Nylon Calculus: Have the Thunder defined their backup role player?

The Oklahoma City Thunder just nabbed Dennis Schroeder, a player that harkens back to a prior motif in the organization’s personnel history. Since drafting James Harden, the Thunder always had an offensive Swiss army knife playing alongside Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant in crunch time.

When Kevin Durant left, became focused on landing a superstar to pair alongside Westbrook, so we saw the theme fade away some. The Thunder seemed adamant about returning a superstar opposite Westbrook, even giving up Victor Oladipo, a player that very well fit the mold of a young James Harden. With Paul George now fully committed to Oklahoma City, the Thunder seem to have come back with the game plan.

I’ve searched each of the Thunder’s past couple of seasons back to Harden’s rookie year to distinguish the archetype of the premier player coming off the bench. I’ve looked at each roster to find players that were ball-handling guards that played more than twenty minutes per game while having played most of the season’s games for Oklahoma city in the year which they’ve played.

For example, the following data includes:

• James Harden’s Thunder tenure, as he’s “created” the role.
  • Reggie Jackson’s Thunder tenure is included, much in the same vein as Harden.
• Kevin Martin’s, Dion Waiter’s, Victor Oladipo’s, and Dennis Schroeder’s career per game averages leading up to each respective Thunder tenure.
• Each player’s similarity score in relation to Dennis Schroeder, comprised of the three final seasons before Thunder tenures.

While Oladipo didn’t come off the bench, the Thunder were playing their first year without Kevin Durant so somebody needed to soak up those lost minutes, but I think the original intent was to hope for a Harden-esque role.

From there I plotted the bolded data from the table below by boxplot to glance over variance. This’ll allow me to see what the Thunder are looking for in this role, and see if there are other options out there in the league should the Dennis Schroeder experiment fail.

The graph helps us visualize how little each player’s box score varied between each player. All of these players were natural scorers and were relatively adept at getting to the line. Every player’s field goal percentage from the floor was just about identical as well.

Below is a calculation of similarity between each players’ three seasons before their first Thunder campaign. I’d used the Basketball-Reference equation that is based on win shares and had simply subtracted each result by 100 for the representation below. All players are strictly in relation to Dennis Schroeder, meaning, Dion Waiters isn’t more closely related to Kevin Martin than he is Reggie Jackson.

What we do see is that Dennis Schroeder’s production from the three most previous seasons resembles mostly that of Victor Oladipo’s three seasons pre-Thunder. The goal here was to see how close these players are by something other than the raw box score, and it turns out that the Schroeder experience brings certain uniqueness.

If we know, in general, that the Thunder have a certain appetite for a bench star, and that Schroeder might be a sign of reigniting lost flame in Oladipo, we might ask if other players are out there that fit the same bill.

The following table contains the means of each box score statistic. We can use the means to deduce what future player may be in the Thunders’ sights. The following players were subjectively selected based on points per game and field goal percentage. The colors would represent relative quality to the mean. Where green for points represents better value, red is given for higher rate of attempts. Data consists of averages over the past three seasons.

A lot of these players are probably a little too good for a Thunder experiment, but there are some interesting pieces to compare here. To reiterate, the mean represents the six players mentioned above, in their years up to OKC. Data for Harden and Jackson are included, as these players were molded into the “role.”

Caris Levert, Buddy Hield, and Jamal Murray were left off as they’re still a little early on in their careers to be considered for the lead Thunder backup role, although the Thunder did bring Dion Waiters onboard midway into his third season. For really young players, Dennis Smith Jr. might be just what Sam Presti could be looking for a couple years down the line should Smith’s growth be stunted.

Based on the above, Tim Hardaway looks to be the best for the Thunder to bring onto the backcourt. And what do you know, apples truly don’t fall far from the tree, as Reggie Jackson would still be a great fit for Oklahoma City’s bench.

All data from Basketball-Reference.com.