Kenneth Faried is one of those players who probably gets overrated by advanced stats. Don’t get me wrong. I love all that stuff. Give me a big helping of TS% with a side of winshares, please. But they oftentimes don’t reflect the actual value of a player. Mainly bigs who don’t do anything but dunk and rebound. Which is what the Manimal does, basically. He’s a great player who fills his role well. Aside from the occasional midrange shot he doesn’t overextend himself. He runs like a gazelle and dunks like a, uh, hominid.
But advanced stats are overly kind to him. Take PER (I know, I know) for example. As of this writing he has the same PER as Zach Randolph, who is tasked with way more shot creation and is by all accounts a way better player. But Faried benefits from only having to take what’s given to him.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the advanced stats are right and Faried and Randolph are of equal value. Maybe raw counting stats are antiquated relics of a simple-minded past. Why count points when the ways in which points are acquired are so different? Come to think of it, why even have stats at all? The only purpose they serve is to let people who don’t watch basketball talk like they do watch basketball.
Feel free to change the title of this video to “Kenneth Faried does a bunch of exciting yet nonquantifiable stuff on the basketball court, maybe even does the most of it he’s ever done but we don’t know because, as we said, it’s not quantifiable Full Highlights”