It is telling, though, that Carmelo and LeBron were the league's best players when it came to last second, broken down offense scoring -- which is where a majority of those isolation plays come from, since the Knicks O was totally dysfunctional this year.
Now, this is an inherently noisy stat, for a few reasons. For one, better offenses will avoid these kinds of shots, so bad units will have more "opportunities" to hit them. That's why our chart of the top 100 players is loaded with Bulls and Bucks. It also doesn't quite capture everything bad about an offense that is inept at creating shots, because turnovers end a possession before it can get into a late-clock situation, and we decided to not factor in 24-second violation TOVs, because there's too much overlap with shots that go up, but don't hit iron.
http://regressing.deadspin.com/which-nba-players-are-best-late-in-the-shot-clock-1563759412
You may be reading the chart wrong. Courtney Lee and Deron Williams are the best in terms of PPP; LBJ and Melo just lead in terms of the number of broken down plays.
Good attempt at trolling, though. For anyone that might think there's something to what static's saying (other than willfully ignoring what the chart would seem to reveal re: Love, LeBron, and Melo -- that sounds like a sitcom.):
Courtney Lee is interesting, because he's such a high outlier for efficiency here. The Grizzlies overall are about average for these possessions, but Zach Randoph is way down at 0.61 points per possession, and takes up a good amount of the Grizzlies' plays. Once the ball finds its way out of the post on late shots, the Grizzlies aren't exactly well-oiled, but it's a controlled sort of chaos that can often get Lee an open shot along the perimeter. Or maybe Lee's just really good at this. He put up excellent marks in a limited number of these plays in Boston.
This is some of the more compelling evidence of just how put-upon Melo has been in New York. He's taken the second-most attempts overall (321), and no player except LeBron has taken such a large share of team's attempts (30.5 percent). He's been so good at this, and so prolific, that the Knicks' offense in late-clock situations is only 9.1 points per 100 possession worse than its overall halfcourt offense. Their late-clock efficiency (84.1 points per possession) is the third-best mark in the league.
LeBron is absurd in a lot of ways, but this is ridiculous. The Heat have played at a slower pace each of the past three years, and this year they're taking late-clock shots on 13.7 percent of their possessions, the fourth-highest share in the league, behind Memphis, Chicago, and Utah. This is not good; late shots are inherently less efficient shots. So how is Miami still the second-most efficient offense in the league, overall? LeBron, basically.
Of the Heat's massive number of late-clock plays, LeBron is responsible for 31.2 percent of them. This is the highest percentage of any team's late-clock possessions for a single player. And not only that, at 0.93 points per possession, he's miles ahead of the league average of 0.78 points per possession. Among players with at least 100 of these possessions, he's 12th in efficiency, and he's taken 347. Put another way: LeBron is more efficient with less than four seconds on the clock than Paul George and Tim Duncan (both right around 0.92) are in the halfcourt.
Topic: If the Celtics could realistically trade for a 'go' to scorer, who would it be? (Read 9420 times)