Nylon Calculus: Kyle Lowry has been better than Kyrie Irving and DeMar DeRozan

On Thursday, the starters for the All Star Game were announced. While Russell Westbrook not making the starting line-up is rightfully drawing attention in the media, there was an even bigger snub in the backcourt Eastern Conference. With all due respect to announced All-Star starters Kyrie Irving and DeMar DeRozan, neither of them have had nearly the impact during the first half of the season as Kyle Lowry, who was not named a starter.

Lowry plays on the same team as DeRozan and the same position as Irving, which makes the three of them fairly easy to compare. Let’s add a fourth member to our analysis group, Irving’s teammate and co-All-Star starter LeBron James, and take a look at how the four of them have matched up with one another this season.

Said simply, Lowry is the engine of the Raptors offense in a similar way to how LeBron is the engine of the Cavaliers. Both essentially run the show, running the team as the floor general and creating high-efficiency offense for themselves and good looks for their teammates. Irving and DeRozan, on the other hand, are more finishers and less distributors than their teammates in this comp. A plot of the true shooting percentage and assists per 100 possessions for all four players bears this out.

A recent article argued that, when it comes to offensive impact among volume scoring wings, creating team offense (estimated here by assists/100 poss) and finishing at high efficiency (TS%) are key elements. Another recent article, this one by Andrew Johnson, demonstrated that shot creation for teammates and volume scoring have a positive interaction with each other across all positions. Taken together, this would strongly suggest that Lowry and LeBron, as the higher-efficiency high-volume scorers as well as the greater team offense creators should be having a bigger offensive impact than their teammates in this comparison. And, as shown below in the plot of Offensive Real Plus-Minus (ORPM, per ESPN) vs Defensive Real Plus-Minus (DRPM), they do.

Real Plus Minus, or RPM, is a regressed estimate of a player’s impact on his team’s scoring margin based upon his play-by-play plus-minus stats, with a bit of influence by the box score stats as well. The y-axis of the above graph shows that, to date, Lowry and LeBron are in-fact having a much larger offensive impact than either Irving or DeRozan. In addition, qualitative scouting yields a consensus that Lowry and LeBron are good defenders for their positions while Irving and DeRozan are not. And that, too, is bared out in the above plot as Lowry/LeBron have positive DRPM scores while Irving/DeRozan have negative DRPM scores.

Next: A quick look at the Pelicans' stagnant offense and situational play

Based upon their styles of play, and how effective they have been at implementing that style, it would have been expected that a high-efficiency, volume-scoring, team-offense creator like Kyle Lowry (or LeBron James) would have a higher offensive impact than All-Star starters Kyrie Irving and DeMar DeRozan. And as estimated via offensive RPM, Lowry DOES in fact have the much larger offensive impact. In addition, being the stronger and more tenacious defender, Lowry also has a solidly larger positive DRPM score. All told, Lowry has been significantly better and more impactful on the court than either Irving or DeRozan. If starters were chosen based purely on merit, Lowry should have been the one chosen to start the All Star game.