NY Knicks: Responding to RJ Barrett being left off The Athletic’s top 125 players

NY Knicks: RJ Barrett’s role, growth, and caliber of talent

This just feels like Terrance Davis being named to an All-Rookie team over RJ Barrett all over again. This idea that the player with less responsibility, playing a minimal role on  very good team, is more of a “net-positive” than the player playing heavy minutes with larger responsibilities on a worse team.

That was absolutely the case with Barrett being excluded from the All-Rookie team. His efficiency simply just didn’t match that of young superstar Terrance Davis, who was essentially taking a few open 3s per game while Barrett was tasked with being one of his team’s primary creators.

It’s clearly something that has come up in this recent list as well. Take Alex Caruso, for example. Caruso is a fantastic role player who is a great perimeter defender.

For Caruso, do we even waste time discussing his flaws? How he’s essentially irrelevant as a shot-creator? His 23% 3-point percentage on pull-up 3s?

No, because he’s found his niche as a 3-and-D player playing next to LeBron James. If Alex Caruso was on the Orlando Magic, are we even having this conversation?

His efficiency would absolutely take a hit. Derek Reifer, who writes for the Strickland had some really great points about usage and efficiency that he actually commented in response to Seth Partnow’s list and the strange selectiveness of excluding positive RJ Barrett stats.

50% is just a nice benchmark number, ok.

Do you really need to ignore true shooting percentage, while negatively highlighting RJ Barrett’s effective field goal percentage as “sub 50%” when it was… 49.9%…really man…

Even more specifically to a young player like Barrett, was there any consideration into separating his poor first few games of the season?

I’m going to assume that the only data used in this list was strictly season-long info that was plopped in an Excel, R, or Python, and that was that. No context, responsibilities, or any elements outside of specific metrics were factored in.

It seems obvious that with young players, we can factor in their 2nd half of seasons more heavily than the first as an indicator of the player they’re going to be. Especially if there are some key leaps in certain statistical categories.

I won’t even split it up into post and pre-All-Star stats... ok maybe I’ll briefly mention RJ Barrett’s 3-point percentage went up 8.5% to 43.5%, his true shooting went up 2.9%, and his +/- doubled after the All-Star break.

How about we just take away a minuscule amount — let’s say the first 10% of the season, and we focus and the other 90%. So for RJ Barrett who played in all 72 games of 2020-21, that’s the last 65 games of the season dating back to January 6th… his effective field goal percentage since then? 

50.7%.

So much for the imaginary “sub 50% = bad” label that he was boxed into.

Barrett’s usage rate, evolving game, and astronomical progress from year 1 to year 2 needs to be accounted for.

I singled out Caruso. Nerlens Noel, Jeff Green, Patrick Beverley, Danny Green, Bruce Brown, Kentavious Caldwell Pope, and a few other players on the list also fall into this same category.

Bruce Brown? I get it we all love watching Bruce Brown run around wreaking havoc on the Brooklyn Nets… do you think he makes this list if he’s on the NY Knicks? Why are we talking about Bruce Brown? Why are we talking about Patrick Beverley?

Ranking Bruce Brown ahead of RJ Barrett, I’m going to assume is simply a defensive versatility metric that a computer pooped out.

RJ Barrett has frequently been a victim of a weird, negative energy from the analytics crowd around his potential, when players around the league have done nothing but talk about how great he is. It’s a part of a bigger problem.