And Now For Something Completely Different: The Andrea Bargnani Argument
Posted on | February 26, 2010 | 1 Comment
Ever since the Toronto Raptors selected Andrea Bargnani first overall in the 2006 draft, there have been plenty of debates over his effectiveness as an NBA player. Many of these debates haven’t been particularly illuminating, as they’ve generally gone “He sucks!” “No, he doesn’t suck!”. As Michael Palin says above, “That isn’t an argument, that’s just contradiction!”
There is an actual debate to be had here, though. Since his entrance into the league, Bargnani has had mixed results. He’s provided his critics with plenty of ammunition, particularly in his sophomore season of 2007-08, where he averaged just 10.2 points and 3.7 rebounds per game while shooting 38.6 per cent from the field. Since then, though, Bargnani’s stock has trended upwards by most measures, and this year, he’s now averaging 17.4 points, 6.3 rebounds and 1.5 blocks per game while shooting 47.3 per cent from the field, all career highs.
The question remains as to how good Bargnani actually is, though. Those totals aren’t to be summarily dismissed, but they’re also not strong enough to put Bargnani into the league’s elite ranks. Moreover, there’s a growing body of evidence that suggests those averages might not tell the whole story about Bargnani.
Scott Carefoot of RaptorBlog did an interesting analysis on Bargnani the other day, comparing him to the other players in the league that average at least 17 points per game and have a minimum of 750 field-goal attempts. He found that Bargnani had the third-lowest ratio of field-goal attempts to free-throw attempts, ahead of only O.J. Mayo and Joe Johnson. That isn’t necessarily apocalyptic, as Bargnani is still scoring plenty and scoring reasonably efficiently, but it does perhaps suggest that a lot of his points are created by the efforts of other players; rather than going hard to the hoop and drawing fouls, Bargnani is relying on receiving kick-outs and knocking down jumpers. It can still be very useful to have a player who can do that, but they’re going to struggle if they don’t have others that can create for them.
Another analyst who’s been quite critical of Bargnani is David Berri of The Wages of Wins fame. Berri, an economist known for using included Bargnani prominently on his lists of the most overrated and overpaid players in 2008-09. He concluded that Bargnani produced -0.006 wins per 48 minutes during that season (for reference, an average NBA player is supposed to produce 0.1 wins per 48 minutes, according to Berri). Not everyone subscribes to Berri’s theories (which are based on regression analysis and how each stat correlates to wins; you can see an explanation here), but his arguments certainly suggest that Bargnani was quite a flawed player in 2008-09 (and the years before that).
What about this year, though? By the conventional approach, Bargnani improved significantly, scoring two more points per game, grabbing an extra rebound, increasing his field-goal percentage by 2.3 per cent and averaging an extra .3 blocked shots per game. Berri’s data doesn’t disagree that Bargnani improved, but it suggests that the improvement was slight, as it still has him as a well-below average player, with a 0.043 WP48 mark through December.
Why is this? Well, you can see the basic marginal values (or coefficients) Berri found for each element of the game in Table Two here. When we compare those with Bargnani’s stats, we notice that he improved in many areas from 2008-09 to 2009-10 but fell off in others, notably three-point shooting percentage and free-throw percentage. Additionally, he’s averaging over three minutes more playing time per game, which means that his additional points and rebounds are less impressive than they would be otherwise.
None of this is meant to completely write Bargnani off. He’s only 24 and he’s only played four NBA seasons; there’s still plenty of hope for him to improve, especially considering that he has progressed in several areas. He does contribute several important things to the Raptors, and he could still turn into an NBA star. The approaches taken by Carefoot and Berri aren’t necessarily the be-all and end-all of evaluating NBA players, either. However, they do suggest that there are still significant flaws in Bargnani’s game, and hopefully, they elevate the argument beyond mere contradiction.
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March 5th, 2010 @ 9:02 am
[...] game is his lack of ability to get to the line, similar to what I criticized Andrea Bargnani for last week. Free throws are one of the easiest ways to score, but Diaw has only averaged 1.7 attempts per game [...]