We overrate passing and assists

I think assists are pretty overrated, and not just because there's such a stark difference between a really high-value assist where you put a basket in someone else's hand and all they have to do is like finish a layup, and then just passing to someone and them doing all the work. There's such a disparity in the value of what that stat is tracking to begin with. But also, high-assist teams, do they necessarily achieve things better than low-assist teams? Do high-pass teams achieve things better than low-pass teams? The answer in this day and age is no. So, I think you can approach this from two different places and be correct in saying that assists are overrated.

The first is, and we'll get into the numbers, it doesn't necessarily predict team success at all. And of course, you do need to pass the basketball in basketball, but I do think we kind of romanticize the idea of selfless basketball where you're just racking up passing numbers and passing just to pass because that's more aesthetically pleasing. And then on the other side of things, I think there's the approach of looking at it the same way the discussion has been over points per game and why points per game is no longer the best barometer and maybe never was to assess like how good is a player. You need to score points. You have to score points. But the conversation has widened to try and look at like how efficient it is, how well it matches up with the rest of the offense, and if you're winning minutes and winning games. And you know, there's kind of this, are you scoring points for yourself just because you have the ball, or are you scoring points for the team? And the assist conversation isn't as easy to have because you can't just loop in on-offs, and you can't just loop in true shooting percentage or effective field goal percentage. It's a little bit more complex with assists. And truthfully, around the NBA, there are some guys who really do just rack up easy assists, relatively low-impact assists, and there are some guys who carve out great gobs of space for their teammates and deliver them super easy points. When I used to go through all of Scotty Barnes and Pascal Siakam's assists and say if it was high-value or not, and a high-value assist is when you create a really easy opportunity for a teammate, and low-value is when obviously you don't, when they do all the work after catching the ball, but the stat, the stat says these two things are the same, and that point of view obviously bleeds into the overall team thing. So, let's get into the numbers.

So, of the top 10 teams in assist percentage last season, only three of those teams were above .500. And that was Golden State, Denver, and Indiana. And the big thing here is obviously that has Steph Curry on that team, it has Nikola Jokic on that team, and it has Tyrese Haliburton. And the Pacers are almost too unique to include in this because they do pass a lot, but we'll get into that later. The bottom 10 teams in assist percentage last season, six teams were above .500. The Cavs were at 64 wins, and OKC at 68 wins was in the bottom 10. These teams are not getting a bunch of assists. And relative to league average, they're actually passing less, too. And we can see that in the passes tracking because of the top 10 passing teams in the NBA, only three teams were above .500. The bottom 10 had eight teams above .500, and all three 60-win teams were bottom 10 in passes made per game. It's because dribble penetration, live-dribble creation is far more important than the aesthetics of passing in the NBA. And being a good playmaker is definitely about being a willing passer, but not somebody who overpasses. Passing in basketball is more so about passing from the ultimate point of leverage where you've created these big rotations to create an opportunity, or if you don't create that rotation, being able to score the bucket on your own. And the best NBA teams, of course, have guys who are perfectly comfortable going and scoring the basketball on their own. Do they have to pass? No. Why would they? They can just go get a bucket. If you overload now, I'm capable of playmaking. We see this obviously, you know, some of the best players in the world as far as scoring the basketball. A lot of the last step they need to make is typically knowing when that ultimate leverage pass has to be made. You know, Anthony Edwards has to work on this. He's probably the best example. A guy like Luka Dončić plays really well in the playoffs because he's mastered that. You just don't want to talk about the defense. But the offensive side, there's a lot of value there. Passing is of course important, but as a whole scale assists and passing thing, I think we overrated. And I'm not advocating that passing is bad. I, I never would. And just because last season the bottom 10 teams in passes made, eight were above .500, and all three 60-win teams were in that group, it doesn't mean that that has to be static, and it isn't going back over the years. It's going to change somewhat, but you have to be willing to pass, of course, but you have to be willing to score. And that's why a lot of the really pass-happy teams are not extremely dominant. And if they are dominant, they're usually dominant in another way, more prominently first, and that is shooting percentage and true shooting percentage and efficiency. Usually, these teams are buoyed by their excellent shooting, which rewards passing rather than, you know, driving and creation.

But to give you guys the numbers, so of the top 10 teams in assist percentage in 2024, six teams were above .500. It was Cleveland, Golden State, Denver, Indianapolis, Sacramento, and the Los Angeles Lakers. And the bottom 10 in assist percentage in 2024, eight teams above .500 again. And there were 450-win teams and a 64-win team that was above .500. The most interesting thing here is that we saw Cleveland go from being a really high pass-percentage team to a low one, and they improved. This is pretty interesting to me. And part of that is because they didn't have to, you know, Evan Mobley was a big change there, not having to be spoon-fed as many, you know, points, and also relying more on the pull-up shooting of Darius Garland and Donovan Mitchell. You would think, you would think that with Darius Garland playing a larger role, that the Cavs would want to pass more, but they actually passed less because they had more dangerous live-ball creators. Ty Jerome also helped with this, too. You can keep going down year by year and see that it ebbs and flows, but the point I mean to make here is that passing the ball a lot will never guarantee you offensive success. You would think the way that passing and assists are talked about in the NBA that this would be a certified unbreakable thing, that if you pass a lot, if you get a lot of assists, you're going to do well offensively. And of course, why am I talking about this? Why have I cared about this so much? Because I cover the Toronto Raptors. And the Toronto Raptors went from a team under Nick Nurse that didn't pass much at all. They wanted to play isolation basketball. They wanted to create double teams on Fred VanVleet and Pascal Siakam. They wanted to score in isolation, and they didn't want to pass because they didn't want to turn over the basketball because the more you pass, the more you turn over the basketball. The Raptors under Nick Nurse were trying to gamify the possession battle, which obviously we've seen years later is a huge factor in the championship. Thunder, and they changed under Darko into a team that's just passing, passing, passing, passing, cutting, passing, cutting, and something, there's a through-line between these two teams. Of course, they're different players, different coaches, a little bit of crossover. That last year under Nick Nurse, I think they were 14th in offensive rating. A lot of that was buoyed by how often they played in transition. When they're under Darko and they're passing and cutting a lot, and when they're under Nick Nurse, they don't have a true blue great offensive creator. This, they don't have a lot of dribble penetration. Obviously, Pascal Siakam can do it to some degree. Obviously, at this point, Scotty Barnes can do it to some degree, but the Raptors across these years, and Fred VanVleet, he needs a screen and he mostly wants to play out of that action. He can't knife middle and create these big rotations. It's not a huge part of his game. The Raptors, it's not about passing. It's not about not passing. It was about one thing: do you have a guy who can break a defense down? And do you have players who can reward that around him? That is the most important thing. And that's why you can see that the Cavs can be high-passing or low-passing, that Denver is high-passing because they have, you know, Jokic can draw triple teams. The Warriors will be high-passing because they don't want to make Steph Curry dribble. They want him to come off, come off a pin-down and hit a three. Draymond Green, a lot of low-value assists, by the way. I've tracked this before. He's, he's his assist numbers are pretty inflated. I'd like to see it if he wasn't playing with Steph Curry. Just a thought. It's, it's fascinating to me because covering these Raptors and hearing coaches talk about, and there's so much made of like playing the right way, letting the ball do the work, all this kind of stuff. But it all falls to the wayside if you don't have that initial, that that key that enters the ignition, the starter, the alternator, it starts going. If you don't have that, you're up the creek without a paddle. It's gonna be tough, man.

And to get back to the point, I think assists are often viewed as like, this guy can create, this guy can't, this guy is a great passer, this guy isn't. And I think that's so, so incorrect. Assists should be viewed as an extension of making shots, which of course they are. Of course they are. But they aren't really viewed that way. And I watched a team in the Raptors last year that was the worst team in the NBA in points per possession on-ball creation. And they were top five in volume of off-ball creation. They didn't have that guy who could break the defense down. Hopefully, Brandon Ingram adds something this year. Hopefully, guys like Scotty, and Quickley, and R.J. are all adding something there, too. But the Raptors constantly wanted to let off-ball screens and slick offensive design do the work for them because when they tried to freelance, there was nothing there. But even in that, too, we see that they didn't shoot the ball well from like anywhere. Even if you put a layup in a guy's lap, sometimes he couldn't make it. If you put an easy three-point look above the break in somebody's lap, he couldn't make it. Now, the Raptors play fast. The Raptors don't hang onto the ball too much. The Raptors keep the ball moving. They want to do that. Who else does that and far better? The Indiana Pacers, who I covered their playoff run. When you look at the time per possession, points per possession, interception, Tyrese Haliburton, his assist rate, his ability to get the offense moving, his ability to do all that kind of stuff flies in the face of a lot of what I'm saying here. That's why he's so special, is that he makes reads so quickly. He moves the ball on so quickly that he kind of elevates the Pacers to a different offensive style than just passing a lot. It's like advancing the ball a lot. It's moving the ball a lot, and it's moving it to players who can score. When you got to the finals and you looked at it, you're looking at the three-point shooting leaders, and you see Aaron Nesmith, Obi Toppin, Pascal Siakam there. Guess what? All the passing it goes way down. If those guys aren't shooting the lights out now, of course, them shooting well is by proxy of the type of style they play, and the players know it, they play to it. And Tyrese is, you know, order of operations. He's mechanical and he's quick in the way that he does it. Of course, this benefits everything. But if they don't have good shooters, assists don't come the same way. And I'm not saying all of this to completely devalue assists, just that I think we talk about them wrong. And assist percentage and assists per game, it can, it can, it can suggest and tell you to look at a guy and then decide if they're a strong playmaker or not. But it doesn't guarantee it. Some guys do more with less. Some guys do less with more, but they keep getting more. And assist per game and assist percentage, they don't guarantee a thing on the team level, on the player level. But I think for a long time, we've acted like that because the Raptors, I don't think, are a very good passing team, but they pass a lot and they have a high assist percentage. There are much better passing teams out there, but the Raptors are like, they're smashing it. They really want to. The Raptors when they were a heavy isolation team, I didn't think they were a great isolation team, but they smashed it. They went after it. Teams mix things up. Teams choose to do things, of course, but those numbers I don't think are always a great representation. Am I saying all of this because I'm definitely an eye-test analyst and I want to devalue people who just scrape data and put stuff out? I don't know. I don't know. But I do think the way we talk about assists and the way we talk about assist percentage and all that kind of stuff, it needs to be interrogated a little bit more. I think it's not a super serious conversation. It's just basketball. But I do think we are a little bit too quick to just assign the passer thing or assign the playmaker thing to a guy who has assists per game when that can really just be an expression of usage. An assist percentage that can take care of the usage thing, but it can't take care of the scheme that they play in.

Could you make arguments like this about anything? Definitely. Like pick-and-roll defender numbers for Synergy. That's obviously impacted by like, is their presence at the nail? Is the team in strong help side? Is the team around you really good playing in help? Can they disrupt plays when they're not at the level? Then you're going to have good numbers. If you're a great pick-and-roll defender, but you have terrible defenders around you and you slip up even once, the points per possession going through the roof. Yes, you can do this. You can, you can really, you know, argue things down to the last letter on everything, but this kind of stuff is not one of the most accessible and most used numbers in all of basketball. Assists, assist percentage, and assists per game. These things are absolutely core to the identity of basketball stats and how we read a player's stat line. And assists, I think, need more interrogation. I wish we did more analysis on the types of playmakers that players are. I myself do it a lot. I think it's really interesting. I think it's the stuff that teams really pay attention to. And if there's a player who seems underrated based on his stat line, but isn't getting a lot of run with a team or something, or is flaming out, you look at defense first, of course, because defense will be the first thing that keeps you off the floor. But second, look at the playmaking, the type of playmaking, and see where that leaves you. This is what I want to talk about today because Trey, you know, he's on vacation. He'll be back. We'll talk about some stuff. I think the Grady versus Jacobe discussion is coming. But this is one last thing I just wanted to dig down on before the offseason was over, before we get into all of our preview stuff, which is coming. I have a lot of exciting conversations. I'm going to pose this question to Caitlin, by the way, but I think assists are very overrated. And being able to create off the dribble, God, that is so important. I just, so important. And you got to hit shots. You got to hit shots. But I think with the way we talk about assists and playmaking is, is, is pretty shallow. That's, that's, that's what I want to talk about today. Okay. Thank you so much everybody for tuning in with me. Just a little bit of a rant. This is something I've been interested in for a long time. Something I've, I've, God, I've thought about a lot. Anyway, thanks for tuning in with me. You can like this video, subscribe, comment, all that good stuff. Let me know. Let me know if you think assists are overrated or underrated. Personally, overrated, man. So overrated. Okay, whether you got into this in the morning or at night, thank you very much. Have a blessed day and goodbye.