At the very bottom of his second look at this year’s tournament (aptly titled “Tournament 2”), this site’s namesake poses the following question: “Who was the last college player as good as Blake Griffin?” While not finding the answer, he does believe that the search has to begin in earnest before Beasley, before Durant and even before Wade and ‘Melo.
I was sort of taken aback. I watch a lot of college basketball and a lot of professional basketball. I can recognize that Blake Griffin is a great college basketball player, and has dominated this year’s game. He will be a fantastic professional player, and has most of the skills necessary to be an All-Star at that level. But at no point during my appreciation of his season and his prospects do I remember thinking that his achievements would merit such a title from someone who no doubt also watches a lot of college basketball, and isn’t one renowned for hyperbole.
So I brazenly sounded off in the comments section, implying that Blake Griffin, while beastly, was no better than Durant or Beasley, let alone the best player in college basketball over the last decade. Bill replied nicely that, in his viewing, Griffin was on an entirely different level. Beasley was actually used as an example of “Basketball 101,” while Griffin did things that made him “something else.” Bill also stuck with his view of Griffin as the better jumper, who was stronger and quicker. There were various points in both of our comments about Griffin’s age and draftability, all of which you could read if you just clicked over for five seconds. I’m not trying to summarize a comments discussion that’s on the same site, jeez.
I posted again, mostly trying to ask the question that drives this article. I don’t really care if Blake Griffin is a better college basketball player than Durant and Beasley were, or if he’s the best of the last decade, or the best of all time. However, the discussion provides a wonderful opportunity to ask: “How would we even decide that?”
Bill, in a refreshing turn of events, turns to personal experience, having seen all three of these guys play extensively in the same league as his beloved Jayhawks. I don’t think it’s particularly relevant to debate which of us has seen more games overall, or of these particular players, and I will stipulate for the sake of this article that he has seen more in both cases. Does that make his judgment of the players stronger than mine, if true? Maybe it does. This is basically the same fight we have in baseball every single day between scouts and numbers guys, the same fight that Jay Cutler fans have with Ben Roethlisberger fans, the same fight that Manny Acta seems to be losing with himself every time he writes a lineup card. I don’t think it’s as settled in favor of the objectivists’ side as most sabermetrically-inclined seem to believe. Value can be found in subjective viewing, especially trained viewing.
Scouts are used at all levels of the game, from high school through the pros. A particularly glowing report by scouts can overcome mediocre performance (I’m not talking only about you, Rudy Gay, but I am mostly talking about you, Rudy Gay), and more than one excellent performer has seen his hopes for success dashed by lukewarm reception by scouts (I hope Psycho T isn’t going to be invited to the draft…I can’t bear to watch him not blink for an hour while his name isn’t called). But how helpful can they be at the extremes? I have to imagine that a basketball scout looking at my professional prospects and Bill’s professional prospects would say about the same thing: “No Flipping Way. Terrible. Can barely be considered as a ballboy.”
We have a similar problem at the other end. Enough words have been written about Durant, Beasley and Griffin in college that we can’t really judge between them. Is Durant’s “great combination of height, length and athleticism that can score in a variety of ways” better than Beasley’s “dominating, fearless, strong, quick power forward” or Griffin’s “combo of size, strength, speed, athleticism, jumping ability and nastiness?” Is Durant’s failure to fully realize his defensive upside worse than Beasley occasionally taking plays off or fading to the corner in an offensive set, or Griffin’s inability to block shots at his height or handle the ball?
Do we go by comparables? Durant has few of these “comps” outside of a “better” Tracy McGrady. Beasley was lauded as a more athletic and harder-working Derrick Coleman. Griffin most frequently draws McDyess and Boozer comps, but usually with some form of qualification, like “healthier,” or “more athletic” or “less likely to stab a blind dude in the back.” How do we even tell whose comparables are better? When these problems arise in other sports, there are usually some objective measures to fall back on. Basketball is not quite there yet.
This past week has seen a relative explosion of talk surrounding basketball statistics. From the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics conference attended, and reported on, by Bill Simmons (among others), to new statistical measures of professional basketball players based very nearly on VORP and RAA, to increased social awareness of the good work being done at BasketballProspectus and by Ken Pomeroy specifically, this was a week to be a basketball stat guy. Sure, stat-favorite Memphis went down last night and the “Rise of the 6 seed” never really materialized when West Virginia and James Harden soiled the bed, but the fact that people even understand Defensive Efficiency and Tempo-Free statistics is a giant leap from where this field was even three years ago. You can only call Calipari’s Tigers overrated or a bust if you are aware that there are statistical arguments for them as leading championship contenders.
Still, basketball statistics generally, and individual college basketball statistics particularly, have a long way to go. There are no Win Shares for Atlantic 10 athletes, VORP for Mountain West walk-ons or park-adjustments for playing in an arena with worse-than-average sight lines. So we are left with an even more incomplete picture of a player’s worth or skill set than we have in baseball. And that’s before factoring in the far greater variability in team effect on a single player and vice versa.
Here’s what I can tell you about these three players in particular:
I can tell you that all three players used an extraordinarily high percentage of their team’s possessions: Durant at 31.6%, Griffin at 31.9% and Beasley at 33.5%. This is notable for a couple of reasons. One, the leader board of this particular stat is generally dominated by great players on mid-major teams with little around them. Two, it’s also usually dominated by guards. Here we have three guys at 6’9’’ or above on major conference teams cracking the top 25 of this particular stat. Still, this doesn’t really tell us anything about how good they are, other than their coaches and teammates ran their plays through them.
I can tell you that all three were in the top 10 of Ken Pomeroy’s Offensive Rating, which judges how many points the player would score over 100 possessions. Durant and Beasley were both 5th in the nation during their freshman season, while Griffin is 10th this year, during his sophomore campaign.
I can tell you that Beasley is arguably the best rebounder, coming out largely even with Griffin on the defensive end, and outpacing him on the offensive end. Durant lags only slightly behind the other two, and that’s with 2-3 other strong rebounders on his team. All three were in the top 30 of Rebound Percentage for players who saw significant minutes in their respective years.
Griffin is a turnover machine, with some form of TO accounting for almost 19% of his possessions. Durant stuck around 14% and Beasley around 15%, both excellent numbers for players at their height and their usage rates.
Griffin is the more efficient shooter overall, putting up hilariously high True Shooting percentages and effective FG percentages. However, both Durant and Beasley held their own especially accounting for their positional differences.
None of these guys are what you would call defensive stoppers, not now and not in college. Still, Durant and Beasley blocked twice as many shots per possession as Griffin has, and that is hard to reconcile once positions and teammates are taken into account.
Griffin has no real outside game to speak of (yet), which puts him a great distance behind both Durant (40.4% over 200+ 3PA) and Beasley (38.0% over 95 3PA). This time, however, we have to account for positional differences in reverse, as Griffin is rarely asked to move more than 15 feet from the basket.
And finally, speaking of 15 footers, Griffin and Beasley each drew over 8 fouls/40 minutes, but only Beasley took advantage, hitting over 77% of his shots, while Griffin has converted less than 59% of his. Durant was no slouch, drawing 6.3 fouls/40, but knocking down well over 81%. As a result, both Durant and Beasley had 30-40 more made FTs than Griffin has this year.*
So where does this get us, if anywhere? We have no idea which scouts to believe and the statistics above can only explain so much. We are left, as ever, with more questions than we started with:
Anecdotally, this year’s Big 12 and entire college landscape is weaker than it was in 2007 or 2008. How can we factor that in? Is it even true? This year’s Big 12 is definitely shorter than in years past, but how much should that affect this discussion? Can we even effectively rank players at different positions who are asked to do different things, even if they are in the same year? Should we take into account that Kevin Durant has more or less proven himself an All-Star in the Association, while Beasley (and obviously, Griffin) could go either way? Does that make them a better college player? How much does age matter? Durant and Beasley are 6 and 3 months older, respectively, than Griffin, but already “graduated” to the next level. Does the best college player in recent memory have to sport a well-rounded game, or can he just excel beyond comparison at a few areas?** Perhaps most importantly, are we even looking in the right places?
I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. I don’t know if Blake Griffin is a better college player than Kevin Durant or Michael Beasley. I would suggest that they were close enough that I’d be more comfortable taking “the field” over Blake Griffin as the best player in college since 2002. Every day, these questions get answered in small ways, and to me, that’s much more exciting than this particular question. One can only hope that the transition to more stat-heavy analysis in basketball goes a little smoother and faster than it did in our native sport.
* I can also tell you that, after I sent her this article, my wife simply replied: “I wish you had told me it was a baseball article in a basketball article's shoes. What's up with all the statistics? I think there's some ‘it’ factor that we should leave alone with basketball. Baseball is boring. Basketball is awesome. Why try to make it more like baseball (i.e. boring)? You're going to ruin every good basketball conversation with your damn nerdy stats. Instead of just saying, ‘Whoa, that was awesome,’ it'll be ‘Whoa, his win share percentage insert other terms I don't understand blah blah blah will work out well for my fantasty league.’ Snooze.”
Our divorce is pending.
** Tangent to this question: Is Griffin the best at anything he does in college this year? He’s not the best rebounder; he’s definitely not a defensive force and he’s probably not the best pure scorer. Does that disqualify him in the discussion as the greatest college basketball player of the last half decade?