Jeff Green - Model of Efficiency

[D.o.s.]

The big thing that strikes me about Green/Harden comparison is the fact that he shoots two fewer free throws and two fewer three pointers, on average, a game.

Why would you look at career averages?  Because the disparity in their free throws is much larger.  Harden averaged 7 more free throws than Green per game last year and 6 more per 36.  Harden drew .59 free throws per shot in his last two seasons which is ridiculously good.  The best Pierce ever put up was .48 which is itself elite.  Green's been around .30 most seasons, which is Rudy Gay territory.

Green has the skills and athleticism of a small forward but his game translates out as a tweener: best offensively at power forward, best defensively at small forward.

Just using the numbers provided in the thread.

Harden's got a real knack for getting to the line.

[nickagneta]

Tony Allen once had a month where he averaged like 21 PPG, 5 RPG, 3 APG, while shooting over 50% from the field and over 35% from three point land. But he regressed back to what he was which is a good player but nothing like the player from that month.

I applaud Jeff Green that he could shine for an extended period of last year but eventually, players just go back to being what they always have been. Jeff has always been a player that shines when the matchup is extremely in his advantage and disappears when it is in his opponents advantage. He is a passive offensive player that doesn't push his offense, even when his team needs him to. He is a poor rebounder because of passivity. He can play very good defense but often doesn't. And his passing skills and ball handling skills are average at best.

That is what I expect Green to return to. I expect him to play 34 MPG +/- 2 MPG and average 15-16 PPG, 5 RPG, 2 APG, and have stretches where he looks like an All-Star and stretches where you wonder "where the heck is Jeff Green?"

He is what he is, no more, no less. On this team, by year's end, I expect him to be the 3rd best and maybe 4th best player on the team.

[Boris Badenov]

It appears that the discussion regarding Jeff Green and his potential has resurfaced, and because it's the offseason, we may as well discuss it again. The comparisons I am going to make here is between James Harden's 2011-12 season and Jeff Green's 2012-13 season. James Harden was the NBA's premier bench player two seasons ago and was traded to the Houston Rockets for the 2012-13 season in which he exploded in his new role as first-option (despite critics' doubts), averaging 26.3 points per game (3rd in NBA). The Boston Celtics are faced with a similar situation, as Jeff Green has never been used as a first option throughout his career. In the 2013-14 season, he will likely be featured more than ever before on the offensive end and we will see whether or not he is up for the task. Evidently, there are many differences between the two (important to recall is that Green is nearly 27 years of age whereas Harden is not yet 23 and that Green is a SF/PF whereas Harden is a SG).

My comparison takes place between the 62 games Harden played in his SMOTY campaign and the 39 games Green played in 2012-13 after Rondo was injured. I find this a good place to start counting his stats because this is when he started getting more involved in the offense (no Rondo, no Sullinger, no Barbosa => more Green). I decided to do some averages for each player's sample time period and what I found was...

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Player MPG  PPG  APG RPG SPG BPG
JGreen 32.7 16.5 2.3 4.7 0.7 1.1
Harden 31.4 16.8 3.7 4.1 1.0 0.2


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Player FTA    FTM    FT%
JGreen 3.4359 4.1795 82.2
Harden 5.0323 5.9516 84.6


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Player FGA    FGM     FG%
JGreen 5.9487 11.9744 49.7
Harden 4.9839 10.1452 49.1


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Player 3PA    3PM    3P%
JGreen 1.1282 2.6154 43.14
Harden 1.8387 4.7097 39.04

Remarkably similar, you may have discovered. What other players fit the bill of at least 16 points per game, 2 assists per game, 4 rebounds per game and 1 block/steal per game, while shooting at or better than 82% on free throws, 49% on field goals and 39% on three pointers?

The sort of efficiency displayed by Harden and Green in his 39-game stretch puts them in an extremely elite category. By widening the qualifier pool to all PGs, SGs and SFs who averaged 14+ points, you'll realize that of the forty-four players only one was able to hit those marks: the newest member of the 50-40-90 club, Kevin Durant, with a statline of 28.1/4.6/7.9. In comparison, James Harden had his own statline of 25.9/5.8/4.9 last season. Jeff Green's expectations will and should be this high, and as a first option next year it is reasonable to hope that he can average at worst a modest 24/6/2/1/½.

My beliefs often come off as bold but if you disagree, post away! For now, all I'll say is that Jeff will be an All-Star caliber player within the next season or two.* Cheers!

*that doesn't necessarily mean he'll make an All-Star team, per se, because as I've pointed out in a previous post, he peaks late each season.

Previous Jeff Green thread

thanks for the data and thread, but i have a bit of an odd question for you. how the heck did you manage to make those stats line up so nice and tidy-like? i have to spend so much time just putting in numbers and they always come out looking like crap.

so, what is your secret? 

I use Courier font which is a fixed width font. Looks like CC may be doing the same thing.

[Boris Badenov]

Harden averaged 19.3 points per-36 in a full year playing with two other players in the top 10 by usage rate. He then went to a team with zero players in the top 100 by usage rate. He did this, mind you, going from age 22 to 23, which is still well within the typical period during which players improve their numbers substantially.

Jeff Green averaged 16.6 points per-36 in a year during which he had no elite scorers playing alongside him. He's on a somewhat more offensively challenged team this year, but it's nothing like what Harden experienced. Also, Green is 26. To call their situations comparable masks all these important differences.

You apparently started this thread to avoid answering the questions I asked at the end of the other currently active Green thread, so I'll ask them again:

(1) Can you find any examples - ever, in the history of the NBA - of players who improved year-over-year from 16 points per-36 to 24 points per-36, at age 26 or something similar?

(2) GIven your answer to (1), why are you expecting Jeff Green to do that?

Like wdleehi says, you're picking the best 39-game stretch of Green's career and extrapolating from that to the rest of his career - and what's more, expecting dramatic improvement without any serious basis (the Harden comparison is, as I say above, a bad one).

Even if you want to rely on such a small sample, your justification is 180 degrees off. Why on earth would you pick the time period when Green played without Rondo to extrapolate into next year and beyond, when Green will be playing with Rondo?

I'm not defending Celticscourse here as I think the Harden Green comparison is unfair where Harden could be the best SG in the NBA next year at least top 3. 

However mostly out of boredom I took your challenge to find a player in NBA history who increased his per 36 PPG by roughly 8 points from 16 to to 24 at age 26 or something similar.   

So I just browsed through the top scorers in NBA history and I found one:

Dale Ellis age 25 per 36: 16.8 PPG age 26 per 36: 23.9 PPG  Then he was consistently in the low to mid 20s for another 5 years.

I admit after finding Ellis I didn't look much harder after but I did notice if you actually take out the extreme of an 8 point increase cut it down to 4 or 5, and say going into age 25 there are actually a decent amount of players like that.  In a normal scenario for Jeff not coming here deferring to 3 hall of famers, and then the heart ailment he very well could have had a 4 or 5 point increase per 36.

BBallTim found Ellis too in another thread.

Like I said there, that is more of a trivia fact than a counter-argument. It moves the phenomenon from "never happened" to "has only happened a couple times in NBA history."

I actually agree with you about the smaller increase. If the claim is that Green could go from 16.6 points per 36 last year to 19-20 per 36 over the next couple of years, I would say it's optimistic but much, much more possible, particularly if we continue to have so few other options on offense.

But 24 points per 36? I just don't see it. Just as one other example, Pierce has only hit that number twice in his career, and he is one of the dominant scorers of this generation. He also never averaged fewer than 19.4 points per 36 after his rookie year - while Green has never averaged *more* than 16.6 after five full seasons in the league. You're talking about two entirely different levels of play.

It's highly improbable but not impossible given Green's past circumstances for that sort of increase, and I bet if I digged around some more I could find a few more examples.  I don't think Green will ever touch Paul Pierce's level but the circumstances of Paul and Jeff during their first 5 years are totally different is it not?  Paul was given the keys to the car from the beginning on the some bad to medicore teams.   Green on the other hand as it's been written about several times played behind Durant and out of position, then deferred to 3 future hall of famers, and the heart surgery.  Jeff's circumstances are pretty rare.  With that said yes I agree I'm not really seeing 24 points per 36.   

I do think there is a very good chance we'll see an increase to around 18 to 20 PPG.  He was right around 18 per 36 the last couple months of the season after it was stated he fully recovered from heart surgery.

If he does just that it will be a success story.  There were only 19 players who averaged at least 18 PPG last year, and 9 who averaged at least 20.

Yeah, very few players reach the 18ppg threshold, so it's not really an insult to project that as his upside. I think there are some people who simply do not understand how rare those big numbers are - or even seemingly modest numbers.

In another thread I ended up checking to see how many players averaged more than 16ppg and 5rpg with 1bpg last year. The complete list was Tim Duncan, Dwight Howard, Brook Lopez and Serge Ibaka. And there are people here projecting Olynyk to have numbers similar to that next year!

You seem to have left six players off that list.  They are:

Josh Smith
Al Horford
Al Jefferson
Kevin Durant
LaMarcus Aldridge

and

Chris Bosh.

16, 5, and 1 is still a nice club to be in, but it's not quite as exclusive as you are suggesting.

By the way, Ibaka didn't average 16 ppg, so the complete list is Duncan, Howard, Lopez, Smith, Horford, Jefferson, Durant, Aldridge, and Bosh. 

Not that any of this matters in terms of a discussion about Jeff Green's potential, but I just had to check for accuracy's sake.

You're right, I was misremembering my criteria from the other thread, they were actually 12/5/2.

I also listed the set of players with 12/5/1 which looks pretty much like what you posted above.

That's what I get for not going back and checking first...but I did get the lists right the first time!

http://forums.celticsblog.com/index.php?topic=67191.msg1534911#msg1534911

[lightspeed5]