Brace yourselves, folks. We’re going to be talking about Markelle Fultz quite a bit this year. And it won’t all be pleasant.

Fultz does not have the profile of a hyper-efficient NBA player. Generally speaking, volume shooting point guards who lack Stephen Curry range, Russell Westbrook athleticism or Chris Paul wits tend to not lead the pack in the advanced stats field.

The college environment produced an impressively efficient iteration of Fultz. There was little doubt of his impact. But is his efficient clip translatable to the NBA?

In college, a sky-high 45.8 percent of Fultz’s total shots were two-point jump shots, on which he shot a likely unsustainable 43.8 percent. The range on his jump shot did not extend far beyond the college three-point line, as he shot just 10 attempts from NBA range all year, compared to 67 for Lonzo Ball and 39 for Dennis Smith Jr., according to Synergy. Most notably, Fultz’s field goal percentage at the rim was the lowest of the top five guards selected in this year’s draft. Dig a bit below the surface, and it’s easy to see how advanced stats may be unkind to Fultz this season.

Put it all together, and the storm of a Fultz debate is a-brewin’. We may analyze the ripening sample size of stats after 25 games to find that his true shooting percentage is below average, he’s struggling to finish around the basket and the team performs only marginally better with him on the court. An entirely logical dive into Fultz’s stats will raise some eyebrows.

So, is Fultz is an inherently inefficient player? Is Ball better? Did Danny Ainge fleece the Sixers?!

Much like debates of Sixers past, it ferments a great deal of misunderstanding. So here, I’ll attempt to mitigate the risk of such levels of misunderstanding occurring by taking a deeper look into some unquantifiable aspects of Fultz’s game. Let’s add some substance to the debate before it ever begins.

Advanced stats may not lionize Fultz. But let’s dig into some stats and film to show what, if anything, these stats may fail to capture in Fultz’s game, how they may unfairly evaluate him, and where our expectations should lie.

Gravity & The Kobe Assist

“Gravity” has become one of the NBA’s trendiest concepts in recent years. It’s commonly used to illustrate the value of a player’s ability to shoot when off the ball, equaling the gravitational pull that a player exhibits on their defender.

Fultz provides a considerable amount of gravity off the ball, particularly because of his ability to hit contested jumpers at an efficient clip. His quick footwork and high release make him practically immune to late contests.

But the most uniquely valuable part of Fultz’s game is the gravity that he provides with the ball. It’s this gravity that results in the most tangible impact: the Kobe Assist. The term, coined by Spurs VP of Strategic Research Kirk Goldsberry, refers to a missed shot that resulted in an offensive rebound and putback. Andre Drummond, last year’s league leader in putback attempts with 3.5 per game, receives a quintessential Kobe Assist from Ish Smith here.

In nearly every case, the Kobe Assist derives from a big man missing his box out assignment due to his need to help contest a shot. Fultz figures to ignite this sequence on a regular basis. Despite being, by all measures, an above average athlete, he uses his slithery, herky-jerky craftiness to attack the basket. By maneuvering shiftily along his path as opposed to stampeding, he often leaves an open invitation for help defenders to drift over to try to alter his shot. In other words, gravity.

It will often increase the difficulty of his shots, but will in turn regularly open up the opportunity for Joel Embiid put-backs. In college, Fultz was able to make these difficult shots work. But with the presence of NBA-level shot-blockers? Expect Fultz’s shots to hit rim more often – lowering his field goal percentage, but leading to Kobe Assists.

The way that stats are recorded force us to focus on the result rather than the sequence. Fultz will be credited with no more than a missed shot. In reality, his ability to attack the basket and entice help defenders was the direct cause of the made basket.

With most players, this is a small ancillary benefit of being able to attack the rim. But with Fultz, it’s particularly valuable. His craftiness in attacking the rim is both reliable and replicable, and will lead to these Kobe Assists on a regular basis. He’ll be among the best at drawing help, and his team will reap the benefit far more than the average player. Hence how the term became called “Kobe assists.”

Expect Fultz to produce ample Kobe Assists out of the pick and roll as well. His elite pull-up jump shot provides a gravitational pull that figures to bring sagging big men out of the paint, allowing the Sixers’ big men to creep into the paint and establish inside position like Drummond does here.

Quantifying the Kobe Assist

But exactly how much value does the propensity to create Kobe Assists have? The key matter in interpreting the data is finding how frequently one player can create Kobe Assists. After all, if all NBA guards create a relatively equal amount of Kobe Assists, there’s no real discussion here. No publicly available data tracks Kobe Assists, or even the events following a player’s missed shot attempt. But there are a few pieces of data that help provide clarity.

Through looking at ESPN’s game log data, I was able to track guards’ missed layups from this year’s college season.

Missed Layups Off Reb off Layups Percentage M. Fultz 43 19 44% D. Fox 69 21 30% L. Ball 21 13 62% D. Smith Jr. 54 16 29%

With the exception of Ball, who attacked the basket in very low volumes and with multiple first-round picks in his front court, Fultz’s missed shots create an impressively higher rate of offensive rebounds. For reference, data from 82games.com that tracked the 2003-04 NBA season calculated that 34 percent of missed layups were offensive rebounded, though the overall number is likely to be lower for guards as their shot attempts rarely ignite the pinball-type offensive rebounding sequences that big men’s attempts do.

While the sample size with this data is extremely limited, it does back up the eye test that a player like Fultz will free up his teammates for more offensive rebounds than other players.

The Verdict

It’s reasonable to expect Fultz to produce only one or two Kobe Assists in any given game. That number sounds trivial, but over the course of season, it will add up to have a material impact on his efficiency numbers.

For the sake of debating Fultz, his gravity and the Kobe Assist should absolutely be factored into the discussion surrounding his efficiency and value. While Ball figures to have higher percentages due to his low volume in attacking the rim and allergy to pull-up midrange jump shots, the on and off-ball gravity that Fultz provides is invaluable, though mostly uncaptured.

To write off Fultz’s ability to get to the rim as inherently inefficient ignores the tangible points that his drives will create while also assuming that he sacrificed an opportunity for a more efficient shot. Placing the entire interpretation of the play on its statistical outcome prioritizes the measure of the statistic over the actual happenings of the game.

Such is the danger of simplifying Fultz’s offensive ability to his percentages. While we can only measure the concrete outcomes of each play, the sequences that create them are a culmination of multiple players’ skillsets and how teams defend them. In the process, we alienate the “wholesome value” that a player like Fultz brings. And Fultz should make us reconsider whether we value efficiency for the sake of efficiency, or for the sake of winning basketball.