I feel like there’s gotta be some way to figure out what the most fruitful assist-to-shooter connections in the league are. However, after spending ten minutes using all the tools at my disposal (basketball-reference and stats.nba.com), I couldn’t figure out a way to do it. All I wanna know is how the Ricky Rubio-Rudy Gobert Spain/France connection stacks up against some of the other connections in the league, but I can’t figure out a way to easily retrieve this information.
My quest may have failed, however, my thirst for knowledge remains unquenched. So I just looked up some players individually to do some comparisons.
The Gobert/Rubio connection is not even that fruitful: Rubio has assisted Gobert just 58 times this season, not counting the multitude of such assists from this game. That number should be higher. Not just higher but way higher. Gobert is a perfect lob-catcher and Rubio is (theoretically) a perfect lob-thrower. So what’s the problem?
James Harden to Clint Capela has resulted in 147 buckets, by way of comparison. Ben Simmons has hit J.J. Redick 81 times. Nikola Jokic has dimed Jamal Murray 96 times. I even sought out out a guy who’s not even known as a great passer, D.J. Augustin, only to find that he’s assisted Nikola Vucevic 97 times this season.
Why? Why isn’t Rubio getting more assists? Why? Why? Why?