3. Utah Jazz shooting guard Donovan Mitchell vs Zach LaVine
Having read the first slide, you surely aren’t expecting much drama in the next 3. A cross comparison of three key statistics suggests that Zach LaVine, Devin Booker and Donovan Mitchell are the 3 best off-guards in the NBA.
Interestingly, Zach LaVine was the only player not to rank in RAPTOR. Somehow, we feel he’s better than John Konchar anyway.
Any metric should be taken with a grain of salt. It’s a little difficult to account for why LaVine slides so drastically according to RAPTOR. One explanation is that his defensive RAPTOR (D-RAPTOR) of -2.2 drags him down. Still, even his O-RAPTOR of +2.8 is lower than we’d have expected.
It’s also worth noting that unlike our soaring Utah Jazz star, LaVine shares the floor with an arguably superior offensive player. DeMar DeRozan’s +4.7 O-RAPTOR nearly doubles LaVine’s total. Given that DeRozan is a 12-year NBA veteran hitting an almost inexplicable peak, that makes some sense. LaVine is a 26-year-old growing accustomed to not having total domain over an NBA offense.
The eye test tells us that LaVine is worthy of this placement. Those 24.6 points per game come with a blistering 60.6 True Shooting (TS%). While scoring remains his primary skill, LaVine is a capable table-setter as well with 4.5 assists per contest.
The analytics crowd may protest ranking LaVine in the top 3 when he doesn’t measure favorably according to arguably the most comprehensive metric available. The pure hooper contingent will be at least comfortable with the selection.
It’s not so much that we’re aligning with either side of Twitter’s Great Debate. We just feel comfortable that, by our eye test, Win Shares (WS) is the most accurate ranking in this instance.