I’m totally shook right now. I was struggling to come up with any kind of narrative for this description, so, on a whim, I went to basketball-reference to look up Bam Adebayo’s on-off stats. My assumption was that, since he’s a high-efficiency scorer who can pass and play defense, the Heat would struggle whenever he was on the bench.
That’s not the case at all. The Heat are nearly five points per hundred possessions worse with Adebayo on the floor, despite the fact the most common lineups he appears in have positive point differentials. As I said, this information has shaken me too my core. I’m shook. I don’t even want to look at any more stats for Adebayo in case they sully his reputation even further. Basketball-reference is a fine tool, but it can easily be misused to enact great psychological turmoil.
Meyers Leonard, meanwhile, improves he heat by four points per hundred possessions while he’s on the court. That’s the last stat I managed to look up before I closed my browser window in fright. It’s not like the Heat are having problems winning games, so micromanaging the rotation is pointless right now, but the lesson that can be learned from all of this is that Meyers Leonard is truly “Meyers Legend” while Bam Adebayo is merely “Bad Badebayo”. The secondary lesson is that I rely way too much on analytics numbers I don’t understand in order to form opinions that I think make me look intelligent.