

Follow up with my previous post about passing, I spent a bit more time dig into the guards assist numbers of last season.

First of all, I tried to look into player assist impact on the team FG%. I looked into the FGA and FGM numbers out of a player's pass. A lot of times, a pass is received and the receiver might post it up, do an iso or get a screen and then shoot the ball, those passes not necessarily is credited as an assist opportunity. However, the FG% out of a player's pass in certain degree reflected how good this player is as a floor general. Since in addition to direct pass results in assists, how good they could distribute the ball and how fast they could identify a miss match, or a weak spot, and then deliver the ball and let his teammate do the work is also important.

From the total team FGA and FGM, it is not that hard to derive the FGA and FGM outside of a player's pass. Comparing these two sets of numbers gives me a +/- FG%, which I take as an indication of how much a player is making their teammates better.

In this table, some key player of hornets were listed. Kemba had the lowest +/- FG%, and AI had the highest.

I also calculated the FGA/pass %. This gives an indication about what percentage of a player's pass are meant for their teammates to score. Usually if one pass it to a teammates who had a mismatch, or were left open, that will end up as a FGA. However, if one could not deliver the ball timely, or kept missing their open teammates, even they pass the ball, it might not end up as a FGA. For a guard, that number reflected how willingly or actively they are trying to set their teammates up.

However, that number could be watery if you play with some ball hogs who would shoot everything, (e.g. Lin ), and opposite is true too, if your teammate don't want to shoot, you will get lower FGA/pass % (e.g. Kemba). However, compare to Mo and Lance, Kemba's 26.3% pass for FGA is a bit low, and hopefully he would trust his teammates a bit more next season.

Next I tried to look into different types of shots that player assist to.

I group the shot assisted into 5 groups, at rim, close shots, mid range, long 2s and then 3s. Usually the most efficient shots are at rim, close to basket and 3s. Long 2s are consider not that efficient shots.

So based on the assist distribution, Lin and Mo Williams has very similar tendency in give high percentage of assist to at rim shots, and total more than 50% of assist were lead to either at rim or less than 8 ft close shots. On the other hand, Lance and Kemba gives out significant higher percentage of assist to 3 point shots, and much lower at rim assists.

Lastly, by align teammates' FG% from or not from a passer gives out some indications on which pair works better together and which pair don't work out well.

Within Hornets team, I noticed that Mo Williams works really well with AI Jefferson, and not that bad with Lance too.

AI is not the highest pass receiver from Mo last season, but 55% of those passes end up as FGA, 30% of Mo's assist went to AI. On the other hand, AI's pass to Mo is on point too.

On the other hand, it is equally obvious that somehow Hornets guards don't work well together somehow. Both Mo/Kemba and Kemba/Lance did not shoot well from other guard's pass.

I did not dig too much for Batum and Lin since they play on a different team, with different set of teammates, thus those numbers might not mean too much. But one thing is obvious for Batum: He somehow helped pretty much everyone on the team to have better 2FG%, which is pretty amazing. oh, yeah, all his pass for 3 pointer went to Lillard and Matthews.

And for Lin, I had to mention his chemistry with Ed Davis, the LED connection was really strong starting from the preseason, everyone could tell except for Byron Scott.

So the first half of the season when Lin was starting, Ed come off the bench, and when the line up was adjusted, Ed was starting and Lin came off the bench. Those two was hardly play together on court. And after all star game, Lin was finally given some time to play more together with Ed, and Ed post-ASG is having a FG% from Lin's pass of 90.6%! How sad it is that those two were playing together on a team do not want to win. I really hope Lin and Zellers could develop this kind of chemistry this season.