So it seems that in order to have a high PER as a role player you either need to rebound like crazy or have ridiculous assist to turnover ratio. I checked for players having less than 20% usage rate that had a PER above 18, which is considered to be indicative of a good second option, and only 12 players popped out: eleven big men (including our own Tiago Splitter) and Jose Calderon. Gomez: It really does seem like a high usage rate is required to have a high PER. This essentially means that Kawhi seldom had the ball in his hands on the offensive side to significantly increase his PER Kawhi's usage rate of 16.4% makes him the 245 th most used player offensively in the NBA last season, and eight out of the nine Spurs that played more than 1,000 minutes last season ranked higher. The significance of usage rate with respect to PER is that if a player spends a lot of minutes on the court mostly because of his defensive work, he will be a low usage player and therefore won't have a lot of field goals made, three-pointers made, assists, or free throws made, which are the primary contributors to PER. PSherman42: Usage rate is an important statistic for determining how many possessions are run through the player. PSherman42: I'm glad you mentioned usage because that is the second biggest reason why Leonard's PER is underwhelming. So the contributions of low-usage, defensive-minded players, which is what Kawhi was last season, will never be appropriately gauged by PER. Gomez: After reading that, I went and looked at Bruce Bowen's career PER. Think about that for a second: PER actually rewards a guy like Ellis on the defensive end more than Kawhi Leonard. There are players that get big steal and block numbers (like Monta Ellis and Deandre Jordan) despite being subpar overall defenders. This is especially true for players such as Bruce Bowen and Trenton Hassell who are defensive specialists but don't get many blocks or steals. PSherman42: The only two defensive stats that are taken into account are steals and blocks, something which even John Hollinger, the creator of PER, has acknowledged as a flaw :īear in mind that this rating is not the final, once-and-for-all answer for a player's accomplishments during the season. PSherman42: We will get back to that, but that's not its biggest flaw, this is: PER doesn't measure defense Gomez: It makes sense for Kawhi to have low numbers in some categories as he wasn't relied upon to create for his teammates. Leonard actually beats Manu in nine of the 12 categories. PSherman42: In almost all the categories where a player beats Kawhi, it's by a fairly large margin - especially field goals made, where Tony has almost twice as many field goals as Kawhi. Now let's use the formula to show how Kawhi stacks up against their own teammates: You can find the actual equation used to calculate PER here, but a simpler, if a bit different, explanation is this from Bleacher Report. Gomez decided to offer his take as well.ĭisclaimer: PER's flaws have already been explored by people smarter than us, but we wanted to figure out why, specifically, Kawhi's was low and if it meant anything. I found that part especially interesting so I decided to take a look at Kawhi to see if his low PER was a cause for concern. You should go read it in its entirety, if you haven't already. Tony Parker's probably the best guy to compare Leonard to because they both came into the league so young, but Parker improved his PER from 11.7 to 16.5 his second season. In terms of PER anyway, Ginobili's prime extended far longer than the average fan would guess, for a full eight seasons up to his age 34 year, as he put up something between 21.7 and 24.3 each year. Ginobili had a far more dramatic improvement, from a 14.7 PER as a role-playing rookie to 18.5 his second season to a full-fledged star by 2004-2005, putting up a 22.3 mark. Tim Duncan's PER improved from 22.6 to 23.2 in his second season, and he's perhaps the worst example of the three because he nearly came to the pros as something of a finished product after four years at Wake Forest. Most disconcerting of all, Leonard's PER actually went down his second season, and it's not like the 16.6 he posted as a rookie was world-beating.Ĭompare his numbers to the first years of the Big Three and it's just not a pretty picture. Wilco posted this optimistic piece about Kawhi Leonard, AaronStampler wrote a sobering response about why Leonard was not a star just yet, and he used one of the most widespread composite stats in basketball, John Hollinger's PER, to make a point:
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