Jeff Green is not the player you think he is

Jeff Green will be suiting up for the Cleveland Cavaliers next year — his sixth NBA franchise as he enters the 10th season of his NBA career. That kind of movement speaks to where Green currently ranks in the hierarchy of NBA players, he’s become one of the journiest journeymen around.

Ask someone to describe Green as a basketball player and you’ll probably get a list of positive-sounding characteristics — an athletic scorer with some stretch, capable of playing and defending both forward positions. Over the past three seasons, the Boston Celtics, Memphis Grizzlies, Los Angeles Clippers, and then Orlando Magic, have each discovered for themselves, in quick succession, that Green is not really the player those descriptors make him out to be.

Green is not much of a scorer, at least not in terms of efficiency. His career usage and true shooting marks (20.9 and 52.6, respectively) are about the same as what Marqueese Chriss and Elfrid Payton managed last season. Green has in fact roughly split his minutes between small forward and power forward over the course of his career but, on closer examination, it may be more of a case of not quite fitting at either, rather than some sort of idealized versatility. And that point about defending both positions — his Real Plus-Minus estimates for the past four seasons (-1.31, -1.06, -2.05, -0.27) don’t really fit the narrative.

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Of all of the pieces of his reputation that have followed Green through his career, the idea of him being a useful shooter seems the most incongruous.

Jeff Green is one of 25 players in NBA history, 6-foot-9 or taller, to have attempted at least 2,000 3-pointers. Only Lamar Odom made a lower percentage. Look at the players around him — Odom, Toni Kukoc, Rasheed Wallace, Robert Horry, Donyell Marshall, Charlie Villanueva — and you’d be forgiven for wondering if Green was some sort of time-traveling stretch big from another era.

There’s some cherry-picking here — setting a threshold of 2,000 career attempts means we’re catching the early adopting stretchy big men, but there’s a subtle lack of modernity in Green’s efficiency. Last season, 45 players 6-foot-9 or taller attempted 150 or more 3-pointers. Only Giannis Antetokounmpo made less than Green’s 27.5 percent and only about a third of those 45 players finished with a 3-point percentage below Green’s career average of 33.3.

At the beginning of the 2000s, when stretchy bigs were just beginning to populate NBA rotations, novelty helped make the threshold for acceptable efficiency much lower. Green might qualify as a useful stretch big for the 2003-04 season. It’s a harder argument to make today. Here’s another way of thinking about it — only twice in his nine seasons has Green had a 3-point percentage above the league average.

Remember those 43 other tall guys who shot better than Green on 3-pointers last season? Seven have already changed teams this summer. Two others — Serge Ibaka and James Johnson — were free agents who stayed put. Nikola Mirotic and Marreese Speights are still on the free agent market. Not all of that group could have feasibly been acquired by the Cavs but in the hunt for tall shooters, it’s not like Green was the only option.

There are all sorts of players like Green around the league — those with a reputation wholly unsupported by facts, a reputation that has somehow managed to endure even as evidence to the contrary continues to mount. Green is referred to as a stretch big but the two characteristics he possess — size and a willingness to take 3-pointers — don’t cover the third and most important leg of that stool — actually making 3-pointers.

This is not to pick on Green. By all accounts he plays hard and is a swell guy. His recovery from heart-surgery is one of the best NBA stories of the past few decades and that fact that he’s even healthy enough to be on a basketball court is something worth celebrating. Still, he is a fascinating example of how an optimistic perception of a player can be frozen and persist across a career that has veered in a different direction.

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That persistence of perception is probably about peaks and valleys. There have been stretches where Green scored with efficiency, where he defended capably, and his 3-pointers were falling. There have been games, weeks, and months where he looked like that rose-colored realization of his skills. But filter in the lows and the grand sum of his career is something less than that.

The Cavaliers entered this summer with a clear need for shooting and defense on the wing, specifically shooting and defense in the person of a single player instead of a platoon. Rumor has it that Jeff Green is that kind of guy. Nine years of experience should tell us that he’s probably not.