Nylon Calculus: The uniqueness of Trae Young’s playmaking
A steep second-half decline in efficiency warranted skepticism about Trae Young’s NBA translation, but even non-believers must acknowledge the sheer offensive load he carried was virtually unprecedented.
A quick Sports-Reference query shows us that he carried the fourth-highest usage rate of all players with 1000 or more minutes played since 2009, the highest assist percentage and the second-highest Offensive Box Plus-Minus of players with comparable usage. He assisted about half of his teammates’ field goals while on the floor and put up a historically elite 7.36 Offensive Player Impact Plus-Minus.
If it wasn’t the most productive, Young’s 2018 campaign was among the most productive NCAA men’s basketball seasons in history.
His presence on the court altered the way opponents defended Oklahoma, forcing them to stretch far beyond the 3-point line, using both that gravitational effect and his passing proficiency to consistently boost the expected value of his teammates’ shots. As he forced defenses to balloon out of their comfort zones, he found seams to exploit. As individual defenders pressed up on him, switched, trapped and fought over screens to guard against his quick-trigger pull-up, he penetrated and created shots at the rim.
Young had an uncanny impact on his teammates’ collective ability to find opportunities at the rim and in transition. Using Hoop-Math data, here is how Young boosted his team’s shot distribution in various directions relative to his team’s other assisted field goals, field goal attempts and league average assist distributions. Provided for comparison is the average distribution for current NBA initiators.
Jones has the edge in transition and on 3s while Young has the advantage in creating assisted makes at the rim.
This is significant because of each of these shot types, assists have the strongest impact on conversion rates at the rim (an R-value of .4 using this same dataset of 2453 team seasons in comparison to values of .02 and .1 on midrange jumpers and 3-point jumpers respectively) and also on overall halfcourt effective field goal percentage (.27 compared to -.12 and .19).
Those R-values fall short of wielding legitimate predictive power, but they do indicate that at-rim assists are a little less noisy than jumper assists. Consistent effective conversion at the rim is more reliant on the systematic creation of clean looks, and therefore the ability to create those looks is more likely to raise a team’s overall scoring efficiency and thus is more valuable than creating looks elsewhere. And Trae Young is better at that than just about anyone.
Here are a few more comparisons to recent prospects. These charts are not to suggest Young is a better prospect or even a similar player, only to illustrate the uniqueness of his playmaking footprint.
Looking back individually on recent point guard prospects beyond the aforementioned, no one with any modicum of passing volume comes close to Young in terms of relative rim assist frequency. Not only that, but none of them impact any of those four shot types to the degree he impacts both transition and at-rim shots. According to Will Schreefer’s play-by-play data, his court presence alone lifts his team’s volume and efficiency at the rim.
There are multiple reasons for this. One, no prospects over the past five or six years drew as much defensive attention beyond the arc as he did. That opened the floor up for his teammates even when he was not directly involved in the play.
Two, his ball handling, underrated first step and craftiness allowed him to beat switches and similarly-sized defenders with relative consistency, getting into the lane forcing rotations before hitting his big men lurking in the dunker’s spot.
Three, even without driving the ball, drawing the other team’s best defenders out past NBA range created passing angles to cutters that would not exist otherwise. His timing, ambidexterity, velocity and overall technical proficiency on those passes threw individual defenders off balance.
A few more comparisons, for good measure:
The sheer size of Young’s footprint, let alone its shape, indicates the transformative nature of his offensive game for a player with his passing volume. He does not fit the gunner mold into which many have tried to squeeze him. Instead, he is a point guard prospect all his own, with dynamic strengths and pronounced weaknesses.
Next: How the Four Factors explain the Warriors and Rockets
His intersection of pull-up gravity and historically good passing does not necessarily make him a surefire bet to succeed but it deserves proper appreciation. He is a statistical outlier that single-handedly shaped and mutated an otherwise tepid Oklahoma offense into a top-40 KenPom efficiency unit.