High usage scoring PGs who don't play defense

Saw this on RealGM. He's wrong about Harden and Westbrook never going to the NBA Finals but he might be right about Dame not being able to get there.

high usage, score first point guards that don't play defense are very quickly being revealed as the fools gold of the league.

I think the money ball argument is really coming in to play with this, you are paying a premium for one of the smallest players on the court to jack up contested 3s off the dribble and take the ball to the rim.you can get your 25 pts on 25 shots from elsewhere in the team quite easily. the scoring aspect of a point guards game should be supplement the creativity, to keep the defenders guessing. Otherwise you are paying the rest of your team to stand around ball watching and allowing a chasm in defense that can be exploited.

Harden, Westbrook, Lillard never sniffed a finals appearance. Even Paul only managed to put those ghosts to rest when he gave up being the scorer to a teammate and saw his PPG plummet.

Curry is the only one that's managed to pull it off, this is down to a unique skillset. ridiculous shooting ability, playing off the ball and being, at his peak, the best finisher at the rim in the league. On top of this Curry never took breaks on defense.

 

BS. Westbrook was always extremely inefficient. That was the difference. Harden was one game away in Houston and it took an 0-for-27 night from 3 as a team and no CP3 for him to lose. Dame made the WCF and had solid leads in 3 of 4 games with a frontcourt of Aminu, Harkless, and Kanter. Plus, the NBA is becoming more positionless. If your SF plays like a PG and your PG plays like a SG, is that okay??? Correlation does not equal causation.

 

I thought Curry was "Trash"

 

If you've only got 3 or 4 examples and you've got one very prominent exception, that's not exactly a great generalization. They're just searching for a way to say "Ja sucks" without saying it.

 

Ball dominant guards who play 0 defense won’t win titles

 

Correct. And I don't think they ever have... Steph and Isaiah Thomas both played very good defense when their teams won.

 

I'd also say Steph isn't ball-dominant... GSW pass the ball extremely well.

 

Fun fact

Dame ranks 10th in time of possession at 7.2 seconds

Simons at 5.3

CJ at 5.0

 

lacking lots of context

let's look at 2020-21 when Dame was healthy:




rather than focusing on just raw TOP, notice the last column, points/touch, and then compare that to the other players that are the primary for running a team's offense

everybody is talking, justifiably so, about how good Morant was this season. Fun Fact: his points/possession this season was the same as Dame's last season

by the way, if you want to derive any conclusion from the raw TOP numbers, you need to normalize for average minutes. You'd also need to try and find a formula adjusting for the difference between primary ball-handlers/initiators and secondary. For instance, last season Dame contributed 35.2% of Portland's assists; CJ contributed 22.0%. Running the offense a lot more than another will have a direct bearing on TOP and seconds/touch

 

Good point. Steph gets most of his looks off the catch after a screen or three... Excellent point.

 

Throughout Steph's career he's never had a higher percent of catch and shoot attempts than he has pull up attempts. His catch and shoot numbers are 10-20% more than Dame's have been on any given season and Dame does have an even higher percentage of his shots coming from pull up attempts. That being said Steph has never come close to getting "most of his looks off the catch".

 

Probably doesn't qualify as "off the catch" since he does a move after the catch. Point is, he spends a lot of time in motion with the ball out of his hands.

 

I guess it depends on what you mean. If you mean that Steph gets in better positions because of ball movement and his own movement on the majority of plays whereas Dame uses picks but keeps the ball on the majority of his scoring possessions, then I definitely agree. The systems that Steph has been in for so long on both ends of the court have benefited him immensely and have really optimized his talent as the greatest shooter ever, they've also covered for huge weaknesses that he has shown on defense and physical weakness overall.

Edit: Dame has suffered from very unimaginitive systems on both ends throughout his career and it will be interesting to see if he can adapt to and optimize Chauncey's more sophisticated and quite frankly better systems or if Dame just plays his style of ball within the parameters that Chauncey will accept. It's pretty late in Dame's career for us to expect to see massive change.

 

I think a lot of this isn't about X's & O's....it's jimmies and joes. Curry has played tons of games with Draymond, Livingston, Iggy, & Durant. Dame has never played with passers like that unless you count Batum. And obviously, Durant and Klay have drawn a lot of defensive attention away from Curry. Dame hasn't had that either

yeah, the Warriors have a better system, but a big part of a better system is better components

 

Absolutely. We're not going to win a title without at least 2 elite players. That almost never happens.

 

I like Billups, but at what point this season was Portland's offense better than it's been the last decade? What did we do that was so sophisticted?

Don't get me wrong, we had some stretches of basketball that were fun to watch, but in general, with or without the injuries, the offense was clearly worse in terms of productivity.

 

The wording was "more sophisticated" and "better" and applied to both offense and defense. I think most people would agree that was true when players were following the plan.

 

He's just trying to implement ball and player movement on offense, which Stotts never did. He's trying to get guys really active and accountable on defense with an aggressive aproach on the floor that Stotts never tried. It is more sophisticated in that it is more of a plan but it's also just common sense that Terry didn't seem to have. Also, like @wizenheimer and @Phatguysrule pointed out he some elite complementary players would be nice for Dame as well.