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Possibly, is the answer, as unsatisfying as that might be.
This isn't directly related to Zion coming back on Thursday, but I also thought it didn't deserve it's own thread and this is the most recent 'Zion' thread.
In preparation for his return, which should be Any Day NowTM, I decided to go back and rewatch a bunch of his college games, just to get a refreshed look at him. I haven't watched him play a full game since Pre-Season, so while I remembered that he was great and athletic and dominant and had great touch, etc, some of the details had gone a little hazy in the back of my mind. It's easy to forget greatness when you haven't seen it in a while and so much other basketball has been going on.
So I picked out a random bunch of games, basically just limited to full games that are easily available on YouTube so that I could have full slow-mo/speed-up control at multiple variables, and I watched 'em. I also took note of their statlines, but along with that I measured a couple of stats that don't actually make it to the box score. Those stats were simple: I measured shots contested (and by that I mean legit contests, not just being stood near the shooter), as well as boxouts, deflections, dunks, and (most importantly for me) potential assists.
Potential assists has been measured by me as being any pass Zion made directly to somebody to put them in position to score. Most of the time this is him passing out of a double team to a shooter who just missed the shot, but sometimes it's out to a shooter who decided not to shoot for some reason (even if they were open, I guess they just didn't trust themselves to take the shot) or to a shooter who was fouled before being able to put the shot up. Unsurprisingly, he had a LOT of potential assists. Sadly, Duke was just a bad shooting team so a lot of his great passes went unrewarded.
Here are some of those games. For reference, a team-high for the Pelicans in total contests usually ends up somewhere around 10, the league leaders in deflections per game in the NBA hover around 4 most years, and about 6 boxouts per game will usually lead the league. So that just puts these stats a little more into context.
Game 1: Duke v Virginia Tech
Zion Final Line: 23 points, 6 rebounds, 1 ast, 1 steal, 3 blocks. 78.4%FG (11/14)
Potential Assists: 7
Deflections: 3
Dunks: 3
Boxouts: 4
2pt Contests: 5
3pt Contests: 5
Game 2: Duke v Louisville
Zion Final Line: 27 points, 12 rebounds, 3 steals, 1 block, 60.0%FG (9/15)
Potential Assists: 6
Deflections: 3
Dunks: 0
Boxouts: 4
2pt Contests: 6
3pt Contests: 5
Game 3: Duke v UCF
Zion Final Line: 32 points, 11 rebounds, 4 assists, 1 steal. 50%FG (12/24)
Potential Assists: 4
Deflections: 4
Dunks: 1
Boxouts: 6
2pt Contests: 6
3pt Contests: 1
Game 4: Duke v Wake Forest
Zion Final Line: 30 points, 10 rebounds, 5 assists, 4 steals, 1 block. 81.3% (13/16)
Potential Assists: 5
Deflections: 2
Dunks: 3
Boxouts: 4
2pt Contests: 4
3pt Contests: 2
This dude is ridiculous.
So hype for him coming back soon.
That UCF game was one of his most impressive.
The thing I forgot about his game (lost in the whole "all he does is dunk" BS I was seeing on twitter) is that Zion actually is capable of taking 3s. For some reason, I had it in my head that he had to work inside to have any impact, and it's just not true. I really can't wait to see him on the floor and see what he does in live action.
I argued this before with the "all he does is dunk" crowd. He really doesn't dunk as often as people think. He can go an entire game, score 30, and not even attempt a dunk.
Charles Barkley, in all his research, talked about Zion going too hard. If you watch the guy play, he really doesn't. I'll say again he plays like someone who has been playing basketball since they were 5 and wasn't ruined by too much AAU. Zion is not one of these awkward late bloomers. He has way more basketball skills coming into the league than Anthony Davis did.
That’s his greatest asset. His low handle and ball control. He knives through defenses and if you collapse on him, he finds the open man. If you come soft he’ll score. And if you come strong, he may still score, but will almost certainly get to the line. And if he does miss, our other players would need to be asleep to not crash in and clean up.
These are things he’ll do right now. As a raw(ish) rookie. Nevermind once he starts to evolve his game. Dunking will be the least deadly thing he does to teams.
Absolutely. I've been talking about this since before the draft :hihi:
Basically, Zion shot horrifically badly over his first 12 games or so. About 17% from 3. It was bad. And that terrible start to the year depressed his 3pt shooting numbers for the rest of the season.
But if you look at his progression it's easy to see that he was a pretty decent 3pt shooter overall. In his final 7 games (tournament play) he shot 43.5% from 3 on more than 3 attempts per game. That's legitimately good. And if you look at his final 15 games, you get 41.2% from 3 on 2.3 attempts per game.
He's not going to be a sniper in the NBA, at least not year one, and he won't be doing it on super high volume: his release is a little awkward and way too slow to it to be his primary weapon. But if you leave him alone on the perimeter, he is perfectly willing to shoot it and is perfectly capable of hitting them. He's not a Ben Simmons :hihi:
Absolutely true. It really stuck out to me when I was rewatching these games. He does have highlight dunks, of course, we've all seen them, but he tends to do those either in transition or when he catches the defense sleeping and is soaring in from somewhere to catch a lob or a putback. When he's actually generating his own shot, he's far more likely to go for a layup off the glass or a scoop shot, both of which he's elite at even when contested.
Agreed as well. He's a rookie and only 19 so he obviously has a lot of growth to go through before he reaches his peak, but he's not walking into the NBA a project. This dude will be able to play and make an impact immediately: he is good at basketball, and people should never underrate that.
I took a look at Zion's college stats, to have a kind of rough predictor of what his NBA stats this season might look like (I know, a fool's errand).
In college he averaged 22.6 points per game on 70.2%TS, and put up 3.9%STL and 5.8%BLK.
I said okay, well what if at the NBA level he put up something like, say, 17ppg on 65%TS with 2%STL and 2%BLK? That's impressive, certainly, but I didn't think it would be breaking any records. So I threw those into Basketball Reference to see how many players in NBA history had done that in a season before. I expected a fair number of results: 17ppg is a lot but not elite, 65%TS is a lot but a lot of players have been dunk machines, and while 2%STL and 2%BLK are both very good numbers they're not really ''lead the league'' territory.
So here's the full list of players to ever do that at least once in a season:
- Charles Barkley
That's it, that's the list.
So I lowered it. What about 15ppg on 60%TS with 2%STL and 1.5%BLK? Here's the list
- Charles Barkley x2
- Anthony Davis x2
- James Harden x4
- Lebron James x3
- Bobby Jones
- Michael Jordan x2
- Kawhi Leonard x2
- David Robinson
- Metta World Peace (only 291 minutes played)
That's a pretty bonkers list, and I thought I was being semi-reasonable :hihi:
Going to sleep seemed to get their attention
Zion caught sleeping on the bench? pic.twitter.com/xobRYaqh3D
— House of Highlights (@HoHighlights) January 14, 2020
That's meditation, homes.
Couple more Zion games watched, hustle plays/none-box-score-things counted up.
Game 5: Duke v Notre Dame
Zion’s Final Line: 26 points, 9 rebounds, 4 assists, 1 steal, 4 blocks. 83.3% (10/12)
Potential Assists: 11
Deflections: 2
Dunks: 0
Boxouts: 6
2pt Contests: 5
3pt Contests: 2
Game 6: Duke v Syracuse
Zion’s Final Line: 35 points, 10 rebounds, 1 assist, 1 steal, 4 blocks. 60.0% (12/20)
Potential Assists: 7
Deflections: 2
Dunks: 1
Boxouts: 5
2pt Contests: 6
3pt Contests: 3
Game 7: Duke v Boston College
Zion’s Final Line: 16 points, 17 rebounds, 3 assists, 4 steals, 3 blocks. 58.3% (7/12)
Potential Assists: 3
Deflections: 2
Dunks: 0
Boxouts: 6
2pt Contests: 4
3pt Contests: 1
Again, 3 games here, 1 dunk total. This idea that many people have (not on this board btw, just in general) that Zion scores everything on dunks is completely divorced from reality. Does he dunk? Of course he does, and it's spectacular when he does, but he can go entire games without dunking and still put up 26 points on 10/12 shooting.
Essentially, across the 7 games I've watched and gathered this data from (a little over 20% of Zion's college games), he's averaged (per game)
6 Potential Assists
3 Deflections
1.12 dunks
5 boxouts
7.9 shot contests
Those are extremely encouraging numbers. Glad to have spent some time get reacquainted with his game too, he's so fun to watch. His on-ball/point-of-attack defense is so impressive, and that will translate immediately even if the off-ball stuff takes time. There are moments where he kind of goes inactive, particularly when it comes to off-ball defense, and those generally come when Duke was up 20 points or something. Crunch time though? When games get close, the motor revs up and in a bunch of these games it was when the score was tightest that he played at his best. The only exception, I think, would be the Syracuse game, where he played 44 minutes and was clearly gassed by the end of it: that was the game that Cam Reddish missed and Tre Jones left with injury 6 minutes in.
Those 6 potential assists per game are what entice me the most. In college, he was whipping these great passes out to guys like Jack White (27.8% 3pt shooter), RJ Barrett (30.8%), Cam Reddish (33.3%) and Tre Jones (26.2%). In our games, in the NBA, these passes will be going to guys like JJ Redick, Brandon Ingram, E'twaun Moore; guys that can actually shoot C&S jumpers. He could easily average 4.5, 5 assists per game at the NBA level without even improving his playmaking skills at all, and when he does improve in that area? Could be truly special.
You're right, that's a great game. Just did a rewatch of that one as well.
Duke v Pitt
Zion’s Final Line: 25 points, 7 rebounds, 7 assists, 2 steals, 1 block. 84.6%FG (11/13)
Potential Assists: 9
Deflections: 2
Dunks: 2
Boxouts: 3
2pt Contests: 6
3pt Contests: 1
I think this is also a fantastic example of something that happens a lot in Zion's games. While yes, he does put up pretty solid contest numbers, they're nothing crazy for a guy who so obviously is interested in defending on ball (hence the high steal/block rates along with deflections). Why is that? Well, it's simple: a lot of guys will, when Zion gets switched on to them, simply refuse to take a shot. This is the best possible outcome of all defense, better than any contest or block. Guys get switched onto Zion, think about his lateral quickness, his good hands, his strength, his athleticism, his low foul rate (he registered more steals than fouls at Duke total) and they just say ''...nah, not today'' and pass it away.
I'm just gonna say it...Lebron and Zion in the dunk contest would probably be the most watched television event in the last 50 years.
But it wont happen because too many ignorant people labeling Zion as strictly a dunker. They did the same to LeBron early which is why he's avoided the contest forever.
Stupid people.
You're probably right but there are just so many obstacles.
If Lebron wasn't going to do it when he was 29, years after proving he was more than just a dunker, he's not gonna do it at 35 when his athleticism is in clear decline.
Zion coming off an injury so soon before all-star weekend means he probably won't be cleared by the team to participate in extra-curriculars like that.
NBA itself seems to recognise that they're short on new talent to put in the dunk contest so that's probably why they're trying to get Dwight to return somehow despite him not being a particularly impressive leaper anymore. They could always try and get Jax to participate though, he's great. He can do a between the legs from the FT line
im just glad to be able to see my team star rookie play in a nba game this season because im tired of seeing morant show out this season knowing i wanted us to pick him over zion...
Any official word on whether Zion will be making his debut tomorrow? I'm waiting for a bleacher report / ZSPN notification on my phone as I'm definite they'll want to televise the game.
LESPN just put out a piece on Get Up (I saw via YouTube) that he's expected to play tomorrow.
And another reporter also said a few days ago that Zion will not necessarily be on a minutes restriction. They will play him in 5/6 minutes at a time and see how he does.
Don't know whether to call that official or not.
When does the injury report come out?
Season ticket holders about to get what they paid for?!?! :)
Come on Griffin - let Zion dance ! :cool:
Breaking: The Pelicans expect Zion Williamson to make his regular-season debut next Wednesday, Jan. 22, against the Spurs. pic.twitter.com/o9rHOccxCe
— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) January 15, 2020
Everyone guessed wrong. LOL
Griff. Trolling. LOL
Can we update the title of thread now that we have our answer?
So just confirms LESPN just says anything they want. To hell with actual journalism and facts.
i thought they were going to do it big and send him out against the clippers or boston on the 18 or 26 for the national tv games......
the spurs game is a Wednesday so can they flex so espn or nbatv can pick the game up?...
Are you kidding me? HE IS 100% HEALTHY. If we go out and go 0-3 until he returns, there will be the built in excuse to play a handful of games then rest him because we are realistically out of the playoff hunt. I’m not normally a conspiracy guy, but this seems like Griff trying to show how much smarter he is. I want my teams to try to win. I hated the way we were fed to Boston. Zion couldn’t have helped?
For the people with the “we have him 7 years, and this will be better in the long term” argument, what does it matter if he isn’t playing? The things he will need to learn as a rookie have been moved to his second year. His “rookie wall” will happen next year. Then he sits again next year?
FRUSTRATED!
At the minimum, he should of debuted against the Grizzlies. We are chasing them for that final playoff spot.
Kinda disappointing but hey... I’m not a doctor. I’m not part of the staff....
So this is just me talking out of my a** like the fan that I am haha.
Pelicans want two more practices - 17th and 19th. Pels play on the road on the 20th. Debut set against to come against the Spurs next week if all goes according to plan. https://t.co/wJB28AVmYF
— Andrew Lopez (@_Andrew_Lopez) January 15, 2020
It's happening finally ...
"Our anticipation is that he'll play his first game on the 22nd at home vs. San Antonio"
— New Orleans Pelicans (@PelicansNBA) January 15, 2020
Full statement from @dg_riff on the return of @ZionWilliamson ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/t889IPH0aZ
He said they are going to watch him closely and his mechanics are an important part of that. Griff also says Zion is a "radically improved" version of himself.
— Shamit Dua (@FearTheBrown) January 15, 2020
David Griffin: "Every objective measure, Zion is better than he was better than the preseason"
— Shamit Dua (@FearTheBrown) January 15, 2020
Talks about how subjective measures are different
Transcription of this:
''So, I wanted to let everybody know in light of all the speculation that's been going on out there and people frankly just taking wild guesses as to when Zion is going to come back, that based on today's practice - that was not terribly intense because we're still somewhat the walking wounded - we're going to continue trying to get him some reps in practice. We hope to have a slightly more intense practice on either the 17th or 19th. Assuming all goes well and that he is cleared by then, which he is not quite yet, our anticipation is that he'll play his first game on the 22nd at home against San Antonio. This process has been one that's been really really good, we've learned a lot more than we've probably taught him, frankly, but we're getting to the point where we actually think he's as ready as he feels he is, so everything's moving in the right direction.''
Gotta say though, I am getting a bit impatient by this point. I've tried to type up a comment kind of explaining why that is without sounding petulant a few times, and I can't :hihi: it's a combination of feeling like the front office has been very opaque and evasive, along with the mild disdain Griff's comment in that interview seems to have about the idea of fan speculation, combined with the slippery inexactness of the ''our anticipation'' aspect of his comment.
Full Griff interview. Will do transcript below.
Transparency is a major issue at this point in the NBA. With the introduction of legalized gambling, online ticket services, twitter, etc., there is way too much at stake to have such an extreme divide between fanbases and front offices. I know that Nets fans are just as frustrated as we are with all of the Kyrie issues, same with Blake Griffin and the Pistons. Why not just come out on Monday when the tweets dropped and say hey this likely is not the case. We know David Griffin is on twitter and saw the news. Instead, thousands of people bought tickets in preparation for the game and those people essentially paid hundreds over value just to see Zion. Griffin had to have known that would be the case.
You are 2 hours late :)
https://www.pelicansreport.com/showt...anuary-15-2020
Griff Transcript:
He opens up with the quote that I already transcribed above, so I won't re-do that bit. Questions will be paraphrased, answers will be transcribed close to verbatim.
Question: How frustrating has the speculation been, given the Pelicans history?
Answer: ''Yeah, it's frustrating only from the standpoint of trust. You know, with the player and with our family here internally. Those decisions weren't even reached until this morning when the medical team got together with myself, with Zion, and we sort of arrived at a place where we can tell where we are. So anybody that was guessing before wasn't getting it from anybody that actually knew, so that's really frustrating, because the only people who actually knew anything during the process was the medical team and the player. So for us to have anybody say anything different it certainly didn't come from our side, so it was frustrating, and it obviously wasn't the player either, it was just people throwing darts trying to take a stab at it.''
Question: How did you arrive at the 22nd?
Answer: ''Based on where we're at based on timing, how far away he is, there are some league protocols in place from a return-from-injury, a return-to-play standpoint where you can't just go from 'out' to playing a game [my personal note: weird, cause that happens all the time on injury reports lol] and so as we look at the timeline and the liklihood for when he gets his best work and when we can put him in the best position moving forward we feel like that's the right time. Practice has been complicated, because of our schedule and then you add to it how many injured bodies we've had, we've obviously brought the G League 2 way guys here [...] yesterday the work that Zion did was as good as I've seen, better than he was in the pre-season, so we feel like he'll be a bigger better version of himself going forward but the timing has been difficult.''
Question: What kind of thresholds has Zion had to meet?
Answer: ''So I mean, I think in terms of the tests that we've been asking him to pass and things that we've been judging him on, there's several of them. Almost all of them are entirely objective, so just numbers from when he was healthy previously to now, and in every objective measure his numbers are better frankly. There are a couple of those tests that are a little more subjective and a little more about the eye test, and in those tests there are still things that we feel like since he's taken this long already, we've let him go through the process to the degree we have, and frankly it's not let him; it's put him through the process, if we've taken this much time we want it look right when we let him go.''
Question: Do we know what the minutes restriction will look like when he comes back?
Answer: ''Yeah, we won't do a minutes restriction and this is something that in general terms we sort of philosophically disagree on. It's not about a hard number, it's about what the bursts need to look like, it's what you're measuring him by. So when you return to play from a serious injury it's not going to be a number, it's going to be that he's going to play in bursts and you're going to judge those subjectively in terms of what he looks like.''
Question: What has the atmosphere in the coaching staff/among players/among the FO regarding Zion's return and anticipation for it been like?
Answer: ''I don't think our players had anxiousness at all because they know that when it's time he'll come back, I think there's a great deal of trust in that regard. From a coaching perspective, the anxiousness has been more related to the fact that they had to play a game the other night without 6 of our top 8 rotational players that we thought when we were coming into the season, so it's really complicated from a coaching perspective, so certainly their anxiety level's a little higher, they have to find a way to doctor up what we have and win a game in that particular situation and obviously they did, and I think the team has a great deal of grit and toughness and they know what it takes to win, and we're certainly cultivating more winning habits.''
Question: When Zion returns what will management look like for the rest of the year?
Answer: ''I mean I think from a sustaining health standpoint you're certainly going to teat him differently. His return to play protocol will be such that I don't think we're going to want to play him back to backs for example but you're going to just have to see how it looks. [...] Watching him go about his business will have a great deal of impact day to day. ''
Question: Did you ever consider sitting him for the full year?
Answer: ''No, and he didn't consider it either. The nature of his injury wasn't such that that was called for. You know, other players that have had to make that determination, in almost every case they had a much more significant surgery. Blake Griffin fractured a kneecap: that's a different issue. Zion knew from the very beginning that he was going to play and he's wanted to play; he's told you that he hasn't been overly happy with me that he hasn't played yet. So it was never a thought that he wasn't going to play.''
Question: After 41 games how do you evaluate the team as a whole?
Answer: ''I don't know that we know enough to know that. It would be disingenuous to say that I know what we are. Frankly a lot of the pieces that we have are going to look better in the presence of Zion, we built the team knowing what it was going to look like in that way and the absence of Derrick Favors for what basically amounted to a month of games you could see that we were just searching, so coming down the stretch where we're healthier, playing against a schedule that's not quite as difficult, for our coaches to have to field a team with the most games lost due to injury and the toughest schedule against at one point, that's tough. We just need to find out what we're capable of being. I think what's most exciting about our group is that you can tell we've got a lot of really good young talent, we've got veterans that love being with that young talent and we have a group that really likes each other. In the times when we weren't playing well, we didn't fracture, and I think that makes us optimistic that when we're healthy we can be pretty good.''
Question: It's interesting you bring up Blake: with Blake, they said he had to get leaner but were worried about him losing his power. How does Zion keep that power?
Answer: ''Yeah so I don't think in the Blake case it was necessarily a leaner situation that makes him share anything with Zion, it's the amount of torque they generate, they're so big and strong and explosive that they just generate more torque than other people. It's physics. So in terms of the similarities there are some but from our standpoint the thing that made it stand out and the reason I mentioned Blake is simply that, it's not really about the lean part. It's about how do you give a guy who manifests muscle as fast as he does to give him the power he needs.''
Question: One of the benefits of being out so long is that it gives time to work on things outside the knee. What's been going on with his mechanics?
Answer: ''Yeah so, we've already talked about the concept of 'teaching him how to walk again', which is sort of preposterous, but really it's just the whole kinetic chain. You're addressing everything you're addressing ankle flexion, then knees, then hips, then back, and everything else and I think what's happened is that his overall kinetic chain is in a much better position, and I think he's more flexible and when you make someone more flexible you have to give them the strength to control that flexibility and it's been a dance, it has been, but he's now able to do some things physically that he wasn't able to do before, particularly because of the flexion in his ankles and his hips.''
Question: Can you understand why fans are a little confused when you originally said 6-8 weeks, then you said no setbacks, and now we're talking 13 weeks plus?
Answer: ''Yeah, I get that, sure, and I'm appreciative of that, but at the same time my job isn't to stick to the initial timeline it's to put him in the best position to succeed, and I get the frustration of it but I'd also hope that we're at a trust level right now where we're going to do the right thing for the kid long term and that's what we made the determination to do.''
Absolutely agreed. Especially when the front office goes silent over stuff. From Griff's interview mid-December where he said that Zion had to meet internal standards before coming back, we've heard from him (I think) once, basically to say that we wanted to have 2 or 3 practices before Zion played. During that time, multiple ''possible return dates'' have flown around in the media, whether from adventuring reporters looking for clickbait or from fans who think they have a pretty good guess.
If Griff is online enough to respond to Shamit when he makes a tweet asking whether Frank Jackson does anything other than score, then he's online enough to see all this stuff and realise what a confusing mess it comes out as, and to clarify it. We know he's not shy, he's willing to talk: he did it all summer. So why be quiet now, when there are so many questions regarding the guy that many of us think is the core of our franchise for the next decade?