While scrounging around for material for this video description, I honed in on Grayson Allen’s effective field goal percentage, which, at 45.2%, seems somewhat low to me.
Full disclosure: I don’t know what effective field goal percentage is or what mathematical sorcery has to be undertaken in order to compute it. All I know is that effective scorers usually have a higher effective field goal percentage. I also know that the “effective” in “effective field goal percentage” does not have the same meaning as the “effective” in “effective scorer”.
So, back to Allen. He plays nineteen minutes per game, but isn’t generally an efficient or effective scorer. This game was an outlier, as he went 6-of-9 from the field. Usually he’s missing more shots than he’s making. But is his eFG% really that bad? I did a search on all players this season who are playing at least nineteen minutes per game to see where Allen stacks up.
There are 245 players averaging as many minutes or more as Allen is. Of those, 220 have a higher eFG%. The Dwights, Howard and Powell, are kings of the list. Jordan Poole, Al-Farouq Aminu (RIP), Dwayne Bacon, and Cam Reddish bring up the bottom. Compared to some of the more futile offensive players on the list, Allen is practically Kobe. Speaking of Kobe, his eFG% in his final season was 41.7%, so Allen is not only practically Kobe, he’s actually better than Kobe. He’s also better than this year’s versions of Ricky Rubio, Russell Westbrook, and Mike Conley.
I don’t know where I was going with this, but I guess I can now say that Allen might not be a great scorer, but he’s definitely not the worst so I should reserve my ire for players who deserve it.