Pierce is a turnover machine and need to handle the ball less.
I don't think it proves that at all. Reading some of these posts, one would think that Paul is averaging about four turnovers a game. In fact, he's averaging 2.6 turnovers a game with an A/TO ratio of about 1.27 per game. While I'd love to see those numbers improve, these are by no means atrocious numbers for a high usage, top small forward.
For comparison, here are some numbers of some other top small forwards:
Anthony: 3.3 TOPG, 0.72 A/TO
Deng: 2.7 TOPG, 1.07 A/TO
Gay: 2.5 TOPG, 1.0 A/TO
Durant: 3.3 TOPG, 1.33 A/TO
Kirilenko: 2.6 TOPG, 1.38 A/TO
Batum: 2.5 TOPG, 1.28 A/TO