Is Harrison Barnes good?

One question has consumed NBA fans for the past two seasons: Is Harrison Barnes good? So, is he?

As near as I can tell, there is almost no consensus on whether or not Harrison Barnes is a good basketball player. Opinions seem to vary from a potential star just waiting to breakout, to utter disaster waiting to be flushed from the league, and pretty much everything in between. The Dallas Mavericks seem to be leaning towards the first opinion, having signed Barnes to a four-year, $94 million deal.

The reason a consensus evaluation of Barnes has been so lacking is that he, perhaps more than any player in the league, has been nearly impossible to separate from his team context. For the past two seasons, Barnes has been the starting small forward for a team that won more than 85 percent of their games. He has played alongside a two-time MVP, arguably the best shooting guard in the NBA, and a one-man revolution at the other forward spot. Around him a capable versatile defenders, and elite shooters and playmakers. Barnes’ individual numbers seem good, but how could they not be when playing in such a stacked lineup?

More from Dallas Mavericks

According to the NBA’s play type statistics, 61.8 percent of Barnes’ offensive possessions last season came either in transition, or off cuts, put-backs, and spot-ups. That means nearly two-thirds of his offense came on opportunities that were created for him by someone else. Knowing that takes a little of the shine off his very respectable 56.6 true shooting percentage over the last two seasons. I mean, even an average shooter should be able to hit a respectable percentage when spotting up around Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, right?

However, one of the most persistent complaints heard about Barnes is that he misses open shots. And he does. Last season, Barnes missed 120 three-pointers that were classified by NBA.com as either “open” or “wide-open”, nearly two such misses a game. That’s a lot of open shots missed, and those are often the ones that we remember. However, because the visual aesthetics of these open misses causes them to stick in our memory, they create the incorrect illusion that Barnes is an unreliable shooter.

We might not remember them as well but Barnes also made 80 “open” or “wide-open” three-pointers last season, which makes him a 40 percent three-point shooter in such situations. The league average on these shots was 36.7 percent and Barnes was one of just 43 players to attempt at least 150 open three-pointers and make 40 percent or better last season. So, he’s not Curry or Thompson from behind the three-point line, but he’s not Rajon Rondo either.

The thing is, as far as a representative sample of Barnes’ offensive game this is about all we have. Shooting open three-pointers was pretty much all he did in Golden State’s offense over the last two years. All but 10 of his three-pointers last season were catch-and-shoot. All but nine of them were classified as “open” or “wide-open”. In fact, a little over 10 percent of his total half-court touches were catch-and-shoot three-pointers. Barnes averaged 29.2 half-court touches per game last season. Here is an incomplete list of players who averaged more half-court touches per game than him: Langston Galloway, Tobias Harris, Rudy Gobert, Archie Goodwin, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Nerlens Noel. Barnes finished 33 possessions as a ball-handler in the pick-and-roll last season, one for every two games he played in.

We know he can be effective as a low-usage spot-up threat. He has shown in the past that he can be reasonably effective as a post-up threat exploiting certain mismatches — he ranked in the 70th percentile in scoring efficiency on post-ups last season. Everything else on offense is largely an unknown.

There is some confusion when it comes to Barnes’ narrow role for Golden State, with this interpreted by some as a reflection of narrow abilities. There could be some truth to that, maybe he wasn’t allowed to work off the dribble more because he had demonstrated in practice that it was a bad idea. However, it seems just as likely that the Golden State coaching staff didn’t need him to do any of those other offensive things because they had Green, Curry, Thompson, Iguodala, etc. to do them instead.

The roster Dallas has assembled for next season is fairly similar. Barnes likely takes the place of the departed Chandler Parsons in the starting lineup. Andrew Bogut — a better defender with a little less range — swaps in for Zaza Pachulia. Assuming health, the rest of the starting lineup is rounded out by Deron Williams, Wesley Matthews, Dirk Nowitzki. With no cataclysmic shifts we might expect to see Barnes assuming some of the offensive responsibilities that Parsons had.

The table below shows each player’s half-court responsibilities on offense, broken down by often they used a possession of each play type and their average points per possession.

Screen Shot 2016-07-12 at 11.13.17 AM /

The biggest difference is in the quantity and type of their on-ball responsibilities. Parsons ran a fair amount of pick-and-roll or received the ball coming off screens (often on curls which allowed him to attack off the dribble), whereas almost all of Barnes’ on-ball opportunities were in the post. Holding these numbers up side-by-side would imply that Barnes will have a lot more opportunities to create off the dribble next season — the numbers say he was effective there but, again, the sample sizes are small enough to make them essentially meaningless.

All this creates a huge amount of uncertainty for the future. If the question is, “Was Harrison Barnes good for the Warriors?” then the answer is yes. He had a small but important job and he did it well. But most of a player’s evaluation relies on what they are asked to do. So to the question of, “Will Harrison Barnes be good in Dallas?” then the answer is TBD.

Next: With Dwyane Wade gone the Heat Culture is tested

For more NBA coverage, check out FanSided’s hub page.

Home/Dallas Mavericks