Welcome to Five Graphs, a new Posting and Toasting series where I create data visuals to help contextualize a player(s)’ statistics. Reading figures off of an NBA Stats or Basketball-Reference page can only take you so far in understanding their place in the larger data landscape. Using visual mediums allow individuals to process the information more intuitively — well, it helps me out, so I am projecting my thoughts upon the world like a true narcissist.

To begin this series, discussing Jarrett Culver and R.J. Barrett felt right. The debate between the two prospects has been quite interesting, almost to the point of polarization. Maybe it’s not really a debate; the Posting-and-Toasting-colored glasses are altering my perception, and outside of a few people from this website and others, Barrett is the overwhelming favorite. Between the two prospects, I lean more towards Culver given the current situation the Knicks are in, though I’m not “out” on Barrett. But keep in mind that I don’t actually follow college basketball and my draft thoughts should always be taken with a healthy, large, uncut grain of salt.

With that said, no matter which side of the debate you are on, or if you’re on the fence between the two, here are some key statistics on the two prospects.

True shooting and usage

Shooting is all the rage now in this era of professional basketball. Finding that happy balance between efficiency and volume is the difference between being a good player and great player. Let’s take a look at NCAA players true shooting percentages who had at least a 28 usage rate.

(If you’re interested, here is the link to the image’s interactive Tableau source.)

Both Barrett and Culver have the same 32.2 usage rate, with Culver slightly edging Barrett is true shooting. Neither Culver’s 54.2 percent nor Barrett’s 53.2 percent are impressive true shooting figures, but Culver did not have the luxury of playing with a teammate who led the NCAA in high-volume scoring efficiency like Barrett did with Zion Williamson.

Shooting charts

Let’s expand on shooting and break down shooting zones. The Stepien has a nifty tool that generates shooting charts of players. Sometimes they don’t have all the games, but enough to have about 90 percent of the total sample. Luckily for us, the majority of Barrett’s and Culver’s games are captured by The Stepien.

In the two most important areas of the court, NBA three and the rim, Culver beats out Barrett in efficiency. As three-level scorers, you can see that Barrett shoots better from short mid-range while Culver shoots better from long mid-range. Both players are going to need to improve their efficiency along the perimeter to open up their games in the NBA. That’s a given. What is going to really impact their offensive ceilings is if either player can sustain and improve upon their mid-range scoring in their respective strong zone.

Assist and turnover percentages

One thing you hear through the NBA draft grapevine is that Barrett is a skilled passer. His vision and ability to find open teammates is going to translate well to the NBA. I’m inclined to believe that, as smarter scouting prognosticators than me all pretty much agree on this. What isn’t nearly mentioned enough is Culver’s passing.

The graph below captures the top 100 college players in box-plus minus with an assist percentage between 23 and 28 percent, the range in which both Barrett and Culver fall into.

(If you’re interested, here is the link to the image’s interactive Tableau source.)

As we know from the first graph, both Barrett and Culver posted the exact same usage rates. And from this graph, we can see that Culver actually has the higher assist percentage compared to Barrett. Culver does have a slightly higher turnover percentage compared to Barrett, but not a large enough difference to really matter (0.5 percent).

R.J. Barrett “comps”

It’s rather unfortunate that when it comes to publicly available NCAA basketball stats, trying to find anything other than counting and advanced statistics is effectively impossible. Even then, Sports-Reference for college basketball does not have historical box-plus minus, usage rate, and other advanced data past this decade. No matter the case, I wanted to see who put up similar numbers to both Barrett and Culver, even if they are just counting numbers.

If you could not tell by the heading, we are starting with Barrett. The Duke freshmen averaged 22.6 points, 7.6 rebounds, and 4.3 assists per game this past season. When you run a season query on freshmen who averaged at least 22 points, seven rebounds, and four assists per game, R.J. Barrett stands alone. Being a statistical anomaly cuts both ways. The initial cut has a reaction similar to, “Wow, that’s really impressive; no player in the Sports Reference database posted per game numbers like R.J.” And if you are a subscriber to Ed Weiland’s thoughts on projecting college players, Barrett hits all the key marks — if he plays the small forward position — to be a productive, good NBA player.

The other cut, however, suggests that Barrett’s raw production numbers are an outlier, and outliers are hard to project forward and interpret because, you know, they are outliers. Since there is an unprecedented element to this, there is always the possibility that things can turn for the worse. Because of Barrett’s uniqueness, I expanded the search criteria to any class, focused on guards and forwards, and made the per game averages 20 points, seven rebounds, and four assists. Here are the results:

I have a feeling that people are going to gravitate towards Penny Hardaway’s numbers in this table, but Penny put up better numbers on noticeably better efficiency. Seeing Bonzi Wells putting up very similar numbers to Barrett is quite interesting, because I haven’t thought of Bonzi Wells in a really, really long time.

Barrett is sixth in scoring but 12th in true shooting out of 16 players. What really stands out to me, however, is that Barrett is dead last in stocks (steals + blocks). For a player with all plus physical attributes, having a worse stock per game average than Luke Jackson is truly concerning.

Jarrett Culver “comps”

Culver’s per-game averages this past season were 18.5 points, 6.4 rebounds, and 3.7 assists. Unlike Barrett, when you run a Sports Reference query with Culver’s numbers, you get a giant sample. Because of this, I made the qualifications more rigid to find similar players in a narrowed-down sample. I began with a query of all freshman and sophomore guards and forwards who qualified for the points per game leaderboard and averaged 17–20 points per game and 3–5 assists per game sorted by true shooting. I then took that list of the 100 top true shooting players and made further edits to include another filter of all players who averaged between 4.5–7.5 rebounds per game. Below is that list of players.

Evan Turner makes another appearance, but this time it is sophomore Evan Turner. Of the 29 players in this table, Culver ranks 20th in true shooting, which does not look good. However, Culver is in right in the same true shooting range as Kerry Kittles and Dwyane Wade. It’s actually kind of amazing how eerily similar Culver’s per-game numbers are to both Kittles and Wade. Culver isn’t Wade, but what about a healthy version of Kittles, who was the third best player on an NBA Finals team?

BONUS GRAPH: Synergy stats

Shout out to my good friend Spencer Pearlman for sending this broke blog boi Synergy stats for these two players. Here are the key offensive figures:

Outside of put-backs and post-ups, play types that neither player have high volume in, Culver edges Barrett in all the key offensive metrics. The pick-and-roll ball handler and isolation numbers really stand out, because Culver managed to be more efficient that Barrett with less-talented teammates and spacing equally as poor as Duke. Maybe if Cam Reddish wasn’t absolutely awful, Barrett’s numbers look better. But even then, he had Zion.

Final thoughts

Outside of counting stats, the numbers favor Jarrett Culver. And what makes these numbers fascinating is that they were effectively all offensive figures, something that, in theory, should favor Barrett. Too bad defensive metrics other than stocks are not available — or they are and my good friend Spencer isn’t actually that good of a friend — because it would be really interesting to see how that breaks down. Maybe a follow-up article? Maybe just a Twitter thread? We will see.