Originally Posted by
Pelicanidae
That's an absurd comparison.
Grant averaged 14/5 on 49% from the floor and 39% from three this season. He's had a double digit PER for the last four seasons. He averaged .134 WS/48 last season, put up a 0.3 BPM, and a 1.5 VORP. His team was +5.3 BETTER with him on the court than with him off it this year, and he held his opponents under their averages when he was their primary defender, including MUCH under their averages at the rim. Was he an all-star? NO. Was he a perfectly competent rotation player? Yes, he was, whereas someone like Miller is debatably not an NBA level player. Miller shot 39% from the floor, 36% from three, had a PER of 8, put up .045 WS/48, posted a -1.7 BPM and a 0.1 VORP. The Pels were only a +3.1 with Miller on the court, compared to Grant's +5.3. They're not the same calibre of player.
I'm not trying to argue that Westbrook has had a world-beating squad around him. He hasn't. But his team has been a LOT better than many other teams. He's not playing on the Bulls here, for God's sake. He isn't relying on a revolving door squad of 10 day contracts and G-Leaguers.
Again, try looking at more than one statistic. Steven Adams' 106 DRTG is solid but not great, true, but at the same time, OKC is +9.9 when he's on the court for a REASON. Why? Because he boxes out (OKC's rebounding percentage is a +5% when Adams is on court), sets screens, does the little things: that's why he ranked 14th in the league among centres in RPM, 11th in RPM wins, etc etc. He held his opponents to under their averages as primary defender, from every point on the court: opponents even shot -0.3% worse from 3 when guarded by him. No, he's not fully switchable 1 through 5, but he's better than many, and the number of bigs who legit can switch 1-5 is very small. He produces impactful minutes. He's not Alexis Ajinca or Omer Asik, guys who AD was stuck with. Again, is he perfect? No, but he's a very very good NBA player.
Wanna know something crazy? OKC's most played lineup this season was this:
Adams/Ferguson/George/Grant/Westbrook. It produced +8.3 pts per 100 on their overall averages. +0.016 FG% too. +6.2 total rebounding percentage. Good lineup.
If you take that exact same lineup and replace Westbrook with Schroder, OKC put up +23.3 points per 100, +.042 FG%, and +18.7 rebounding percentage. They even had a better assist percentage: +0.8 compared with -0.6 with Westbrook in Schroder's place. This wasn't some spot minute lineup either, it was their 4th most used 5 man lineup across the entire season: these 5 guys played over 150 minutes together as a 5 man squad. For comparison, we didn't have ANY five man lineup play that many minutes together across this season. Our most common lineup played only 138 minutes together, and that had Wesley Johnson on it.
Does that mean that Schroder is better than Westbrook? Obviously not. Does that mean that pretending that Westbrook was playing with a group of incompetents who couldn't string together meaningful basketball if not for him bailing them out is a silly thing to do that ignores reality? Yes, yes it does.