FanPost

Winston, not Bridges, will be the most valuable MSU player

*intro paragraph rehashing what everyone else has written twenty times this summer better than I would have*

Michigan State is loaded this year. They have two projected top ten picks in Jaren Jackson and Miles Bridges. They bring back what should be improved sophomores in Josh Langford, Nick Ward, and Cassius Winston. Something something Carter Schilling back frontcourt depth, you get it.

MSU’s offense will improve drastically for all the aforementioned reasons. Writing "Preseason NPOY Miles Bridges" would usually be enough explanation, but I have my concerns about how much his productivity will warrant those kind of postseason accolades. My personal rationale for why I think it’ll improve is that I think Winston showed signs as a freshman of being a truly elite playmaker this upcoming year.

Since the 2009-10 season, there have been just four high major conference freshman that have posted an assist rate better than 35%: Kendall Marshall (UNC 2010-11), Jawun Evans (Oklahoma State 2015-16), Markelle Fultz (Washington 2016-17), and Cassius Winston (Michigan State 2016-17). While Fultz went off to the NBA, Marshall and Evans came back to lead much improved offenses.

1RrELvm.0.html

Based on their individual numbers, I think Winston’s freshman stats are somewhat in the middle of Evans and Marshall but leaning more towards what Evans’ end of the spectrum. While some of this could be cherrypicking/hindsight bias (which: eh, it might be and also let's not check times where I was wrong), I was pretty high on Evans going into his sophomore year due to his unique statistical profile. What originally piqued my interest was trying to find players who also had Denzel Valentine’s unique blend of high-usage, passing, and shooting when I stumbled upon him. There are a few things that lead me to believe Winston won’t be as good as Evans in his second year (1. Evans was incredible as a soph 2. Evans is probably a better athlete 3. Evans always had 3-4 shooters on the floor 4. They got a lot of efficient FGAs in transition) but I think there are more than enough similarities to make the comparison.

While being able to create opportunities for teammates is obviously important, another hallmark of being a great PG is being able to create for yourself when the play breaks down. However, I don’t think traditional box scores are always able to capture whether or not a player is really creating for himself, or if he’s just benefitting from a good offensive scheme that creates open shots. One stat that I look at often and I believe is underutilized comes from hoop-math which uses play-by-play to track what percentage of three-pointers made are assisted on. Using Bryn Forbes as an example of a spot-up shooter, in his two years at MSU he had 182 made three-pointers with 175 of them being assisted giving him a combined "%assisted 3s" of 96.1%. A player who was a bit more self-reliant in his time in college was D’Angelo Russell who made 94 threes with 50 of them being assisted giving him a %assisted 3s of 53.2%. For the purposes of making a chart where the best results are in the top right, I changed it to 1-%assisted 3s so it’s really what-percentage-of-your-3s-are-unasssisted.

QqKYJm0.0.html

I included most of the significant B1G perimeter players since the 2011-12 season with Marshall (2012 only) and Evans added in. There were some players I didn’t include because 1. Including everyone would’ve taken forever 2. They weren’t interesting and would’ve just fallen somewhere in the middle on both axes (Dekker, Marble, etc.).

To run through some of the extreme examples quickly:

- Forbes as a senior in the top left only had 3.6% of his 3s being unassisted while making his 3s at a 48.1% clip

- JaQuan Lyle as a freshman in the bottom right had 61.3% of his 3s being unassisted while making his 3s at a 25.2% clip

- Jordan Hulls as a junior in the top right had 45.8% of his 3s being unassisted while making his 3s at a 49.3% clip (damn hulls you scary)

With some players have multiple seasons represented on here, you can somewhat see what kind of shots they probably took and how that affected their 3P%. Nigel Hayes and Drew Crawford were a couple guys who had ~40% shooting seasons as spot-up shooters (~5% unassisted) followed by years where they shot ~30% shooting with ~30% of their 3s being unassisted. A good chunk of that dip is due to having to take on a larger load as Crawford no longer had John Shurna and Hayes (with Koenig) had to lead a Wisconsin team that lost 5 of their top 7 players.

I think once you understand what’s going on in the chart it’s pretty self-explanatory why I’m encouraged by what Winston did as a freshman. That cluster in the upper-right area is a group of some of the best guards in the B1G in the past six seasons with some exceptions (e.g., Lyle, Jackson).

The most obvious example of NBA player combing good 3P shooting with creating off the dribble is Steph Curry who has absolutely insane consistency.

c3BDa38.0.html

(the stat is %assisted 3s which is the normal stat and not %unassisted 3s which is what the graph uses)

Let's just say it's a good thing for a PG to have.

Because I don’t know how to finish articles, I’m going to just say it: I’m optimistic for a sophomore Jawun Evans-lite season from Winston. In my opinion, he’ll be the most important player on this MSU squad. He’ll have better players surrounding him than Evans had and probably more similar to the UNC squad Marshall was on which was preseason #1 and earned a 1 seed.



This is a FanPost, written by a member of the TOC community. It does not represent the official positions of The Only Colors, Inc.--largely because we have no official positions.