by Pete
So Ricky Rubio has landed. He has finally come to America to play for the lowly Timberwolves alongside Kevin Love, Michael Beasley and self-described future superstar Derrick Williams.
The world is up in arms about Rubio because his stats for his club team in Barcelona last year seem lackluster: 22.7 MPG, 6.5 PPG, 3.2 RPG, 3.6 APG. Based on last year’s NBA stats, that pretty much makes him Mario Chalmers. Not exactly what you want from a No. 5 overall pick. But can we judge his Euro performance by our NCAA/NBA standards?
The basketball media is constantly talking about how different the European game is. In fact, the European game is so different that Fran Friscilla has become the Mel Kiper of European basketball and got more face time than Jan Vesely’s girlfriend at this year’s draft.[1]
Comparing Rubio’s stats to his teammates he’d be the fifth highest scorer on the team. In theory, that would situate him as the T’Wolves’ starting point guard. A quick perusal of fifth best scorers on all 30 NBA teams last year puts Rubio somewhere between Shawne Williams and Rajon Rondo. That’s a huge window. If he ends up playing like Shawne Williams, we’ll obviously call him a bust. But should his career emulate or exceed Rajon Rondo’s then David Kahn will look like a genius.
If we normalize Rubio’s stat line to his entire league, however, could we perhaps get a more concrete player comparison? Barcelona’s top scorer was NBA castoff Juan Carlos Navarro at 15.7 PPG. The MVP was Dimitris Diamantidis of Panathinaikos (12.6 PPG, 6 APG). The EuroLeague’s top scorer? Keith Langford at 18.7 PPG for BC Khimki. On the Timberwolves Rubio would score closer to 8.5 PPG. Normalized to his new league’s top scorer, Rubio’s PPG would go up to around 11.5 PPG. His assist totals would move up to 6.8 per game. So essentially a reasonable – yet high – performance by Rubio for the 2011-2012 season (provided there is one) is somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 PPG and 6.8 APG. Those statistics would situate him at about 25th among PGs for scoring, and about 13th for assists. Certainly those numbers don’t light the world on fire. But they happen to situate Rubio’s statistical performance in league with both of the PGs from the NBA Champion Dallas Mavericks: Kidd 7.9 PPG, 8.2 APG, Barea 9.5 PPG, 3.9 APG. So maybe we should lay off ripping on Rubio until we’ve really figured out how the European game translates to the NBA. After all, didn’t most of the world just revise its view on “the best foreign-born player ever in the NBA”?[2]
More importantly, the statistics revolution in basketball has yet to solidify. Because baseball is a repeated series of one-on-on confrontations, advanced metrics have an intuitive and immediate validity. For basketball, however, we can’t yet be as certain.[3]
So what do we know? We know that an acceptable range of expectation for Rubio – according to the numbers – is from the unexceptional and confusing career of Shawne Williams to the championship pedigree of Rajon Rondo. More likely, his stats will compare to the indomitable Mario Chalmers, who appears to have the basketball IQ of a pancake.
Yet for those of us first exposed to Rubio in the 2008 Beijing Olympics Gold Medal Game, our Budweiser eyes told us something different. Despite 6 points on 1-3 shooting (4/4 FTs), 6 rebounds, and 3 assists, Rubio showed flashes of court command that rivaled Pete Maravich (there I go comparing again). So how do we reconcile our eyes and the numbers?
We don’t. If this year’s NBA Finals taught us anything it is that a whole slew of people can be wrong without anyone actually being right. Let’s not forget that Ricky Rubio is only 20 years old. Let us not forget that he’s about to play for a young, struggling, traditionally bad NBA franchise. Let’s just give the kid a break and let him play 20 games before we sell him up the river.
But if he turns out to be the basketball messiah, I have dibs on titling him “The Greatest Under-Seven-Foot Spanish Basketball Player Ever”.
[1] Nevermind that by the end of the draft no one had any idea who the players were and the NBA teams were just picking cool names.
[2] The comedy of this title is unending. Dirk constantly outperformed the general media’s woefully ignorant expectations, only to be given this foolish and qualified title. It’s like winning an Oscar but constantly being asked how you enjoyed winning your Golden Globe.
[3] My personal belief is that the five-man unit stats compiled by 82games.com are so far the best metric for evaluating performance, but even that needs a tweak here or there.
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